07/18/2026

DIY Pro Historic Exhibits — Everything is a Beta Version Until We Die, So Just Start Experimenting

By Aaron Barth

Before I lean too far into this mid-morning, I wanted to get some process notes down on the A to Z of a beta version fabrication of an historic image displayed in the common area entry of the Heritage River Landing, aka and hereafter the landing (physical address at 1700 River Road, Bismarck, North Dakota 58503).

The below image is what I ended up with. And some notes below that provide the road map that got me there.

Historic image credit: Montana Historical Society, from the Frank Jay Haynes (b. 10/28/1853 – 03/10/1921 d.) photo collection. Image is 1877-1878, Bismarck, Dakota Territory, Missouri River, steamboats left to right as Far West, Nellie Peck, Western, Benton.

We started with this big chunk of blank wall that faces south, and if you stand where this image was taken, you can look at the wall, then out the glass doors south toward the BNSF-soon-to-be-razed Northern Pacific Railway bridge (substructure/piers date to 1880-1883, and superstructure to 1905). With all the blank white walls in the common area of the landing, I got some off the shelf LED track lights from Menards. And had them installed by a local electrician. We indeed all laugh when Clark Griswold told his father or father in law that he learned everything from him about exterior illumination. But interior illumination is just as important. For making things pop.

Back to the previous blank wall. I wanted local historical imagery to impress upon visitors. It strikes at those senses of history and senses of place — full sensory history. So the evening and weekend research proceeded.

There are a handful of popularized photographers whose works are still in tact today, largely due to one generation after the next deciding that what they photographed was of value. Frank Bennett Fiske. Frank Jay Haynes. David Francis Barry. Type these names into your search engines and you’ll find quite a bit. The Montana Historical Society has an excellent body of images from Haynes. David Barry’s stuff is kind of scattered, in private and public repositories (the Newberry Library in Chicago has some Barry stuff). Digital Horizons has solid online Frank Fiske stuff.

It’s easy to start clicking on these links and just get lost in the images, one after the other. While in the Haynes collection through Montana Historical Society’s online collection, I landed on the image before you. It was perfect: Haynes faced his camera south, just as the present visitor does today at the landing. The historic image shows the Missouri River bank and shoreline, just as visitors can see today (with added twentieth century Interstate 94 “Grant Marsh” bridge and U. S. Army Corps of Engineers riprap). This was the image. Even within the image were humans. With faces and eyes looking into the camera that the visitor could gaze into. And the eyes in this image gazed back to our own retinas here in the present. As we look at them, they look at us. Different time. Same space.

Next was to look into what type of resolution the image could be obtained. The Haynes images are high resolution. So I filled out the necessary image requests, submitted them through the non-profits Fort Abraham Lincoln Foundation (est. 1982) and Northern Plains Heritage Foundation (est. 2004), and FALF resources took care of the non-profit processing fees. A couple weeks later Montana Historical Society e-mailed me a link with the high resolution images for download. So images were now secured.

Then it was exploring the various online and local large scale high resolution print options. For whatever reason I found Banner Buzz, an online shop that does large scale (to me meaning larger than 36″) printing on polyester fabric at a sensible price point (looking at the receipt, it was $193.06). Nothing, mind you, was assured that my process journey was going to work. But I wanted to at least submit the high resolution photo, order this from Banner Buzz, and see what it looked like up close once it arrived in late May 2026.

It was fantastic.

View of the image printed on the polyester fabric when it first arrived in late May 2026. For scale, you can see a chair. Or my Redwing boots bottom center of image.

After this I asked one of our dutiful staff, Grant Sundquist, to build a 1×3″ cedar frame for it to mount the fabric. He got the first draft of the frame all framed up. Then we placed it in the spot. And gazed at it. We did not frame it yet. We needed to look it over. Let it kind of work on us. We decided the skyline, though big, could be edited down. We really wanted the steamboats and the human subjects to be the central “oomph” to the eyes of visitors. So in the last couple days I edited up the frame with a chop saw, using a Bosch air nailer and air compressor. I used 1×2″ cedar strips (rough milled, or whatever it’s called) as the initial border.

The 1×2″ rough cedar was air nailed directly around the stretched polyester image. The top of the rough cedar was made flush with the flat top of the polyester image, as I anticipated I would run my 1×3″ rough cedar moulding on top of that. To frame it all in.

After securing the 1×2″ border, and remembering to snag some digital images of this process, I then used the 1×3″ moulding to finish the front. And I added to the back two French cleats, the longest ones I could find at Bismarck Lowe’s.

All said, this was about $350 in materials. Online, I could not find anywhere to get this high resolution image printed up large enough and in a professional looking display for less than $2,000. I checked with a couple local shops, and found that local print shops often max out at 36″. The local banner and sign shops can go larger. And they have pro ways to mount it and all. But it’s often all of our human labor in this process that is understandably the most valuable and understandably the most cost. Usually.

Gonna rinse and repeat this process for a couple other walls at the landing. The image already has captured the attention of all commercial heritage vessel staff. There are calls for wanting more local steamboat images. And I’ll keep thinking about ways to impress the 30,000′ view upon viewers, that sort of micro and macro that Maya Jasanoff accomplished so well in her steamboat history work on Joseph Conrad.

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07/09/2026

Little Bighorn-Greasy Grass at 150 and Wally McRae’s “Reincarnation”

By Aaron Barth

On June 25, 2026, Shadd Piehl, Dakota Goodhouse, Prairie Rose Seminole and I physically visited Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument (LBBNM) for the scheduled 150th (1876-2026) of the battle. That day, at approximately 2:58pm (mountain time), just after a 2-hour rain shower, the clouds parted and we were given a view of all the markers on the hillside along with smells of prairie grasses, and a distant horn from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s locomotive. The latter train noise provided a nod to why this battle took place 150 years prior, as the U.S. Military worked hand in hand with United States policy makers and the industrial railroad (the Northern Pacific Railway at that time, the Northern “N” being the part of BNSF today) to punch linear train tracks east-west across the continental interior. It was a global theme. (I’m not going to search for it now, but you can locate at about some time in the 1860s, a quote from Leo Tolstoy bemoaning or critiquing the railroad punching through the Siberian forests — railroads were punching linear everywhere).

Shadd and I rode out together to LBBNM that morning from Medora (which, as well, dedicated and opened the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library on July 4, 2026). From Interstate 94 heading west, we decided to take the Colstrip Exit, and head south on Montana Highway 39. While on that stretch, Shadd started chatting a bit about the late Wallace McRae, and one of his popularized cowboy poems, Reincarnation. Shadd mentioned that McRae tended to encourage the younger up and coming cowboy poets to push their craft in new directions. His words reminded me of the thoughtful historians I have had the privelidge and intensity to know over the years who also have done the same.

I didn’t get to read and sit with McRae’s “Reincarnation” until after I returned to the Northern Plains from LBBNM. I sat down on June 29, 2026, around 12:24AM (central) and transcribed it word for word into my journal. Writing in the analog has always impressed new paths into my memory better than typing it out on these here digital platforms. The third section of McRae’s poem is as follows, and below that a picture from our June 25, 2026 site visit. I thought about that and the time we spent at LBBNM, 150 years later, 1876 to 2026:

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06/19/2026

Just Below the 49th Parallel: Juneteenth USA and Emancipation Day in a Former British Colony

By Aaron Barth

I’m taking a couple minutes here in the Morton Mandan Public Library, June 19, 2026, 5:01PM (central), to memorialize in a blog post the Northern Plains Juneteenth events that just started to unfold outside at Dykshoorn Park, Mandan, Morton County, North Dakota. Or thoughts of this particular Juneteenth. Some weeks ago, while on a work assignment in Niagara Falls National Heritage Area, our working group site visited the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center in Niagara Falls, New York. During the visit, our gracious and knowledgeable interpretive guides noted that just across the river, in Canada, the Juneteenth equivalent would be Emancipation Day, on August 1st, to observe the day in 1834 which arrived through the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, making the practice of enslaving human beings illegal across the British Empire, including colonies such as Canada. Canada’s House of Commons voted unanimously on March 24, 2021, to designate August 1 as Emancipation Day. There’s a whole official Canadian government write up on it linked here.

Historians of the Great Plains have crafted rather sophisticated arguments and narratives about how culture unfolded in different ways on the Great Plains and in the North American West north and south of the 49th parallel. It kind of has me wondering how a narrative that straddles this imaginary geopolitical boundary might work and unfold: Juneteenth in America, which has its origins in Galveston, Texas, circa 1865. And Emancipation Day throughout the British Empire, which included Canada starting in 1834.

As of now, at 5:18PM, I don’t have much more to write about this. Other than the usual latest peer reviewed biographies and histories one reads on topics, this in particular leaning me towards that of Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and President Grant’s struggle with reconstruction and beating back and down the racially charged terrorist insurgencies throughout the post-Civil War South. Of this latter topic, Lt. Col. George Custer proved effective as a federal enforcer, leading the Union’s 7th Cavalry into the South to put down and suppress the KKK. I better get back to the present and go find a bit of food at this lovely Juneteenth celebration on the Northern Plains.

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06/14/2026

How to Get Excited About Steamboat History on the Northern Plains?

By Aaron Barth

It’s a real question. At the outset, those who are not excited about steamboat history raise an eyebrow when they first encounter a researcher who is excited about steamboat history. It’s understandable. Because the topic sounds like yet another flash-pan moment in the long historical record. “Steamboats? Importance?” Yes. Both of those. Steamboats accelerated the ability of crew and cargo to advance from port to port across the globe. And steamboats plied up the inland waterways. Throughout the planet. The continental interior of North America as well.

Globally, the Anglo-sphere happened to have greatest influence with steamboats. And this segues into the latest reading by way of Maya Jasanoff’s 2017 work, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin Press, 2017). On page 96, Jasanoff notes that in 1878, British ships had 5x the registered tonnage capacity of the next-largest merchant fleet.

Locally, on the Northern Plains, steamboats moved goods and materials from all the way up to Fort Benton (est. 1846) in Montana Territory, and all the way down to St. Louis, just south of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Bismarck, and the landing at Bismarck, was one of those 1870s steamboat intersections.

People reading this should make time to read Jasanoff’s 2017 work on Joseph Conrad. Maya does a great job. Her and I had a chance to visit, real time, in autumn 2013, when we both happened to attend the New Zealand Historical Association’s biannual conference. Jasanoff mentioned she was working on research that concerned Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. She also was a key note speaker — which is what one is invited to do if one is, ahem, cough cough, a Harvard trained and practicing historian.

At that conference, I was in the trenches, presenting in a session or two. It was great. NDSU’s Tom Isern had accepted my ask to attend the conference with him. It was an amazing experience. My girlfriend (now wife) Molly McLain also joined the travels to New Zealand, and her brother, Matthew McLain, joined too.

It’s relevant to discuss these personal interactions, or the memories of them. It humanizes these otherwise human-less historical titles that we see on the book shelves (those high school or junior high memories of listening to the football coach who was deputized to read from the mechanical narrative of that year’s history text book for 50 minutes at least 3 times a week will diminish the character of any listener).

Interacting with human historians is similar to physically and in-person visiting historic sites: read about it in a library. That’s a great first step. A much needed foundation to it all. Then schedule time with the urban or land scape. Dust has settled since the historical event took place at the historical landscape. But it’s often only millimeters or inches of dust. Maybe a foot or two. Okay maybe it’s a Hellenic meter. But still. Visit them.

Okay, so here are a couple steamboat reads. One is by Tracy Potter, Steamboats in Dakota Territory: Transforming the Northern Plains (Arcadia Publishing, 2017). And the other, mentioned above, by Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

And below-below is a digital mock up, at least one image of what will be a larger assemblage of images, in the common area of the Heritage River Landing, 1700 River Road, Bismarck, North Dakota. I took a photo of the space where we wanted a big historical image to go. Then I slapped the photo into Power Point. Then, I did some research in regional archives, including Montana Historical Society. I remember seeing this image before, and the orientation of how we intend to display it also points directly south of where the original image was taken.

The image is with the Montana Historical Society, Helena, and our non-profits sourced and paid for all the high resolution images and the rights to display them (with appropriate recognition). Those images are a part of the Frank Haynes collection. Frank ran around all over the place taking photos with the wet plate collodion process (the device is similar or the same to yesteryear’s Matthew Brady and today’s Shane Balkowitsch).

Okay, and just before I hit “Publish” on this Word Press blog entry, below-below is some verbatim text transcription from the June 28, 1876 front page of the Bismarck Weekly Tribune, almost 150 years ago today (it is June 14 today):

RIVER NEWS (Bismarck Weekly Tribune, front page, June 28, 1876)

The river is still falling, but the stage of water is good, and promises to remain so for some time.

The Carroll left for Benton on Wednesday [July 21, 1876] last with a full load of Diamond R. goods and a good list of passengers.

The Benton left on Thursday for Benton with a full load of freight and passengers. When near Buford she met with a serious accident to one of her engines which will delay her some days. The Captain left on Monday [July 26, 1876] for repairs.

The Key West will leave for Benton on the 3d of July, and will be the next boat up.

The Durfee left Yan[k]ton on Sunday [July 25, 1876] with a full load of goods for the military posts.

The Denver left for St. Joseph, Missouri, a few days ago but at Fort Pierre was sold to John Dillon, and she will hereafter be engaged in the Black Hills trade, either as a ferry or between Fort Pierre and Yankton, unless the government carries out its intention to close the route over the reserva[t]ion, except for the transportation of supplies.”

The Far West has not yet returned from her first trip up the Yellowstone. The Josephine arrived last evening, departing for the supply depot at 5 o’clock this morning, drawing three and a half [feet] of water…

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05/10/2026

Glenn Ohrlin Landscape Memory

By Aaron Barth

I’ve gone down the spelunking rabbit hole of western Americana, drover (aka, cowboy) folk music and culture, and have in front of me Glenn Ohrlin The Hell-Bound Train: A Cowboy Songbook (University of Illinois Press, 1973). The foreword is by Archie Green, and he gives a couple touch points of Glenn’s seasons of life. Born in Minneapolis on October 26, 1926, Glenn’s dad was a Swedish immigrant who worked farm labor in the rural, and transitioned to house painting in the growing metropole of Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Glenn’s mother was second generation Norwegian Minnesotan. So Glenn’s birthday comes two years after Clell Gannon’s Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres is published in 1924, and he (Glenn) represents the transition of 2nd to 3rd wave cowpoke western Americana.

Without going too far into the rest, here are some surviving material culture (aka, “STUFF”) nodes of this all.

First. Within this 1973 U of Illinois Press monograph is a super thin record (33 1/3 RPMs) with just a couple of Glenn Ohrlin’s songs on it. We have a record player. So may try to play this. But this is the second record I’ve seen now in these U of Illinois Press publications on western Americana drover life from the 1970s. Good stuff.

Second. Shadd Piehl, a couple weeks ago, mentioned that he knew Glenn Ohrlin, and Glenn on occasion would visit his family place (Walter and Becky Piehl’s) around Minot and Velva, North Dakota. Because Glenn’s sister had some kind of connection with the Minot and Velva area. So that transitioned into Shadd telling me he, at his house, has some of Glenn’s horse tack hanging on a wall. My eyebrows raised at that and I asked Shadd if he would mind sending me a picture of the horse tack. Relics and history is only alive if we talk about it in the present, no? So below is a photo of said horse tack of Glenn Ohrlin’s. Perhaps we’ll look to curate it indefinitely in a Northern Plains west-Missouri River cowboy bar.

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03/15/2026

Historic Garden Varieties Continued: Western Northern Dakota Territory and Southern France

By Aaron Barth

In the last couple weeks I found myself along with a small group of colleagues in Medora, western North Dakota. The four of us had a bunch of really good professional reasons for being in Medora, and as I needed to step away from the larger group to take a digital meeting phone call (complete with airpods), I decided to listen in on the digital meeting from the historic Marquis de Morès garden that the CCC built up in historic Medora, North Dakota. Just some general technical notes during the site visit.

During heritage and history nerd training with Tom Isern at North Dakota State University, one thing Isern keyed his students in on was to look for inscribed names at the bases of memorials, statues, and sculptures. Names. Years. Anything. This seemingly simple technique was used when reviewing the Marquis de Morès’ pedestal statue. On the statue east elevation, at the base of the bronze, is the first initial, surname, title, and city, that appears in this order: F. Barbedienne, Foundeur. Paris. It’s a reference to this chap who has a body of work still floating around the globe that industrial capitalists continue to help make more valuable through some sort of emotional structural demand (aka, “market forces.”).

The years that Barbedienne lived, 1810-1892, and the years that this statue would or could have come about placed in Medora, did not match: the Marquis was only in the western northern Dakota Territory badlands in the 1880s, and he got himself killed in the 1890s. Barbedienne isn’t mentioned in the index of Sergio Luzzatto’s 2026 The First Fascist (Harvard University Press), but I’ll have to see if he appears in the index of the late D. Jerome Tweton‘s previous biography of the Marquis. If you read about the character and nature of the Marquis in Luzzatto’s work, and Tweton’s work, you could imagine the Marquis creating a bronze of himself to place IN the hamlet named after his wife, daughter of the 19th century New York banking powerhouse Hoffmann. The Marquis was big on ideas and funding them with other peoples’ money. It was, as Grandpa Simpson often said, the style of the times.

Anyhow, for inscriptions: one has to migrate to the north elevation of the statue, the base, where you’ll see this inscription: POISSON. That’s Pierre-Marie Poisson (1876-1953). You can research him digitally on the French Ministry of Culture website database. So one might imagine a research question (sometimes one doesn’t have the sort of travel budget of a Marquis) that thinks about whether or not Barbedienne created some scale version of this Marquis statue while the Marquis was alive. Then this Poisson chap finds that bronze, or statue (doesn’t exactly need to be bronze), and scales it to the size we see today, and casts it. Then it sits out here in Medora. Then in the 1930s, the CCC comes along and the CCC administrator looks at this and says, “we should do a larger garden of some sort around this.” The CCC also included a drinking fountain (which is out of commission as of my site visit). But this would indeed have been a welcome hydration reprieve. Could be cool to see the fountain restored. Some day. Sounds like a project that has some work ahead of it.

Some photos of that site visit of mine of the bronze and inscribed names. At the end is an image of the drinking fountain.

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03/12/2026

Northern Plains Correspondence: Clell Gannon to Russell Reid – May 25, 1958

By Aaron Barth

My wife often cruises through the library used book sales in our region. Recently she went through a used book sale at the Bismarck Veterans Memorial Public Library and located a copy of North Dakota History: Journal of the Northern Plains, Volume 34, Number 4, Fall 1967, the Russell Reid Memorial issue. She purchased and returned with it, handed it to me, and I opened the cover page and within was a small envelope, dated May 26, 1958, with a note inside from the residence of Clell Gannon to Mr. Russell Reid.

So I thought I’d comment on the note here. After this, I’ll reach out to the State Historical Society of North Dakota to curate this note with the larger collections of Clell Gannon and Russell Reid. That way it will be publicly available for present and future researchers (yes, you can hear the Indiana Jones phrase, “This belongs in a museum…” in this case, this belongs in a public archive).

The note was in the standard cursive of the day. To help with readability, below is the transcription of mine, and then following that images of the original letter:

912 Mandan St, Bismarck, N. Dak May 25, 1958

Dear Russell:

We were very pleased to read of the great honor that the University of North Dakota is to confer upon you. It is overdue, but it is nice they have seen fit to give you this recognition, and you will honor them in much or more than they will honor you. We are glad your mother has lived to share this day with you and we know that if George Will were alive, he would be more happy at this event than for the similar honor that the AC conferred upon him. Congratulations from all of this. You are most deserving. Sincerely, Clell, Ruth, Grael and Craig.

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02/28/2026

Medora and Cannes: Heritage Tourism, of the Garden Variety Sort

By Aaron Barth

I’m currently waiting for my family to rise for the morning, and reading Sergio Luzzatto, The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Mores (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2026), and came across a contextual description of the historic landscape architecture in Cannes, southern France, where the Marquis (aka, Tony, or Antoine de Vallombrosa — names get really altered and complex when one is born into the invented tradition of the aristocracy) romped around as a child. Luzzatto does good in providing this 1870s-ish description of the social climate of this garden. I’ll just quote Luzzatto below here in this paragraph from page 30:

Already in the late 1860s, tourist guides were calling the garden of Villa Vallombrosa one of the major attractions of Cannes, praising the generosity of the owners for allowing tourists to visit “the magnificent garden.” It was an “authentic Eden,” insisted the accounts of the early 1870s. With the efforts of the skilled horticulturists the duchess hired to manage the garden, it was soon celebrated far beyond the limits of Provence. The crowds of visitors became so large that the duke decided to establish at the entrance a system for collecting donations to benefit the local hospice. As for the duchess, despite her health problems, her reputation as the driving force behind the elegant, salon-like, charitable society gathered on the Riviera ended up earning her — in the very guide that coined the name “Côte d’ Azur” — the posthumous title “Queen of Cannes.”

So this got me remembering an on the ground visit in the western North Dakota city of Medora the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps heritage landscape architecture that is a garden dedicated to Tony, aka, Antoine de Vallombrosa, aka, the Marquis de Mores (one can extend their pinky finger while going through this name sequence if one wants). Have a look at the photos of mine below from a couple summers ago. Was the 1930s landscape architect who guided this CCC construction in Medora imagining a sort of symbolic nod to the 1860-70s fancy garden in Cannes, France that Tony spent his childhood running in? I don’t know. But all research begins with questions.

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02/16/2026

Directions to the Grave of Little Casino – Elizabeth McClelland (1840-1916) Dakota Territory & North Dakota

By Aaron Barth

“Yeah, it’s Little Casino. That was her nickname. One of the earliest brothel madams in Dakota Territory, specifically in Bismarck, Dakota Territory. Her final resting place is a cemetery near Wilton, North Dakota.” The question often follows, “How do you get there?” This short blog post is directions to that spot. So when asked I can find this blog and just text it along for directions. This post isn’t about who Elizabeth was, as in biography. That’s for other posts. Now, on to the headstone in the cemetery.

Heading into Wilton from the north or south on North Dakota Highway 83, turn west onto 318th Avenue NW/Burleigh Road from Highway 83. You are looking for Riverview Cemetery. It’s only about 1/4 mile west on 318th Avenue NW. Just to the north you’ll see a square perimeter of conifers. By now you’ll notice the headstones, too. Yes, that’s it. Below is a pic of the west facing entrance to Riverview Cemetery, along with a little green arrow in the photo. I added this when I was texting to some others the location of McClelland’s headstone.

Boom. Now you have it. Also, at least a couple regional historians have discussed one of the world’s oldest professions in the context of Dakota Territory and the Fargo-Moorhead area. So you should pick these two titles up as well. Carroll Engelhardt, Gateway to the Northern Plains: Railroads and the Birth of Fargo and Moorhead (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Kristen R. Fellows, Angela J. Smith and Anna M. Munns (editors) Historical Sex Work: New Contributions from History and Archaeology (University Press of Florida, 2020).

Inscription at bottom of McClelland’s headstone: “Ye without sin cast the first stone…”

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02/11/2026

Abstract for 61st Annual Northern Great Plains History Conference

By Aaron Barth

Earlier today I submitted my abstract to the listed coordinator for the 61st annual Northern Great Plains History Conference hosted this year at Montana State University from October 28-31, 2026. 

Abstract submission deadline is April 17, 2026. The link is here.  

My abstract is below👇🏼. We will see you this autumn in Bozeman:

An Irish-American Memory of Little Bighorn: Patrick Byrne’s 1926 Soldiers of the Plains

Abstract: In 1926, Patrick Byrne published Soldiers of the Plains, a book that introduced an Anglo-American readership to the Battle of Little Bighorn/Greasy Grass (LBG/GG) from a Native American perspective. Byrne deliberately published this work at the 50th observance of LBH/GG (1876-1926). As an orphaned Irish immigrant from Roscommon, Ireland, and a resident of Bismarck, Dakota Territory and later North Dakota, Byrne was intimately familiar with historical memory of nineteenth century colonization. He understood the nineteenth century Anglo-American attempted conquest of Northern Plains Tribes as analogous to the nineteenth century British imperial occupation and attempted colonization of Ireland. This paper explores the prologue to Byrne’s life that is the Irish potato famines, his emigration from Roscommon, Ireland to Bismarck, Dakota Territory, his professional experiences that led to his 1926 Soldiers of the Plains, and how his imprint throughout the Northern Plains persists to this day.

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