Given the recent favorable action by the legislature, the state recreation area at Pembina Gorge soon will become Pembina Gorge State Park. This action is great news in the Rendezvous Region of northeastern North Dakota. Travelers attracted to the area by the vistas of the gorge will find much more to explore — as was evident by the events associated with the demisemiseptcentennial — you know, I’m just going to say “175th” — of Walhalla, the oldest town in the state.

Burying Billy Buttons

Little towns need a claim to fame. Lehr, population about eighty, bills itself as the “Smallest City in USA Situated in Two Counties.” In 1948, when the population was more like five hundred, the town fathers worded the slogan a bit differently: “The smallest city in the United States incorporated in two counties.” Logan and McIntosh being the two counties.

Raining on the Parade

Uncle Ben

Uncle Ben Corbin — who homesteaded on Beaver Creek in the 1880s, sold catfish to his neighbors in Emmons County, earned a reputation as a frontiersman who could live off the land, and gave that wonderful wedding dance for his daughter in 1894 — had another persona: the Wolf Slayer. The reputation goes back to his time in Iowa, where Corbin swore he could “catch more wolves in a month than any man living; but the money must be in sight first.”

Uncle Ben's Fish Stories

One August afternoon in 1896, the editor of the Emmons County Record greeted a well-known visitor to his Linton office. The editor called him by one of his many nicknames, “Colonel Ben Corbin, the Wolf-Worryer from Wayback.” Colonel Corbin bore gifts — a “nice mess of catfish,” which he taught his host how to skin for the table.

A Kind-Hearted Old Soldier

In 1874 Walter A. Burleigh, a notorious grafter, was seeking to return to Congress as the delegate for Dakota Territory, which the Bismarck Tribune insisted would be a “calamity.” Lest anyone over east in the Red River Valley take his side, the Trib reminded people how Burleigh had pronounced their part of the territory “only fit for the production of mosquitoes and catfish.”

Fish Stories

Might as well admit it, I’m a sucker for the Glorious 4th. My affinity for the national holiday probably goes back to family gatherings on the farm where food miraculously materialized around a bonfire and nobody ever successfully totaled up how many cousins there were sitting on the hayracks and throwing fireworks.

The Glorious 4th

Cather, and her persona Jim Burden in My Antonia, were perhaps a bit too mystic about ground cherries, but it sort of makes sense. Cather in her Nebraska novels is a deeply Romantic author, with a certain twist: she embraces sensual experiences, often as triggers to mystic insights. So Jim lies down in the garden, picks and munches a few ground cherries, and proceeds to become one with nature.

The Yellow and the Green

I have the most lovely row of ground cherries growing in my prairie garden this summer. Ground cherries are a niche crop, much confused, even by nurseries. This year I observed flats of ground cherries in one greenhouse that bore, simultaneously, the labels “Ground Cherry,” “Tomatillo,” and “Tomato.” Lots of confusion there, although all three are members of the nightshade family.

Ground Cherries in the Prairie Garden

When New England-born Ninette Maine Lowater moved to North Dakota in 1916, her journey was not joyous. As a teenager she had moved with her family from Connecticut to Wisconsin in 1859. After the Civil War she had married a returning soldier, Harrison Lowater. With him she raised three children and lived in comfortable, although not luxurious, circumstances. Mrs. Lowater became a poet of some note, publishing her work in both local and the national press.

The Wordsworth of Emmons County

Is there still musical performance in the legislature since Representative Carolyn Nelson retired? Is there a legislative choir? If not, then Senator Erbele, how about it? Somebody needs to make a place for harmony.

Husband, Come Home!

Plains Folk is a commentary devoted to life on the great plains of North Dakota. Written by Tom Isern of West Fargo, North Dakota, and read in newspapers across the region for years, Plains Folk venerates fall suppers and barn dances and reminds us that "more important to our thoughts than lines on a map are the essential characteristics of the region — the things that tell what the plains are, not just where they are."

The legislature has gone home, prompting sighs of relief across the state, not least among the legislators themselves. Yes, I have been among those taking shots at them during the recent session, or rather, I would make the distinction, taking shots at some of their actions.

A Free State

Jesse James

Oh how we boys — folkies of the 1970s — loved to sing the ballad of Jesse James.

The Ballad of Jesse James

In a frame shanty on a homestead claim in Spink County, Dakota Territory, a Norwegian mother imprisoned by a blizzard gave vent to her hopelessness. “We are as if we were living on an island in the middle of an ocean,” she lamented, “with nobody to care if we blow away or if we freeze to death. There is not a person with whom we can talk and who understands our language.

One Day on a Territorial Homestead

Sometimes when you travel you plan your itinerary carefully, but you get lost anyway, and then it turns out what you stumbled into while lost is better than what you had planned. The same goes for doing archival research in prairie history.

The Hand on the Plow

Rummaging around in a manuscript collection of the Institute for Regional Studies at the NDSU Archives the other day, I was surprised by the contents of a folder of correspondence labeled “Jury Duty Requests, 1893-97.” This was in the papers of Sheriff Oscar G. Barnes, of Cass County.

Jury Duty

It wasn’t what I was looking for, but that's how things go when you rummage around in archival collections. I came to the North Dakota State University Archives to search the Institute for Regional Studies collections for information about Lilac Days, that lovely college custom—of which I will write soon—that sought to promote the planting of a lilac hedge along the highway from Fargo all the way to Grand Forks. Indeed I did find the sheet music for the ritual song, “Lilac Days.”

The Vanishing Homesteader

"Come all you jolly fellows and listen to my tale / And I’ll tell you about the trouble which landed me in jail." So begins a remarkable and rare ballad of the northern plains — the confessional composition of one Archie L. Baker, a bootlegger languishing in jail in Fargo in 1929.

The Bastille at Far-go

During the 1890s, the so-called Gay Nineties, two developments transformed popular culture and folklore across the country, including the Great Plains. The first of these was the proliferation of urban music halls, entertainment venues that were masculine, sometimes a little bawdy, and, surprisingly to us today, exceedingly sentimental.

The Baggage Coach Ahead

In 1916 the Grand Forks Herald published the words — three 8-line stanzas and a chorus — to a popular song that was making the rounds. The chorus starts out in heartwarming fashion, but then it takes a deadly turn.

The Fatal Wedding

In Oslo last summer, we called in at the Gustav Vigeland Museum, adjacent to Frogner Park. In a cluttered corner of the museum I espied something that signified nothing to other visitors, but meant something to me. It was a plaster cast of Norway’s great Romantic poet, Henrik Wergeland. I recognized this as the original study for the bronze statue of Wergeland that stands in Island Park of Fargo.

Monumental Matters

Plains Folk

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