Plains Folk

When I wrote some weeks ago about drummers--traveling sales representatives--in the prairie communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I was also reporting on the currency in those days of a folklore genre — the fraternal prayer, you might call it. By which I mean, a declarative sort of prayer, recited publicly, on behalf of some self-conscious group, often one that felt itself misunderstood, and thus called on the Almighty for understanding and relief.

There is a lot of texture to historical life on the prairies that gets glossed in historical memory. As my old friend John Helgeland used to say, doing History is mainly a matter of leaving things out. That is how a historian, academic or popular, tries to get at the essentials and make a manageable, useful story.

When I say that Dr. Kelley and I are flying to Norway, people around here make assumptions. So let me clarify that although I am a card-carrying member of Kringen Lodge of the Sons of Norway, I have no Norwegian ancestry; I’m in it for the pie.

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.