Plains Folk

As the English sparrow, a.k.a. the house sparrow, Passer domesticus, made its way from New York, where it was introduced in the 1850s, to Dakota Territory in the 1880s, prairie folk braced themselves for the invasion. The US Department of Agriculture, in a 405-page farmer’s bulletin of 1889, warned them of “the obnoxious character of the English sparrow.”

Just a few years ago—2018, by my notes—I was wondering what had happened to the English sparrows, a.k.a. house sparrows, that I had cussed for years as they cleaned out my bird feeders. A quick internet search disclosed that the sparrow disappearance was a global phenomenon, some sort of plague that had swept across Asia and Europe and North America. Not to worry, the sparrows are back now and as voracious as ever.

You may know by now that I am getting obsessive about my quest to discover and regenerate the ballads and balladry of the Great Plains. Many a dark morning I carry my coffee with me through digital portals into that world where the Canadian settlers of Emmons County are writing and singing their own homesteading ballad, or where picnicking Grangers are breaking into choruses of “The Farmer Is the Man.”

Angie the History Dog is driving me nuts in mid-winter. Out for a hike or a snowshoe, we cut a deer track, and she thrusts her chubby nose deep into a hoofprint, ruminating indefinitely until spoken to harshly--upon which she proceeds eighteen inches ahead and repeats the same ritual with the next print. In a frozen landscape, she is struggling for olfactory stimulation.

People sometimes ask me where I get all these stories about life on the prairies. My typical reply is, Why, there’s one up every section road. That’s actually understating things a bit. There are several good stories up any section road, and they intersect and entwine one another.

It’s not like I have any experience in the matter, but there are fellows who really need a smart woman around to let them know when they are behaving badly. A few weeks ago I was talking about a remarkable ballad that originated in Minot in 1908, “A Bachelor’s Lament.”

Chapter 4 of Molly Rozum’s masterwork of Great Plains history, Grasslands Grown, opens with Kjersti Raaen on a train. Kjersti was the sister of the well-known writer Aagot Raaen. They were daughters of Norwegian immigrant settlers in the Goose River valley of Dakota Territory. Had not Kjersti died young, I think she, too, might have been celebrated.

The first time Molly Rozum started telling me about the genesis of her book, Grasslands Grown, I said, "Molly, stop! You’re making me cry." She was talking about the importance, to boys and girls growing up on the prairie, of going barefoot. And many of you hearing this know exactly why that might move me to tears.

In 1997 an English scholar published a paper on the origins and use of the word, “blizzard,” and concluded, “The etymology of the word is still speculative.” Well, no, I don’t think it is. In a previous essay, I started up the road toward the origins and dissemination of the term. And I hinted it might have something to do with baseball.

Laundresses in Bismarck in December 1874 found themselves in a cost-price squeeze, as they were being charged fifty cents per barrel to have water hauled up from the Missouri River. As reported by the Tribune, "'Tempering the wind to the shorn lamb' was the way the Bismarck washerwomen put it when Missouri River water advanced to fifty cents a barrel, and the next day’s blizzard piled a big snow drift near her back door."