NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota
State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
June 11, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
Howard Lamar is a true gentleman and the most respected scholar of western Americana in the world. Forty years ago, early in his distinguished career, Yale University Press published his first book, "Dakota Territory, 1861-1889: A Study of Frontier Politics." It's a delight to say the Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota State University has brought this classic work back into print.
It came about when Lamar visited Fargo two years ago to present the Cater Lecture in the Humanities. We proposed a reprint of Dakota Territory, and he was pleased to give his assent. For the new edition we got Catherine McNicol Stock, one of his outstanding students from Yale, to write an introduction. Some folks around here know her for her own book, "Main Street in Crisis," the story of small-town North Dakota in the 1930s.
Then we got Jack Dalrymple of Casselton—descendant of bonanza farmers, perennial Republican, and apostle of the producer-owned cooperative movement on the northern plains—to write a preface. This is an interesting connection. Jack finished his bachelor or arts degree at Yale in 1970 with a senior thesis titled "Oliver Dalrymple and His Bonanza: An Essay on a Western Entrepreneur and the Operation of a Wheat Farm." The director of that thesis was Professor Howard Lamar.
All these east-west, Yale-Dakota connections behind this book are symbolic of the message of the book itself. When Lamar wrote it, Americans placed a lot of faith in the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner, author of "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." A century ago, Turner told us that what was important about the American experience—what made Americans liberty-loving, materialistic, capitalistic crusaders for democracy—was the frontier experience. The frontier forged American values. We in the West liked hearing this, because it made us the most American folks of all—made us central to the story of the country.
Unfortunately, when you study the early history of our own part of the country, as Lamar has, you begin to wonder about this business of the American frontier. As he points out, the movers and shakers of Dakota Territory were not sturdy yeomen. They were, more often, carpetbagging office-seekers, many of them flagrant grafters, sent out from the East to govern the territory. In fact, it is fair to say that in the early days of the territory, the federal government was the most important and dependable source of wealth. The greatest beneficiaries of federal largess were those in the Yankton crowd hanging around the territorial capital. They kept people in other parts of the territory—the mixed-bloods of the Red River Valley, for instance, and then the miners of the Black Hills—subordinate as long as they could.
It would be pleasant to report that the sturdy German-Russian and Norwegian farmers of the territory, and the straight-shooting ranchers, and the upstanding business people eventually asserted democratic values and overthrew the machine, but that's not what happened. Rather the Yankton crowd lost control of the territory to new machines, corporations headquartered outside Dakota—the railroads. Construction of the Chicago & Northwestern, and especially of the Northern Pacific, shifted the weight of territorial power away from the lower Missouri.
Lamar tells the wonderful story of how in 1883 the citizens in Yankton were keeping guard to prevent the meeting of a commission charged with removing the territorial capital. The capital removal commission, by law, had to convene in Yankton, and as a deadline for the meeting approached, the Yankton crowd thought they had won. "And then at 6:00 a.m. one morning an inconspicuous train rolled into the railroad yards of Yankton and continued through the town westward at a leisurely speed," notes Lamar. On the moving train, the capital removal commission did its work, under the leadership of that titan of the Northern Pacific, Alexander McKenzie of Bismarck.
So, don't expect a shoot-em-up western, and don't expect to be catered to when you read Dakota Territory. Just expect to learn the genuine origins of Dakota political culture.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Tom Jirik (701) 231-9629