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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
May 11, 2000
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©2000 Plains Folk
How I get suckered into these things, I don't know. The Lutheran chaplain on campus snookered me into giving a talk in his "Last Lecture" series. Drawing on the obsession of professors to hold forth at the drop of a hat, the series asks the speaker to imagine he has just one more lecture to give and say what he thinks ought to be said. This is an invitation to be mawkish, and while I had to appear, I didn't have to get sappy about it.
So we talked a while about famous last words that were not sappy, like those of bank robber and murderer Ralph Fleagle as he walked to the gallows in Colorado. His final comment on capital punishment: "This will sure teach me a lesson." Or those of Doc Holliday, who had come west for dry air to ease his tuberculosis, become a gunfighter to avoid a lingering death, and in 1887 lay dying, to his chagrin, in bed. His last words were a choking giggle: "This is funny."
And of course, William A. Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, when he heard Sheriff Pat Garret enter his darkened room to blast him into eternity--"Quien es?" (Who is there?)--a simple question that seems deeper the more you think about it.
Then we talked a little while about dying cowboys in Great Plains folk songs, how such a character never just dies, but always props his head on his elbow and gives, well, a last lecture. All such dying cowboys worry about their resting place. Some wish to be carried back east to the little church yard; whereas, the others ask to be buried on the prairie.
This one I have figured out. Invariably, if a cowboy of folk song fame dies doing good, doing his job or helping his comrades, he asks to be buried back east. He is fit to lie in holy ground. On the other hand, if he dies doing wrong, on the wrong side of the law or hanging out in a saloon, he asks to be buried in a narrow grave in the unholy West.
And then we talked a while about real plains folk of our own times, about how great writers like Wallace Stegner and Scott Momaday represent us better than we know--how they probed their roots on the plains for their books, but moved away to other places, and then agonized for decades about who they were and where they were from.
Finally, for a text that would let me finish up honestly but somewhat seriously, I turned to Ecclesiastes 9, a deep well for readers of any faith. That's the chapter with the wonderful verse about the race not being to the swift, nor the contest to the strong, which I think should be read as the invocation for every state high school basketball final.
It also is a chapter that contains just about everything we need to know about living well on the plains. "For a living dog is better than a dead lion," it says. Plains folk are survivalists, to be sure. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest," it says. How many times have you heard someone from around here say, "I'll rest when I'm dead"?
What we too often forget in this part of the country is the verse that says, "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink they wine with a merry heart." It has become fashionable among Great Plains writers to depict life on the plains as a life of deprivation, where day to day we have a lack of amenities, punctuated by blizzards and bankruptcies. Somehow, with the first rhubarb of spring on the table and the redwings whistling the slough, it doesn't seem that way to me.
The message of Ecclesiastes 9 is not one of deprivation, but one of appreciation. Enjoy the scent of alfalfa when you're making hay, it says. Smell the ozone after a good thunder-banger. Run your fingers through the stiff curls on the forehead of a white-faced calf.
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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse, (701) 231-6136
Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern that is
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