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

September 2, 1999

Plains Folk: Finding Meaning from the Landscape

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

©1999 Plains Folk

This column begins of an evening in August in the Red River Valley of the North, where swathers are running through dusk. The windrows, darkened with shadows by the setting sun, are like piping on a great, gold garment. It is a luminous landscape.

Or maybe it began years ago, the night I proposed to my wife. That took place upstairs in the Hays Tavern, of Council Grove, Kan. I'm sure I was eloquent, but I don't remember any of that. What I remember is that it was April, pasture-burning season in the Flint Hills, and as we drove home, fire lines were dancing up the tallgrass hillsides, palpable smoke scenting the valleys. Now, you may think a hot fire is an odd symbol for me to attach to a long and loving marriage, but pasture burning is a matter of renewal.

All right, I'm getting sentimental, but there is a semi-profound thought behind these images and sentiments. It has to do with how we identify ourselves in this part of the country, the Great Plains of North America.

Since about 1931--the year Walter P. Webb published his classic book, "The Great Plains"--we have been environmental determinists. This is to say, we figure we are what we are because of the influence of the land upon us. We live in a land--pardon me for saying the obvious--that is level, treeless, and semiarid. (This is a good place to remind everyone that the adjective "level" is the approved one, preferable to "flat.")

Webb told us that "this land, with the unity given it by its three dominant characteristics, has from the beginning worked its inexorable effect upon nature's children. The historical truth that becomes apparent in the end is that the Great Plains have bent and molded Anglo-American life, have destroyed traditions, and have influenced institutions in a most singular manner."

In this line of thought we adapt and become part of the land, composed of its own elements. The swather I mentioned in my first paragraph--that was invented in South Dakota to adapt wheat farming to the northern plains. Pasture burning--that adapted cattle culture to the rhythms of tallgrass prairie.

Chuck Suchy, the wondrous songwriter from Mandan, N.D., told me he tries not to listen to much other music, because he wants his own songs to sound native, like the natural fruit of the northern plains. Now, though, I've crossed a line. When you adapt the methods of farming and ranching to a semiarid land, you do so of necessity. Either you find ways suitable to the land, or you fail. Chuck, on the other hand, might write other sorts of songs, but he chooses to write ones native to the prairie. That is a matter not of necessity, but of love.

It always sounds arrogant when I say it, but here goes: Today we are not subject to the tyrannies of environment in the same way as were our forebears in their sod houses and tar paper shacks. This is only partly a matter of technology--air conditioning, Polartec, four-wheel-drive, the Internet, Roundup, big round bales and all that. It is more a matter of the changing balance of economic power, the change to a service and processing economy wherein we on the plains may be more advantaged than deprived.

Does the land, the environment, mean anything now to our regional identity? Of course it does, but in an entirely different way. At the close of this 20^th century our relationship with the Great Plains environment has been transformed from one of fear and awe to one of delight and awe. The plains are being repopulated by people who like it here. The best plainsperson today, the representative plainsperson for generations to come, is the one who smells the wolf willow.

Sharptail season means for me a 10-mile hike across the Missouri Coteau. I don't know whether I'll get any birds this year, but somewhere out there I'm going to find a nice pile of rocks with a view, sit down and rest, and think about what life in the Great Plains landscape is going to mean in the next century.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136

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