January 17, 2002

Plains Folk: Arbor Day

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The sexy undertones of tree-planting on the prairies were the subject of a previous column. That one paid a visit to Arbor Lodge, home of Caroline and Sterling Morton (the founders of Arbor Day) in Nebraska City, Neb.

This one is much more wholesome. It has to do with how Arbor Day, originally a prairie holiday, went national, and how its prairie roots withered.

The pioneer politician (in territorial days, those two were pretty much the same) of Nebraska, J. Sterling Morton, introduced the motion in 1872 whereby the Nebraska State Board of Agriculture declared an Arbor Day and offered prizes for prolific tree-planting. In 1885 the state legislature made the holiday more official and set the date on Morton's birthday, despite his being a Democrat. Other states took up the movement, and before turn of century the holiday was observed, mainly in the schools, nationwide.

The ceremony's prairie roots thrived in the prairie states. In North Dakota, for instance, the Department of Public Instruction issued an Arbor Day Manual in 1895. It was a prairie booklet, mostly.

State Superintendent Emma F. Bates protested the common belief that trees would not thrive in the Flickertail State: "It is not true that trees will not grow in North Dakota," she stated, a double-negative for emphasis. She voiced familiar, traditionally female themes of housekeeping, charging schoolchildren, as they tidied up their schoolrooms, to also adorn the landscape. "This is our home," she said, "let us make it as beautiful as possible. . . . Learn, also, how to plant trees so they will grow. Learn to love our North Dakota and make it desirable to live in."

Protection, not just beauty, was an aim. The manual stated needlessly, "It is needless to state that in our prairie country we need something, anything, to protect as much as possible from the heavy winds."

Experienced tree-planters offered good advice. James Sinclair, of Mayville, advised against fancy species. "Select a box-elder for planting," he counseled, "about five feet in height, as at this size the box-elder is one of our hardiest varieties." In South Dakota, C.F. Stark of Clark County charged the kids of the West River to plant natives: "The cottonwood is the most easily grown and the most abundant," he noted.

For a while, then, Arbor Day on the prairies encouraged girls and boys both to adapt to the land and to adorn it. Look next, though, at "Arbor Day: Its History, Observance, Spirit and Significance," by Robert Haven Schauffler (1917). By this time the holiday has gone continental and its rhetoric been co-opted by people and values rooted far from the prairies.

A foreword by former President Theodore Roosevelt, who should have remembered how things are on the plains, is concerned with the conservation of forests, not with life in the grasslands. Gifford Pinchot, the great forester, also writes a chapter, which shows that Arbor Day has become a celebration of conservation in a sort of official, USDA sense, remote from its regional folk origins.

Trees, too, served a national agenda. In those days leaders of the Country Life Movement were worried that as people all moved to the cities, the country would suffer moral decay. "Our young cities have too often been ruthlessly sacrificed to a brutal, hideous materialism," Schauffler writes; trees might help, might revive "the dormant love for nature."

I am a curmudgeon. I would like, as we encourage our kids to plant trees, for them to plant prairie trees for prairie reasons. Cottonwoods, especially, the seeded kind like God made.

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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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