September 20, 2001

Plains Folk: Rare and Glorious Days

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

A century ago in Munich, N.D., a baby boy of Icelandic descent was named by his parents for the first white European child born in the New World–Snorri Thorfinnson. The boy grew up in North Dakota and among kin in Manitoba. He graduated from North Dakota Agricultural College and went on to a distinguished career, as a professional extension worker and an amateur (which term I use with reverence, referring to its Latin root) historian.

Thorfinnson died in 1986 in the community of his retirement, Fort Ransom, N.D. He was one of those citizen-historians who went about investing his home country with story and meaning. He was fascinated with Indian antiquities–burial mounds, the Writing Rock–and especially with what he took to be evidence of early Norse presence in the region. Viking mooring stones on the Sheyenne River, for instance.

This sort of myth-making is easy to parody, and many professional historians such as I would do so, but whereas I may joke about such matters, I will not denigrate them. I see in Snorri Thorfinnson a purity and sincerity that I cannot match, but still may emulate.

I got to thinking about all this while doing the grouse opener, which involved a 10-mile hike through the grand prairie pastures of the Missouri Couteau. My retriever is young, and I am old, so now and then I found a seat on a pile of glacial rock and just contemplated the countryside. I remembered that Snorri, a bird hunter and a sometime-poet (hey, he was Icelandic, after all), once wrote,

Gold, help us to appreciate
Autumn’s rare and glorious days.

Snorri was a Farmers Union man who believed that the changes in our land, the depopulation of the agricultural countryside, were not just the work of large, impersonal forces but rather matters of values and choices. Another of his poems was called "Big Operator." In it he wrote of tearing down farmhouses, bulldozing shelterbelts, pulling up fences, all because "I need land, more land, and greater wealth." He predicted that as the farms went, so would the main streets, and of course, the people.

They’ll come and go, no need for school or church
Nor all the folderal of country life.

Here I sit on a pile of rocks in a cow-pasture–hard evidence that this was once a cultivated land, which now has gone back to prairie. It is a beautiful prairie. A place does not have to be untouched by humankind or labeled a wilderness in order to be beautiful. It might be useful, too, and be exquisitely beautiful. Just look about with me at these pot-holes teeming with waterfowl; at these scarlet bullberries promising winter sustenance, perhaps even grace; and yes, at these happy calves.

There is the possibility in these times of a life on the plains whereby humankind and nature do not do daily battle, but rather meet in daily embrace, complementing one another. I can see this Middle Landscape in my mind, and sometimes with my eyes. Snorri saw it, too, and knew its potent appeal.

Snorri wrote of "The Message of the Prairies." "It is not a call to the cities," he averred. He said,

The wild winds . . .
. . . tell me of wide, sunlit spaces
Swept by the Northwind bold,
Of men who dare face the cutting air
And live on these prairies cold.

Ah, but today, Snorri, the prairies are not cold. Autumn’s rare and glorious days.

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

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