Plains Folk

Clay Jenkinson’s book, The Language of Cottonwoods, is a lot like my suitcase packed for a long research junket. You open it up, and all sorts of things pop out. Some of them are kind of loopy—on purpose, I suspect. They help to situate the more sober ones as propositions for serious consideration.

“It is important that we have conversations about our beloved state,” says Clay Jenkinson, introducing his book, The Language of Cottonwoods. “I love North Dakota with all my heart.”

Fisherman’s Dream is the most wonderful of all the roadside installations on the Enchanted Highway. In his new book--or manifesto, or memoir, or really it’s an extended essay--Clay Jenkinson declares, “I am wild about Fisherman’s Dream.” This particular Gary Greff creation drips with irony, while at the same time appealing to the basal fisherman, so that you come away affirmed but also feeling like there are some things you may not have apprehended.

“Jerry Kelland started on his contract at the fire hall this week,” says the Langdon Courier Democrat of 18 January 1894. “He will put in a brick cistern of 1,000 barrels capacity. Dynamite was used in breaking up the frozen earth.”

This new book by David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, is long, winding, and sometimes exasperating. I was making my way through its treatment of Indian relocation in the 1950s when suddenly the author launched a rangy exposition on the building of interstate highways--how they enabled rapid transit across the regions of America, and how turkey buzzards, taking advantage of the increased roadkill, followed the asphalt into whole areas of the country they never had inhabited before.

I don’t know whether it is on account of the nostalgia that oozes from that stanza, or because of my delight in the discovery of a new-to-me prairie folksong, but it almost moves me to tears to bring into twenty-first-century currency a prairie ballad lost for nearly a hundred years: “The Old Sod Shack.”

Professor Tom Isern is a distinguished professor at North Dakota State University for a reason -- he really cares about the people of the plains, wants to understand them deeply, and wants to help other people understand them, too.

The complex of beds and borders and compost piles between our house and Willow Creek is, officially, a place, which we call, simply, the Prairie Garden. You can hashtag it, #prairiegarden, and you can check into it online at the Prairie Garden. The sense of place is one good reason for planting a garden, working in a garden, or just sitting with your dog in a garden--to get to know a particular place really well and thus be informed about life on the prairies, its details, its limits, its promise.

There you have the news from Oberon, Guelph, Sheyenne, and Pleasant Prairie, respectively. Brought to you by the country correspondents of those rural communities.

Two things stand out in the chorus from 1916 I just sang. First, the tune is familiar. It’s “Marching through Georgia,” a triumphal battle anthem from late in the Civil War. Political balladeers liked to use melodies from the Civil War, because they were familiar, conducive to group singing.