Plains Folk

Historians of the Nonpartisan League, our great farm movement of the early twentieth century, have known all along that the leaguers were a singing lot. Like the Grange and the Farmers Alliance before them, the NPL raised a crop of balladeers who assailed Big Biz and the old party bosses while extolling the virtues of farming and farmers.

Years ago I had the honor of meeting Paul B. Sears, the ecologist from Oklahoma, author of the 1935 jeremiad, Deserts on the March. He came to Emporia State University as a consultant in the founding of the Center for Great Plains Studies. At the time I was unaware what a giant this slight old man, Paul Sears, was.

In an unlikely turn of events, a poem by an Englishwoman about a soldier in the French Foreign Legion traveled to America to become a cowboy ballad. The poem, as recounted in my last essay, was “Bingen on the Rhine,” by Caroline Norton. The ballad is “The Last Longhorn.” It begins,

Eureka! Found it.

“As Henry stepped out of the door, he noticed a peculiar cloud in the west, too light in color to be rain, or even dust. He called Rosie to the door to look.” Henry and Rosie Ise, homesteaders in northern Kansas, faced a grave challenge coming from the land itself: “Grasshoppers--millions, billions of them--soon covered the ground in a seething, fluttering mass, their jaws constantly at work.”

If I use the word “pastoralism,” it’s usually misunderstood. People think I’m talking about clergymen, possibly of the Lutheran variety--when really I’m speaking of what we in the United States generally call “ranching.” In the rest of the English-speaking world that’s pastoralism, and if practiced on the open range, that’s “extensive pastoralism.” And the open range is referred to as “waste lands.”

A week ago I confessed to being an unabashed academic, and I’ll tell you what’s more: I work in the academic area known sometimes as “the liberal arts” (a term so difficult to explain in the current social climate that I’m going to skip it for the moment) and otherwise known as “the humanities” (also a term fraught with misunderstanding, but one I will go with for now).

If you’re a regular listener to Plains Folk, then you know you’re dealing with a farm boy. I’m the guy who buys out other heirs and nurtures hopes of seeing the family farm (dating from 1874) into its seventh generation. I will need more than my biblical three-score-and-ten to do that, so wish me luck.

All over the Great Plains the figure of the “old settler” emerged as an object of celebration. Old settler’s picnics were a regular event in hundreds of places and served to cement a community identity based on common experience. The picnic was a day, too, when old settlers could tell their stories and be respected.

One evening in April 1933, in Crosby, in the northwest corner pocket of North Dakota, a seventeen-year-old farm boy named Raymond Semingson, the son of Norwegian immigrants, got up and sang “Home on the Range.”