Plains Folk

Was there ever a town whose name better expressed the buoyant optimism of the prairie frontier than Westhope, near the Canadian line, in Bottineau? Local chroniclers have credited the name to a phrase, “Hope of the West,” emanating from the railroad men who founded the town in 1903, but I want to believe the sentiment was honest. Westhope.

Things were pretty raw out on Duck Creek, northeast of Hettinger in Adams County, in 1907, but the Milwaukee Railroad had arrived. Soon, over in Lemmon, on the South Dakota line, there was a flourishing newspaper, the State-line Herald. By which we know that “the boys” on Duck Creek, as the editor said, were singing some stanzas about their life as homesteaders.

Pushing boxes and pulling folders from the massive Baldwin Corporation Records held for the Institute for Regional Studies at NDSU Archives, I come to the realization we have a lot to learn about life on the plains by rereading the considerable — I should say massive — documentation available in the reading room. Given that the papers of the Baldwin Farms in Dickey County alone comprise 32 feet of records, it’s a heck of a job.

Having spent a fair bit of time in Ellendale over the years, I always wondered about the history of that elegant insertion in the business district, with its triple-arch facade, known as the Baldwin Building. I knew there had to be a story there.

The year 1889 is so full of meaning in the history of the Great Plains. To Samuel Western (that’s his real name, seriously), it connotes the writing of constitutions, five of them, all in the Great Northwest — North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho — as authorized by Congress in the Omnibus Bill of 1889. He writes about them in his new book from University Press of Kansas, The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Lost Promise of the High Plains and Northern Rockies.

This sort of notice appeared ritually in the newspapers of the settler society on the northern plains sometime in April — I quote from the Griggs County Courier Democrat, 29 April 1909: "The pasque flower or prairie crocus, the first flower of spring, is showing its head above ground."

There was a certain irony in the determination of immigration authorities and aroused citizens of the early twentieth century to turn back immigrants at Ellis Island on account of the eye disease, trachoma. It was true that many Germans from Russia and others arrived with telltale granules of the disease under their eyelids. But it was also true that trachoma was already established extensively in the United States. It could not be kept out. There is no reason to think trachoma had not been present here since the early days of the republic — at least ever since Napoleon’s woebegone soldiers, shielding their diseased eyes from the sun, returned from the Nile in 1801.

Trachoma, the contagious eye infection, was a serious complication for Germans attempting to immigrate here from Russia. I’ve already talked about the cases of Magdalena Klipfel of Ashley and Benedict Fried of Richardton in the early 1900s. Germans from Russia were not the only ones affected by public fears of trachoma among immigrants.

Trachoma, an infectious eye disease now handled readily with antibiotics, was considered a menace, the major cause of blindness, early in the twentieth century. It came to public attention in 1897 when Dr. Porter S. Wyman, surgeon general of the US Marines, issued a report calling trachoma a “dangerous contagious disease,” after which inspectors at US ports of entry commenced watch for it. Inspections of all immigrants--lifting of eyelids, looking for the telltale follicles underneath--were standard by 1905.

In her 1941 book on the early history of McIntosh County, Along the Trails of Yesterday, Nina Farley Wishek writes of her life with the Germans from Russia among whom she lived. One chapter is entitled “German Maids Whom I Have Known,” for as the wife of the town’s leading business figure, Mrs. Wishek employed domestic help. Like other upper-class women across the prairies, she recruited her help from among the immigrant farmers’ daughters.