March 28, 2002

Plains Folk: A Journey

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

There was a certain sense that things were coming unraveled as I headed west on I-94. No kuchen and coffee at the Drumstick today, I knew. That venerable oasis of Bismarck closed its doors after New Years. Come evening, I also knew, I would not be able to repair to that wonderful Keller, the German-Hungarian Club of Dickinson. It, too, has closed.

A stop at the North Dakota Winter Show, Valley City, did not improve the outlook much. The bison sale was a bust--magnificent breeding stock gaveled away for next to nothing. Every bubble bursts, I know; those bison heifer prices of recent years were ridiculous. Bison is a real commodity with a real constituency, meaning the industry will be back. From now on, any money made will have to be on the basis of real value, rather than speculation. Ultimate confidence in the future of this signature industry of the northern plains did not make me feel better about the malaise of the moment.

Isn’t it remarkable, though, how travel through the Great Plains landscape salves the heated brain and stirs a battered soul? On this occasion I was headed for Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, a place of history and spirit for many plains peoples. In particular I wanted to spend time contemplating this volcanic remnant with the work by Scott Momaday, "The Way to Rainy Mountain," on my mind. A future column will be my rumination on Devil’s Tower, but for now, I feel moved to write about the getting there.

It is a good thing to be a historian when you travel the plains, or perhaps I should say, any true traveler of the plains becomes a historian. Making my turn south on 85, I paused to amble around St. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in Belfield. How odd and yet heartening that this building, the product of bitter schism, should be such a thing of beauty.

Suffering and beauty often are mates on the plains, I thought, as I made another stop in Buffalo, South Dakota. The stucco, art deco high school that was built in 1939 and still serves the community was the product of the Great Depression and its Works Progress Administration.

High taste and low stand cheek to jowl in this part of the country, too. In Belle Fourche, because the light was right, I pulled over to photograph the stunning neo-classical Butte County Courthouse, its lines so nicely accented by a well-done paint job. Then I couldn’t resist taking a few snaps of its neighbor, the Weyer Motel, with its hokey facade of petrified wood.

To appreciate such material works of humanity on the plains is one element in well-seasoned travel; to wonder at the wealth of wildlife inhabiting the plains today is another. Surely there are great problems in the Great Plains environment. Land use is often abusive, chemical use is unspeakably perilous, and we seem to be waging continual war on all species that do not return us profit in the narrow sense. Still, I chuckle at people who insist on calling the Great Plains environment "fragile." It is, in fact, remarkably resilient. Modest husbandry brings about fabulous aesthetic returns.

That’s what I was thinking as I drove parallel to the old Belle Fourche to Dickinson stage trail and studied the mature bald eagle studying me, I on the asphalt of 85, he in a stubblefield. Eagles are commonplace on the plains in this post-DDT generation. And whereas the Cave Hills and other grand buttes of the region no longer boast bighorns, plainspersons from a century ago would marvel at the restoration of pronghorn and especially blacktail herds. Wild turkeys strut from the coulees. Mink scamper across late winter slough ice. To a creature of the mid-twentieth century such as I, the plains have never seemed so alive with wildlife as they are today.

From this I take the lesson that the end-game for humanity on the plains may not be the dismal thing that most prophets preach. Good things may come from trial. People, like other species, are more resilient than we credit, if you give them half a chance. I plan to stick on the prairies and see how all this comes out.

The prime rib is still great at the Corner Bar, in Camp Crook, and you know, Fried’s Family Restaurant of Mandan now serves pumpkin blachinda.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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