May 15, 2003

Plains Folk: Letters from Readers

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Writing Plains Folk is a great way to stay in touch with people across the plains. I hear from them every week, almost always in a friendly vein; obviously my column readership has no overlap with the talk-radio constituency of the region.

Some of the kindest letter-writers represent what I know to be a large constituency composed of expatriate plains folk now living in cities to the east or west. For instance, I heard from Tioga, N. D., native Jo Bugge, now in Seattle, who still reads the Bismarck Tribune. Responding to a recent column about the virtues of ice fishing and plains life in general, she said, "Thank you for capturing our Prairie experience with heart." Aw shucks. "I expect to return ‘home’ when I retire," Jo writes.

Many other correspondents are from the class of people that author Wallace Stegner named "the stickers" -- diehard prairie people, many of them with mixed feelings about life on the land, but lovers of it all the same. A week or so ago I heard from Dwight Anderson in Warren, Minn. He and his brother were seeding, and nervous about a coming rain.

Dwight is one of these guys with a powerful sense of place, who locates himself in relation to county roads and Indian trails, who picks up arrowheads in spring. He writes from the situation of a rural area being in-filled with non-farming residents, some of whom complain too much about lack of amenities in a place they chose to move to.

Yet he writes with appreciation of a family (an electrician, a stay-at-home mom and three kids) who moved onto a farmstead last year and have taken to the country. "The bus is going by for the first time in a couple years," Dwight notes, "and as I cultivated the quarter-section around the farmstead, I noticed steel posts ringing the 12-acre yard. As I got closer I realized there were sheep in the yard, and I see that as a positive sign."

A letter like that can set me to thinking for a whole evening about simple and basic things. Land, family and neighbors.

I appreciate, too, the people who write to share knowledge or expertise about a subject raised in a column. Lately I’ve been writing out of the old county extension reports held by the North Dakota State University archives, and one column treated the work of county agent J. Clayton Russell in Golden Valley County.

Russell loved to build things -- cisterns, silos, chicken houses, you name it -- and so it came as no surprise when I heard from Tom Scherer, NDSU agricultural engineer, that Russell went on to a long career in his department in Fargo. Indeed, Russell and Dick Witz were the inventors of the "mound" a.k.a. "Nodak" type of septic system. (Is that earthy enough for you?)

Some column topics set off regular hailstorms of contending recollections. A column about the Zesto Drive-in of Pierre, S. D. (where people feed ice cream cones to their retrievers), prompted letters from Zesto fans across the country. Columns on 6-man football ignited old arguments from some Republican warhorses from the West River about disputed contests they should have forgotten a long time ago.

Here’s my all-time favorite letter from a reader, a young one. Now and then I have occasion to mention the town of Rhame, N. D., where I like to feed at the Table & Tavern. My correspondent there writes, "I live in the town of Rhame, ND. It is small, the school is great and the store is kinda great, the waterhole bar is still there, the shear hair styling is there and the Consolidated building is there. The Cathlic church is there and so is the luthern church. I think rhame is an awesome town." I think so, too.

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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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