Plains Folk

"Wheat will win the war!" / "Plant wheat . . ." / "Plant the cattle ranges ... " / Plant your vacant lots ... plant wheat!" / "Wheat for the boys over there!" / "Wheat for the Allies!" / "Wheat for the British!" / "Wheat for the Belgians!" / "Wheat for the French!" / "Wheat at any price!” / "Wheat will win the war!" Cue the patriotic music, woven into a masterly score by Virgil Thompson. I’m channeling the classic 1936 documentary film by Pare Lorentz, The Plow That Broke the Plains, quoting

The pantry in our place on Willow Creek has an eight-foot shelf devoted to nothing but flours: bread flour, whole wheat, soft white biscuit flour, semolina for pasta, you name it. My capable wife has a wonderful way with dough, and I myself can turn out a pretty good stack of sourdough pancakes. Wheat holds pride of place in our culinary life, as on our family farm, and it seems not just bountiful but also wholly beneficent. Or so I thought, until I worked up the chapter on wheat for the Oxford

If you’ve been listening to my rambling remarks over the years, you know that I am a lover of calendars--agricultural, academic, religious, recreational, you name it--and in fact, I consider calendars, the demarcation of life in cycles, and the overlapping of calendars in reinforcement or tension, to be fundamental to a rich life on the prairies.

Take a couple of good breaths, because we’re about to take a deep dive into the philosophy of history. Maybe not that deep, because I’m still a farm boy, and my subject today is wheat, but this little essay has to do with how we think about an everyday, material subject like wheat.

“At the shadow social Saturday evening a young fellow was bidding at his lady friend’s shadow,” so says the press report from Bottineau in December 1912. “Three guys chipped in and bid over him, giving the ‘shadow’ to another friend.”

“The question, Money vs. Fame, was decided for the affirmative,” reported the Golden Valley Chronicle on the debate featured in the first meeting of the Belfield Literary Society in February 1908. But wait a minute, which was the affirmative, money, or fame? No matter, the society moved on with an announcement that its next meeting would debate the question, “Resolved that the United States should own and control the railways.” Never let it be said that our forebears a century ago were out of

There was some talk about it in 1885, but it was November 1886 before folks in Williamsport, Emmons County, organized a meeting to consider forming a literary society. Literary societies--often just referred to as “the literary,” as in, I picked up my sweetheart and took her to the literary last night--were common across the country, but tough to get going in the hardscrabble earliest days of prairie settlement. Before long, though, every community came to the point when people decided, we

“I may not know who I am, but I know where I came from.” So writes Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer Prize winner and prairie boy, in an essay I assign every fall to my students in the history of the Great Plains. Stegner here addresses what he calls “the question mark in the circle,” the identity question: Who am I, and what am I doing here?

Ballad hunters of the early twentieth century captured from memory the folksong, “Dreary Black Hills”--“Stay away I say, stay away if you can / Far from that city they call Cheyenne.” The ballad is a lament by a gold-seeker in the Black Hills Gold Rush of 1876 who goes home broke and disillusioned.

On a February morning in 1925, there convened in Lincoln, Nebraska, a meeting of a genteel society, the Nebraska Writers’ Guild. The featured speaker was none other than the distinguished folklorist and linguist, Louise Pound.