February 7, 2002

Plains Folk: Bobwhites in the Graveyard

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

I am not a ghoul. I just spend a lot of time in graveyards. For purely scholarly reasons. Well, that’s not quite true. I’ll admit to enjoying many of the hours I have spent in country cemeteries up and down the plains. They are places of human interest of the most elemental sort, full of pathos and sometimes humor. Who can remain unaffected by a stroll through a Kinderfriedhof, the distinct section of the cemetery set aside by German immigrants for child burials? Likewise, who can refrain from chuckling at a gravestone bearing the likeness of the deceased’s beloved pickup truck? It would be disrespectful of the dead not to laugh at this final jest.

Sometimes, too, there come flashes of understanding. During a long study of the cemeteries of Germans from Russia, during which my assistants and I cataloged hundreds of wrought iron grave crosses, one such flash came. The understanding arrived because I was lingering in a graveyard to savor the gentle birdsong and long twilight of northern latitude. We had been trying to figure out why so many iron crosses, priceless works of folk art, had disappeared from cemeteries. Most people said theft, or vandalism, or something like that.

Watching the shadows of the perimeter pines, though, I realized what was the problem. Trees. Evergreen trees, symbols of eternal life, are death to funerary art in the north, because they trap snow. Deep drifts crush art, even art of iron.

Another mystery arose in a Metis (mixed-blood, Indian and French) cemetery in North Dakota where we found beautiful blacksmith-made crosses. German-Russians said one of their smiths must have made them, but they didn’t look quite right to me. I suspected that some Metis blacksmith was the artist. Later, strolling through the graveyard at Batoche in Saskatchewan, I found the grave of Gabriel Dumont, the Metis military leader who fought the redcoats to a standstill in 1885. His grave bore a cross of design exactly like those in the Metis cemeteries of North Dakota.

Memories of many such memorial places came to me as I turned up the drive past the Rainy Mountain Kiowa Baptist Church in Oklahoma. I parked and approached the Rainy Mountain Cemetery, resting place for ancestors and kin of N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa who is, arguably, North America’s most illustrious Indian writer--although he always bridles at being called an "Indian author." Perhaps we should just say he is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

And I thought about bobwhite quail. In "The Way to Rainy Mountain" Momaday writes, "One day late in the afternoon I walked about among the headstones at Rainy Mountain Cemetery." It is late afternoon as I walk, too. "The shadows were very long. . . and the dark red earth seemed to glow with the setting sun. . . There is deep silence." It is the same today.

"Something is going on there in the shadows. . . And then there is the sudden, piercing call of a bobwhite. The whole world is startled by it." I hear the rustle in the plum bushes–but drat, it is only a Harris sparrow. Do you know how much I would have given to have heard a bobwhite just then? There should have been a covey in that plum thicket.

I do know quail cover, however, and that put me in mind of still another graveyard, one full of Lutherans near my boyhood home in Kansas. This one always had quail in it. It never seemed right to me to shoot them in the cemetery. It seemed all right to me then, though, to put a spaniel over the cemetery fence in hopes he would scatter the birds into the stubblefields.

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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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