A farm boy in Burleigh County known as “Happy Mac” was not happy in July 1936. He had been doing his part for the family during hard times, herding their beef and milk cows wherever they might find forage. It was sparse.

I just came in from an inspection tour of the Prairie Garden, and the news is bad. The juneberry crop is not worth harvesting this year. Maybe it was the hard winter, maybe the late freeze, maybe the spring flood, or maybe the siroccos of early summer, but we have so few berries I am just leaving them for the birds.

Now in the fields I’ve put the seed / And, Lord, I’ve done my best indeed / Look now with kindness, Father dear / To all the little kernels here!

Across the western United States (and even in New York), western riders take part in what is known as “cowboy church.” The cowboy church movement is commonly credited to Glenn Smith, an ex-rodeo clown who was inspired with the idea and made an enterprise of it. Worship from the saddle is not exactly my subject today, however.

Most of the EuroAmerican heroes of generations past on the Great Plains have feet — or at least toes, and some of them whole legs! — of clay. This is to say, if we look at them closely, and especially if we look at them with twenty-first century lenses, we see things that make us uncomfortable.

George Armstrong Custer is not a source I ordinarily would cite as to geographical terminology, but let me draw attention to a hopeful distinction he makes early in his memoir, My Life on the Plains. He remarks how schoolchildren were being taught to refer to the midsection of the country as “the Great American Desert.”

So maybe by now you know that I object to the lumping term, “the Dakotas,” in reference to the two sovereign states, North Dakota and South Dakota; likewise, that I regard the vernacular terms “West River” and “East River” as culturally interesting, but politically pernicious. In general, as a student of the Great Plains, I have come to believe that in our federal nation, the sovereign states are important and possess their own defining histories.

Certainly there are others who, like me, wince at usage of the lumping term, “the Dakotas,” in news reports and popular parlance — especially, I think, those emanating from Minnesota, where “the Dakotas” is shorthand for “beyond the horizon,” “way out there.” (Similarly, I grind my teeth when I hear disparaging, or perhaps just thoughtless, references to prairie populations as “the locals” — as in, those quaint folks living their little prairie lives and clueless about the wider world.)

If Teddy Blue Abbott, he of that classic memoir of the open range, We Pointed Them North, is to be believed, the song was a worn cliche among cowboys in Montana. They got sick of it; Abbott and others made up their own, new ballads to supplant it in their night-herding repertoires.

On May 17, 1910, the Grand Forks Herald took a forthright stance in defense of rhubarb. Its editorialist had tolerated recent Chicken-Little reports about the deleterious effects of the tail of Haley’s Comet, but when alleged scientific authorities commenced expounding on the dangers of rhubarb, he had enough.