It all started with a letter of lament written by a woman who signed herself, “A Marriageable Girl,” published in the Minot newspaper, the Ward County Independent, on 9 January 1908. Well, actually, this grievance had been simmering for a while among the young women of the Magic City.

Plains Folk

The Bachelor's Lament

A week or so ago Dr. K and I were part of a group assembled to sit at the feet of three literary masters—Mark Vinz, Debra Marquart, and Louise Erdrich—as they talked among themselves about the sense of place. This was in the Fargo studios of Prairie Public.

The Gray Hills

The past few weeks I’ve been trying to explain how we on the Great Plains are so fortunate to have a prodigious crop of ballads and folksongs dating from the settlement generation and its children.

A Prodigious Crop of Ballads

Now and then in the middle of a Plains Folk essay you may hear me erupt into song, sometimes mournful, sometimes exuberant, because singing is a significant part of my life. I am, as I sometimes remark, an unreconstructed folkie from the 1970s, and there was a time when I made rent with a Martin dreadnought. Thank God I don’t have to do that now. Because the music business is full of, well, real musicians.

Hundreds of Ballads

It was in 1941 that America’s great Shakespearean scholar, George Lyman “Kitty” Kittredge, slipped the surly bonds of Cambridge, Massachusetts, never more to enthrall and terrify the boys of Harvard. Kitty would not have been at home on the range, but he was a mentor to the greatest of all collectors of western ballads, John A. Lomax of Texas.

A Man by the Name of Crego

Early on in the greatest novel ever written about life on the Great Plains of North America, My Antonia, Ms. Cather’s narrator and her protagonist agree on something: they concur that people who grew up on the prairies shared a “kind of freemasonry.” Such folk possessed common experiences and attitudes that made them something like a secret society.

The Plainsman

"We’re happy as a clam on our claim from Uncle Sam/Though the rabbit is not always fried the best"So sang the four bachelors of the Willow Bend Quartette, Valley County, Montana, at a schoolhouse gathering on Christmas Eve, 1916. The singers were L. O. Carter, lead; Will Lloyd, bass; Raymond Sullivan, baritone; and James Lloyd, tenor.

Grass Widows and Fried Rabbit

Soon the last of the massive poplars planted in the 1970s at our property on Willow Creek will all fall. Then the tallest tree on the place will be the native, seeded cottonwood I planted in 1992. Surely it will outlive me. I like that. Because Clay Jenkinson is right: cottonwoods speak to us of our common condition.

Language of Cottonwoods

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.

Gear Up and Go

“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.”

Who Are We Now?

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.

Fisherman’s Dream

“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.”

Swimming Under the Fire Hall

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.”

The Transformation of “Home on the Range”

Being a professional historian, an inveterate traveler, and an ardent exponent of life on the plains, I have a longstanding interest in heritage tourism — especially heritage tourism of a particular kind. In the twentieth century a distinctive profile emerged for that wily tourist known as the “independent traveler.” Lately a new acronym has emerged in the trade literature — FIT, which means Free Independent Traveler. I like it.

Matching Wits with FITs

The self-taught engineering genius behind the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad Bridge (completed 1882) spanning the Missouri River at Bismarck was George Shattuck Morison. “At the time of his death on July 1, 1903, at the age of sixty-one,” the geologist and historian Edward C. Murphy writes, “Morison was regarded by many to be the leading bridge engineer in America, if not the entire world.”

Caisson Disease

Plains Folk is a commentary devoted to life on the great plains of North Dakota. Written by Tom Isern of West Fargo, North Dakota, and read in newspapers across the region for years, Plains Folk venerates fall suppers and barn dances and reminds us that "more important to our thoughts than lines on a map are the essential characteristics of the region — the things that tell what the plains are, not just where they are."

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Plains Folk

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