March 24, 2003

Plains Folk: Historic Sites

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Just south of Kathryn, N.D., in the Sheyenne River valley, you take a lane south off Highway 46 to get to Standing Rock. This is a place that speaks for itself, if you have the time to let the conversation unfold. Pull in and park--there’s probably no one else around--walk the short trail to the upright boulder, past the fieldstone historical marker, and linger atop the round mound. Particularly if it happens to be autumn, the valley vistas will make your heart ache.

A few miles west of Rhame, you turn off Highway 12 and follow the jogs in the gravel road north, east, north, west to get to Fort Dilts. Once again, no parking problems, no crowds, just you and the place. Maybe a mowed pathway to invite your boots onto the level highland where Hunkpapa confronted goldseekers and soldiers. The modest historical marker is mounted on petrified wood. If it’s spring, don’t step on the purple poppy mallow. Think your own thoughts.

Some might prefer to occupy such sites with their own thoughts alone, and I do like it that there are no other people around but I also like to have some fact and story to mull over. That’s why I welcome the copy of A Traveler’s Companion to North Dakota State Historic Sites (2nd Edition) sent by Rick Collins of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, its publisher. Several of the society’s editors were involved in its production and at least five staff in its writing. Available from bookstores or from the SHSND, the Companion is a bargain for travelers of either the hiking-boot or the armchair variety.

From it we learn that a soldier named William L. Larned kept a diary detailing the fight at Fort Dilts, a hasty cut-sod fortification in 1864, and that H.H. Larned drew a map of the site, showing tent and grave locations, in 1921. Pull out your Companion and you are no longer alone at Fort Dilts, you are with a quiet, informed journeyman, the best sort of traveling companion. At Standing Rock you tread more lightly and respectfully, conscious you are on the burial site of people we can imagine only dimly. You learn that Joseph Nicollet and John C. Fremont were here in 1839, and that Nicollet put the rock on his 1843 map, calling it "Inyan Bosndata."

North Dakota does have well-developed historic sites, of course, places where tasteful preservations, reconstructions and interpretations facilitate a different sort of experience than Standing Rock or Fort Dilts. It’s a good experience, good for people who desire material things to assist in the recreation of a historical experience, good for families and good for travelers from other regions. Fort Union and the Chateau de Mores are well treated in the Companion and cannot fail to impress visitors. Still, I confess that my personal fascination is with those stark places where many would look around and say, "I don’t see anything here." I fear that I am truly a North Dakotan.

A full reading of the Companion, such as I did in my great-grandfather’s armchair during a post-winter snow, leads you to connect things in a way that might not happen over the miles and hours of travel. You notice, for instance, how many recognized historic sites commemorate the Sully and Sibley expeditions against the Indians of the northern plains in 1863. These range from the impressive Whitestone Hill Battlefield near Kulm to the pitiable Camp Arnold gravesites north of Oriska. The Daughters of the American Revolution marked most of these conflict sites early in the 20th century.

I don’t think it is only light deprivation causing me to contemplate the double irony that we not only waged such wrongheaded campaigns but also commemorated them. Someday a good historian is going to read the expedition journals with a critical eye and tell a sadder, truer story from them. (No, the Indians did not poison the lakes. Stop drinking that slough water, and you won’t have to dig so may graves. Someday somebody is going to have to mark all those.)

Traveling alone can be hazardous. Take a Companion with you.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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