Plains Folk

In February of 1992 I, accompanied by Bancroft the History Dog, blew into a frozen Fargo, North Dakota, determined to shift my energies to a land grant university on the plains, even at the price of serving a sentence as an academic dean. One of my first new friends in Fargo, the poet David Martinson, immediately told me I must read a remarkable new book by Kathleen Norris, entitled Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. I read it; we invited Kathleen to read and lecture at NDSU; and thus I contributed to the minor literary sensation swirling around her book.

This isn’t what I expected to find when I started investigating the early history of Halloween pranks. But then, Medora was not your typical frontier community.

In his first issue following Halloween 1885, the editor of the Hope Pioneer recounted the doings of the holiday.

You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe said, but I do, and I do so without discomfort. Although I get a little tired of replaying the buzzer-beater in the state semifinals of 1970, because that was a long time ago and a lot of miles, too, and was not necessarily the apex in the trajectory of local history. Or maybe it was, and everything since then has been downhill. This actually is a thing among Great Plains historians, the assumption of inevitable decline, such that scholars have adopted the term, declensionism, to describe it. Scholars devised the term, but the phenomenon is real, we feel it at the grassroots in prairie communities.

One thing I noticed was, there are a lot of eagles along the middle reaches of the Missouri River. Bald eagles in the trees, eagles soaring overhead, eagles huddling over carrion on the road.