Plains Folk

Awakening in winter dark, I felt a peculiar consciousness of a living, stirring thing in the house — something other than the usual snores of a Labrador retriever. I padded downstairs to the prairie kitchen, lifted the towel covering our big Medalta mixing bowl, and checked the progress of my vorteig — my pre-dough, the batter stage of a baking project I had left on the counter for first rise overnight. It was alive, and alluring — I bent over the bowl to take in the scent.

There were a lot of great ballads that originated in points south on the Great Plains and somehow made their way to North Dakota. Bismarck’s renaissance man, George Will, collected folksongs from his father’s seed company employees more than a century ago, and one of the first songs he reported was “The Texas Rangers.” The expansion of the range cattle industry was the context for the migration of many such ballads north.

Sooner or later, I suppose, someone is going to get wise to the hidden storyline of “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and demand the ballad be outlawed from the public schools. Generations of children have sung the story of the hardy traveling woman, Betsy, crossing the plains to California. The continental journey is the first obvious theme of the ballad.

In 1882 the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its magnificent, now-iconic bridge across the Missouri River at Bismarck. Dedication ceremonies hailed this as a triumph of progress. Cattle hereafter would be shipped readily into the northern Dakota badlands, while settlers would take up land near the railway and commence field agriculture.

It’s a debatable proposition which is the great Western novel: The Virginian, by Owen Wister, or Shane, by Jack Schaefer. Both works deal with conflicts on the open range, specifically in Wyoming, and the heroes who resolved them.

Driving out to St. Mary’s of Dazey for the fall supper, I kept thinking about a great old friend from north Barnes County: George Amann, a lifelong farmer and devout Catholic with a strong sense of his place on earth and under heaven. George told me stories about the Corpus Christi procession at St. Mary’s and about life on Bald Hill Creek.

The physical appearance of the photograph is itself a metaphor. The Farm Security Administration photographer John Vachon took it, having stopped along the road in Morton County, North Dakota, in February 1942.

In April 1874 the Bismarck Tribune saw fit to remind residents of the territory of the provisions of a certain law that had been passed by the territorial legislature in Yankton in 1871: the “Dakota Herd Law.” In order to avoid misunderstandings and disputes, people needed to know that the law had repealed the practice of open range in Dakota Territory.

One of the great promoters of western settlement in mid-nineteenth century was William Gilpin of Missouri — military officer, western explorer, first territorial governor of Colorado. In 1857 Gilpin was distressed about the still-prevailing notion that the country east of the Rockies was a Great American Desert.

We live in a time of hyper-sensitivity in matters of contagion. Dr. Kelley and I are members of a rather conservative—actually, really conservative—Lutheran parish where some members still exercise the option of the common cup. On the other hand, we recently took part in a communion service where we were issued little sealed plastic packages, one compartment of which contained just a splash of wine, the other a dime-size gluten-free wafer.