November 27, 2003

Plains Folk: Dakota Dreams

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

To be a child on the Great Plains frontier was a wonderful life, filled with sensual delights. Or, to be a child on the Great Plains frontier was a horrible life, filled with drudgery and abuse. It depends on whom you ask.

The works of Elizabeth Hampsten, a North Dakota scholar, lean toward the latter view. I don’t want to misrepresent her views, but they almost convey the sense that to bring a child to some such place as North Dakota was a matter of child abuse.

The works of Elliot West, a recent president of the Western History Association, lean the other way. He says that while parents often had a hard time adjusting to western life, their kids thrived on it. They took to the country and became plains folk.

Maybe we ought to ask the kids, not the kids as old people recollecting early days, but the kids at the time. There were, in fact, children who kept diaries recording their lives and impressions.

And then, what if we let the words of those children speak to children today, rather than putting words into the mouths of children of the past? That’s the premise of a new book by Janet Howe Townsley, published by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press. It’s called "Dakota Dreams: Fannie Sabra Howe’s Own Story, 1881_1884."

The author of the book, Townsley, is the grandniece of the author of the diary on which it is based. Fannie Sabra Howe came to Mellette, Dakota Territory (later northeastern South Dakota) with her parents, Charles Morgan and Mary Jane Howe, from Wisconsin in the early 1880s.

The Howes took a homestead claim, because most everybody did, lived in a tent for a while, but had commercial ambitions. Charles Morgan Howe entered into a partnership and established a lumber company, a business that both symbolized and capitalized on the building boom implicit to frontier settlement.

Much of the book is concerned with the building not only of the town but also of the wonderful residence of the Howes’, the round house with its spiraling turret. Arriving from her last stay in Wisconsin, young Fannie writes, "Pa [has been] building a castle_and they never let me know a word about it!"

Weighing in on the question of the nature of childhood on the frontier, with this diary, chalk one up for a wonderful childhood. Here is the stuff of the senses. Fannie rides the hayracks, plays with family pets, and one day records, "I killed three lizards after the rain." Her mother was not so comfortable with nature’s creatures. "Frank [her brother] saw one under the bed and it scared Ma fearfully."

At this time of year readers may be seeking Dakota Dreams in local bookstores, in which case there is another good title from the northern plains that may be of interest. Published a year ago by the North Dakota State University Institute for Regional Studies, the book is "Tori and the Sleigh of Midnight Blue," by Margo Sorenson.

Tori of the title is the daughter of a Norwegian widow in the Red River Valley. The book raises interesting questions about the status of widows and land in ethnic farming communities, but I don’t want to be too much the historian now. The book is most of all a good story that girls, especially perhaps girls of modern blended families, can relate to.

Tori, of course, has qualms about a suitor who appears hopefully and helpfully at her mother’s door. The blue sleigh mentioned in the title is a memento from her late father. Naturally, she has an obnoxious little brother who plays a destructive role in the plot and friends who can be snotty. In the end there is a resolution of acceptance in a scene at the schoolhouse, that constant symbol of community.

Books like Tori and Dakota Dreams are good gifts, by which I mean, gifts from the authors to the people of the plains. We always need more stories.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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