October 2, 2003

Plains Folk: Lebanese

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

I carried along for in-flight reading on a recent junket a new book from the University of Mary Press. People kept craning their heads around to study the dust jacket, their quizzical faces, and sometimes their direct questions, indicating how peculiar the topic must seem to the casual reading public.

The book is "Prairie Peddlers: The Syrian-Lebanese in North Dakota," by Father William C. Sherman and his two collaborators, Paul C. Whitney and John Guerrero. Prairie readers, get past the apparent peculiarity. This is a notable book that foregrounds a people too long consigned to the margins of our regional story.

Popular usage termed these folk "Syrians," and the U.S. census called them by various names, but they are in fact the Lebanese, and they appear historically throughout the Great Plains. During my boyhood in western Kansas I knew the Jahay boys as farmers and goose hunters in the Arkansas River Valley, and the Rohars as veteran custom harvesters. South Dakota has sent two men of Lebanese ancestry, James Abourezk and James Abdnor, to the U.S. Senate. People like these punch through worn stereotypes.

One of which is that of the title phrase, "prairie peddlers." People of other ethnicities commonly interacted with the Lebanese in this fashion, the immigrant peddlers arriving at farmsteads in boxy wagons, or later in well-laden trucks.

There is nothing untrue about this stereotype, as Father Bill and his co-authors show. Most all Lebanese families relied on peddling to make an economic start in the new land. The writers refine the old image, however, by showing that considerable numbers of Lebanese women, including even Muslim women, took to the road as peddlers. This historical image of immigrant women traveling the land, negotiating transactions along with their place in the world, is stunning. (Consider it the next time we decide to erect a monument to pioneer women.)

The authors also chronicle the rapid movement of Lebanese into other commercial endeavors, establishing them as anchor businesspersons in prairie towns.

Not that they were deficient as farmers--they came to homestead and did as well as others at it. There were enclaves of Syrian homesteaders up and down the plains, but the largest concentrations in North Dakota were: in Pierce County, near Rugby; in Mountrail County, at Ross; and in Williams County, around Williston.

That the Lebanese succeeded in farming was remarkable for two reasons. The first is, obviously, they came from a Mediterranean land and had to adapt to the continental steppes of North America. Second, at one point the U.S. Department of Commerce ruled them ineligible for citizenship, and therefore ineligible for homesteads, because they were not "white persons" (a decision that was, fortunately, reversed by federal courts).

The Lebanese settlements comprised both Christians and Muslims (called Mohammedans by their neighbors). The Christians comprised Orthodox and two branches of Catholicism, Maronite and Melkite. Others regarded the Muslims as more exotic; indeed, the basement-mosque built at Ross in 1929 has acquired a certain celebrity, as it is said to be the first mosque built in America. The authors carefully hedge that claim, specifying it to mean the first building constructed as a mosque, rather than converted to such use. (I’m still skeptical.)

In our regional story to date, the Lebanese have figured as local color. Remembered are individual peddlers who established relationships with farm families, generous hospitality at meals featuring kibbi and tabbouli, and snapshots of religious ceremonies. The background of such benevolent images was an environment of social discrimination and ethnic slur. "Nonetheless," the authors point out, "wherever they resided in North Dakota, Syrians never seem to have felt sorry for themselves, they never saw themselves as ‘victims.’" Indeed, Bismarck businessman Floyd Boutrous was such an outspoken exponent of American values that he became popularly known as "Mr. Constitution."

Prairie peddlers? Way more than that. "An American success story," this book says, and shows.

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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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