August 15, 2002

Plains Folk: Heroes

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Open before me is an inscribed copy of "Old Man on His Back: Portrait of a Prairie Landscape," by Sharon Butala (published by HarperCollins). Color photography by Courtney Milne complements Sharon's text to produce a stunning book that evokes the prairies of southwestern Saskatchewan in compelling fashion.

Old Man on His Back is a tract of native grassland that constituted the Butala ranch until the past few years, during which time title and control passed to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. This transaction caused local consternation and generated critical gossip, for the transfer of land from the practice of production agriculture to the cause of prairie preservation is not just an economic transaction. It involves an implicit critique of ranching as land use. It says, perhaps we have not been perfect custodians of the land.

Every such transaction provokes me, as a farm boy and a plainsperson, to think about such matters, with mixed feelings. I am aware that for some people from points east and west, prairie preservation is a stalking horse. It is a cause embraced by radical environmentalists and animal rightists, true believers who are waging a culture war against my own people, who raise crops and animals as a living and a way of life.

Sharon and Peter Butala, though, are ranchers. Their decision to contribute to prairie preservation resulted from their personal situation and their grounded assessment of conditions. It was not leveraged by any sinister agenda. They did a good thing.

I now think back over events of the past summer, a panoply of things that seem disconnected, but somehow all seem to fit. Large in the middle of the summer was my leadership of a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar for teachers entitled "The Great Plains from Texas to Saskatchewan: Place, Memory, Identity." For most of the participants the high point of the seminar was an expedition to Eastend, Sask., boyhood home of Wallace Stegner, including a day at Old Man on His Back prairie.

For me, though, the highlight was a quiet discussion of one of Stegner's essays called "Specifications for a Hero." Here Stegner writes of the qualities he admired as a boy, and those he came to admire as a man. Even as he redefines a hero, the definition gets away from him again, so that I realize "hero" is nothing one can achieve. Just when you think you are getting close, the requirements change; something else is required; and if you aspire to heroism, you have to redirect your efforts.

Early this summer I left my research in Saskatchewan and drove hard into central Kansas, called home to help with wheat harvest for the first time in 30 years. I did not do this as pilgrimage; family circumstances (a farm accident) created the need. Yet it felt good to stand in the dank darkness of a stubblefield lit by machine lights and fireflies.

Meanwhile, on each return to North Dakota, I scaled the walls of the country church called Ladbury, near Sibley, joining with volunteers restoring the old church, writing their own essay about prairie preservation with brushes, scrapers, hammers, cement mixers, and front end loaders. Like the Butalas, these folk are doing what seems right.

Now I'm just back from a junket to Sweden, where in the course of academic business, I visited some shrines to old-world heroism that immigrants here also hold dear. In one of the royal palace museums of Stockholm I studied the bloody tunics of Gustavus Adolphus, holy relics of his battlefield martyrdom. I thought then of the prairies, and of Stegner, and of heroes I have known. And I resolved never to install heroism in a glass case, but rather to follow those who continue to define the quality in my own country.

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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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