Plains Folk

NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

April 15, 1999

Plains Folk: A Chronicle of Sensory Experience

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

All the Pearson girls, Kathy L. Plotkin tells us, were beautiful and smart. So is her book, "The Pearson Girls," new from the NDSU Institute for Regional Studies.

The Pearson girls—Lucille (the eldest, born 1903), Elsie, Agnes, Flora, and Charline (the youngest, born 1917)—were the five daughters of Charlie and Inda Pearson, Swedish farmers in North Dakota's Emmons County. With the family lacking sons, the girls went to the field and learned farm work. All but one, who became a registered nurse, became teachers, and all left the farm. The parents encouraged them to do so. The Pearson chronicle is the story of rural vitality and depopulation on the northern plains writ small.

The outline of that story is familiar—the bloom of settlement, the fruit of vigorous families and prosperous villages, followed by generations of withering consolidation and even collapse in rural society. Generally we write this story as tragedy, tempered only by nostalgia.

When Plotkin gets out the Kodak albums, the old letters, the tapes, and the memories and pieces together the narrative portrait of her mother and aunts, she reminds us of something important. She shows us that within that broad outline of regional history, so easily and shallowly characterized, lived wonderful individuals and families who did not regard their lives as tragic mistakes or their choices as fatalistic fait accompli.

Plotkin always wanted to be a Pearson girl. Daughter of the eldest, Lucille, she landed back at the grandparents' farm as a result of her mother's unfortunate marriage. She observed or experienced much of what she writes, and she gathered the rest from family members. Plotkin sets down portraits of farm life that are honest, sensual and transporting.

Chapter 7, for instance, is devoted to description of the farmstead and specifically the farmhouse, built in 1915, and is more effective by prose than film or video could be. We are escorted up the front steps, past the lilacs and rock garden; we peer from the veranda through the oval glass of the front door into living room, with its upright piano, its Edison, its table cluttered with magazines; we walk through the colonnades into the dining room, with its oak table and unmatched chairs and on into Inda's kitchen, with its black coal range and white porcelain sink; and thence we enter the walk-in pantry, full of canned meat and vegetables and jellies of wild grape and bullberry.

Jelly production required auto expeditions to the Missouri River bottoms, picnics, shaking the bullberry branches and collecting the scarlet berries from the tarps onto which they fell. This is rich description indeed.

So is the chapter devoted to haying at the hay meadow that was "the pride of Fairview Farms" because, irrigated by springs, it "never once failed." This is a world full of bounding jackrabbits and chirring gophers, the nests of prairie chickens and killdeers, the smell of wild mint, the taste of cold milk pulled up from the spring.

There is much more to the story—Inda's cooking with plenty of cream and butter, Charlie's hands softening once a year when he sheared the sheep, the girls piloting themselves to school in the Hollow Horror (the enclosed sled fashioned by Charlie to protect them from snow and wind, with only a tiny glass by which the path could be viewed and a little slot through which the reins might be pulled).

Plotkin is not trying to say something profound, but she does. She is saying that the generation of the Pearson girls experienced far more than we imagine. Their life was neither an idyll nor an ordeal. It was a full exercise of the senses.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136