April 10, 2003

Plains Folk: Bakken Homestead

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The sod house is the single most compelling symbol of Euro-American pioneering on the plains. It evokes domesticity, democracy, and the land in one powerful package. The most monumental photographic images of sod houses are the Nebraska photographs of Solomon Butcher. The single most celebrated image of a sod house, however, comes from Walsh County, North Dakota, and its story is intriguing.

The photograph dates from the late 1890s, its location commonly given as Milton, North Dakota, which is a little confusing. Actually the photographer, John McCarthy, was from Milton, in Cavalier County, whereas the house and the homestead on which it stood were in neighboring Walsh County. The home was that of John and Marget Bakken, Norwegian homesteaders, and their two children, Tilda and Eddie.

Sure enough, with the help of friends in the North Dakota State University Institute for Regional Studies, I find properties with the name John Bakken in a 1910 atlas of Walsh County. The homestead 80 is in S14 T158N R58W, which is to say, Silvesta Township. The house was in the NE/4 of the NE/4. Bakken also acquired the other 80 in the quarter, as well as another 80 in an adjoining section.

According to a family history and a published Walsh County history, John Bakken was born in Benson, Minnesota, in 1871. His parents were from Telemarken. After a sojourn in Minnesota, they moved their large family to homestead in North Dakota in 1881. There John married Marget Axvig, who also came from a big Norwegian settler family, she having been born in Telemarken in 1867.

John and Marget took their own homestead and were pioneers of mythic cast. During the starving time early in their marriage, Marget fed the household on bread, syrup, and lard, supplemented with milk from the cows she milked. John made the furniture and the straw mattresses. When snow drifted over the soddie, he shovel-carved 13 steps from the door to the sunlit surface. They built a good frame barn in 1904 while still living in the sod house and finally moved into a frame house of their own in 1906.

It was in 1898 that McCarthy photographed the family in front of their house. The low, rounded roof is overgrown with weeds and grass and punctuated with stovepipes. The situation of the family members perfectly represents traditional gender and age roles. Marget stands at the door, a washbasin in hand. John stands off to the left, spade in hand. The girls are dressed in Sunday dresses, but they stand on ground well out from the house, children of the country. The family dog is a blur under the window.

You can view the photo at the American Memory website of the Library of Congress (memory.loc.gov) as part of the Fred Hulstrand collection posted there by the Institute for Regional Studies. Hulstrand was a photographer who bought out McCarthy in Milton and operated his own studio in Park River. His assistants, the Wick sisters Thelma and Sylvia, colorized photographs with oil paints. The exhibited photo is one of these colorized prints.

The fame of the photo came when an artist from the Treasury Department noticed it in a book called Pageant of America. His reproduction of the image became the Homestead Act centennial stamp, 4 cents, issued in 1962. The stamp shows subtle changes in the composition of the image, and one glaring one -- the removal of the children (allegedly to avoid depiction of living persons). The dog is gone, too. On issuance of the stamp, however, John Bakken, still living in North Dakota, recognized himself and his old soddie.

Another artist’s adaptation of the same photo appeared on the Utvandringen til Amerika postage stamp issued in 1975 by Norway to commemorate immigration to America. This one restores the children to their rightful place. Indeed, the postures of John and Marget make the children central to this postal image -- rightly so, given the attitudes of immigrant settlers.

And the dog is back.

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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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