Plains Folk

Rummaging around in a manuscript collection of the Institute for Regional Studies at the NDSU Archives the other day, I was surprised by the contents of a folder of correspondence labeled “Jury Duty Requests, 1893-97.” This was in the papers of Sheriff Oscar G. Barnes, of Cass County.

It wasn’t what I was looking for, but that's how things go when you rummage around in archival collections. I came to the North Dakota State University Archives to search the Institute for Regional Studies collections for information about Lilac Days, that lovely college custom—of which I will write soon—that sought to promote the planting of a lilac hedge along the highway from Fargo all the way to Grand Forks. Indeed I did find the sheet music for the ritual song, “Lilac Days.”

"Come all you jolly fellows and listen to my tale / And I’ll tell you about the trouble which landed me in jail." So begins a remarkable and rare ballad of the northern plains — the confessional composition of one Archie L. Baker, a bootlegger languishing in jail in Fargo in 1929.

During the 1890s, the so-called Gay Nineties, two developments transformed popular culture and folklore across the country, including the Great Plains. The first of these was the proliferation of urban music halls, entertainment venues that were masculine, sometimes a little bawdy, and, surprisingly to us today, exceedingly sentimental.

In 1916 the Grand Forks Herald published the words — three 8-line stanzas and a chorus — to a popular song that was making the rounds. The chorus starts out in heartwarming fashion, but then it takes a deadly turn.

In Oslo last summer, we called in at the Gustav Vigeland Museum, adjacent to Frogner Park. In a cluttered corner of the museum I espied something that signified nothing to other visitors, but meant something to me. It was a plaster cast of Norway’s great Romantic poet, Henrik Wergeland. I recognized this as the original study for the bronze statue of Wergeland that stands in Island Park of Fargo.

I made a cold call to the Jamestown offices of the North Dakota Farmers Union in order to talk with Trevor Lewis, the Youth Education Specialist in charge of the Farmers Union summer camp program. I asked Trevor, are you familiar with the old song, “The Farmer Is the Man”? And bless his union heart, he was! I wanted to know whether the summer camp songbook still contained the stanzas of the song. Trevor got right back to me with a copy of the 2022 Farmers Union Camp Songbook.

Early morning a few days ago I ventured onto the icy section road to take Angie the History Dog for her morning constitutional and was delighted to feel a warm breeze supplanting the icy gales of the recent cold snap. Returning to my desk, I commenced checking weather reports for Dickinson, Billings, Belle Fourche, and such points west to confirm what I suspected: that at my home in Cass County, we were the beneficiary of a chinook. In the Red River Valley we seldom get a chinook wind with force, but we are grateful when a remnant arrives, spent but still warming.

The prairie ballad, “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim,” the anthem of the settler society on the Great Plains, may have originated in western Kansas in 1880—flowing from the pen of the homesteading printer, Frank E. Jerome—but it was a hardy traveler. During the early 1880s the song percolated in Dakota Territory, especially along the Jim River, living a quiet life of little public notice—only to emerge full-blown as a popular favorite in 1883.

There is something that has always bothered me about the first verse of the classic homesteading ballad, “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim.”