Three days ago it was my intent to blog some analog (lots of hand writing) notes I’ve been taking while digesting Era Bell Thompson’s 1946 memoir, American Daughter (University of Chicago Press). In 2025, doing anything analog is radical, aka, returning to the roots. So I picked it back up this late afternoon, June 22, 2025. The June 20, 2025 Summer Solstice derecho that ripped across central and eastern Northern Plains dropped 13 documented tornados (this one just east of Jamestown, near Spiritwood, video here) had everyone occupied with setting up temporary sleeping quarters in basements, and, later, trimming downed trees, along with checking in with loved ones from beginning to end from Bismarck to Jamestown to Valley City to Fargo to Grand Forks. Tragically and sadly the derecho’s violence took three to the other side.

Back to Era Bell Thompson. Two themes (non -exhaustive or -definitive) emerge from American Daughter:

Thompson narrates Northern Plains landscape beauty which, unless you as a reader don’t know this already, is part of the Great Plains literary canon. I imagine her narrative could apply to all grasslands ecosystems throughout the planet. But, specifically of eastern Burleigh County, North Dakota, in the vicinity of Driscoll, circa 1910s, have a look at this passage:

“It was a strange and beautiful country my father had come to, so big and boundless he could look for miles and miles out over the golden prairies and follow the unbroken horizon where the midday blue met the bare peaks of the distant hills.

No tree or bush to break the view, miles and miles of prairie hay-lands, acre after acre of waving grain, and, up above, God and that fiery chariot which beat remorsely down upon the parching earth.

The evenings, bringing relief, brought also a greater, lonelier beauty. A crimson blur in the west marked the waning of the sun, the purple haze of the hills crept down to pursue the retreating glow, and the whole new world was hushed in peace.

Now and then the silence was broken by the clear notes of a meadow lark on a near-by fence or the weird honk of wild geese far, far above, winging their solitary way south.

This was God’s country. There was something in the vast stillness that spoke to the man’s soul, and he loved it.

But not the first day.”

Which leads to a second non-chronological theme: while on the farm in Driscoll, everyone but a few seemed to be in debt. The land was rented. Dwellings were rented. Money was borrowed to purchase equipment. Yet, while banker notes lingered over the heads of everyone, all farmers were still free. In her narrative leading up to page 49, Thompson lays the foundation for the lead up to farming working class revolution that swept the 1910s Northern Plains. Thompson speaks to her father’s perception of the 1916 rise of the Nonpartisan League on pages 50-51, teasing out the tension between the urban and rural:

“In 1915 a growing rebellion against ‘big business’ and the ‘city fellers’ resulted in the formation of the Nonpartisan League, a political organization composed entirely of farmers. The League swept the country like a prairie fire… My father was cheered by this odd turn of events. When he left politics back in Des Moines, [Iowa] a rock-bound farm in the middle of North Dakota was the last place in the world he expected to find it again; but there it was, all about him, on the tongues of everyone, for the farmers were up in arms, drunk with their sudden strength and powers… That Saturday Pop went to Steele with Gus and Oscar Olson and August Nordland for a political rally at the Farmer’s Union hall. Something about Townley, the dynamic little organizer, inspired Pop, set him to thinking. Two weeks later, when Lynn J. Frazier, the League’s gubernatorial candidate, came through Driscoll campaigning, Pop was the first to shake his hand.”

I’ll continue to analog my way through American Daughter. On chapter 4, now. I got to texting a bit about Era Bell Thompson with Bernard Turner with Bronzeville-Black Metropolis National Heritage Area (BBMNHA). It turns out Thompson’s papers are with the Chicago Public Library, linked here. Bernard and I are optimistic about developing a BBMNHA and Northern Plains NHA talk. Thompson was a part of both the urban and rural in Great Plains and Midwest history, and all the comparisons and contrasts and tensions that entailed. My next scheduled stop will be to get on the ground in and around Driscoll, to revisit the Era Bell Thompson sense of place. Be like Herodotus: also plan visits to go where the history was made, urban or rural. More to come on that.