Plains Folk: Peeling Back the Layers on I-94

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Like most people in my part of the country, I spend a lot of time daydreaming my way along Interstate 94. Even if you like plains landscapes, this can be a sleepy drive.

What helps is to become aware of the layers atop which you are skimming. I-94 is essentially the route of old Highway 10. The frontage road near my house, in fact, is Old 10. If you pull off at Exit 331, the Casselton exit, you’ll find another two-mile stretch of Old 10 going west. Detailed maps pre-dating the interstate locate a landmark called the "Can Pile" here, on the south side of the highway. The Can Pile, a gas station dating from the 1930s, served traffic on Old 10, and its pile of cans still stands–decorated this year with lights for Christmas.

Let’s go a little deeper: back in the 1920s, before Highway 10, as I learn from Clason’s North Dakota Green Guide (1920), there was the National Parks Highway, also known as the Red Trail, Fargo to Glendive. I pity the travelers who relied on Clason. This guide observes, "The state is well supplied with good roads. The prairie soil makes a wonderfully durable and easily maintained road, under moderate traffic." Clason calls the Red Trail a "Highly Improved Road," whatever that meant.

A good way to become aware of these earlier layers of experience is to travel with the WPA guide to North Dakota, published by the Federal Writers Project in 1938. You can follow the tours it lays out, sort of, except where they have been flooded by dams or otherwise obliterated by unthinking progress–anyway, it’s fun to try.

Pretty soon you become aware of all sorts of layers beyond just highway construction–layers of human habitation. For instance, much of the country along Old 10 was settled first by Yankees–Anglo-Americans who brought money to start businesses and bonanza farms. As in so many parts of the plains, the Yankees made their fortunes and then gave way to European immigrants–Norwegians and Moravians in areas I’m talking about.

Although outnumbered, the Yankees did not give way willingly in matters of culture. The men joined the state historical society, the women the Daughters of the American Revolution, and between them they tried to ensure that Anglo-American history would define the country, making the immigrants take mere supporting roles.

When the Dacotah Chapter of the DAR organized in Fargo in 1919, it looked around for something to do in a land where no revolutionary blood had spilled, and it hit on the Sibley expedition against the Dakota in 1863. The Sibley campaign, coming out of Minnesota, was an altogether deplorable affair by which Sibley killed a few Indians, got a few of his own men killed, and accomplished nothing.

Sibley was clueless about conditions on the plains. His perceptions of Indian actions are laughable. You read his reports, and it’s obvious he is trying to sound like a Civil War commander. His accounts are full of unwieldy movements, seizure of strategic positions, claims of victory. He thinks he’s in a war, when in fact what’s going on is that the Indians are luring him around the prairies, trying to keep their families clear of any conflict and waiting for him to wear out and go home.

He also hates the country, saying that central North Dakota is "for the most part uninhabitable. If the devil were permitted to select a residence upon the earth, he would probably choose this particular district for an abode, with the redskins' murdering and plundering bands as his ready ministers, to verify by their ruthless deeds his diabolical hate to all who belong to a Christian race."

Still, the name "Henry Hastings Sibley" was irresistible to Yankees seeking Anglo-American martial heroes–hence the DAR memorial to Sibley that has stood two miles west of Buffalo, North Dakota, on the Red Trail, since 1927.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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