As Dr. Angela Smith and a cohort of digital public historians prepares this week for Friday’s grand unveiling of the Fargo History Project at the Plains Art Museum in downtown Fargo, North Dakota, I thought I’d pull a couple titles off the shelf and revisit them to work up some thoughts for opening and/or closing remarks later this week at that event. The class has benefitted from the scholarship of Carroll Engelhardt, Gateway to the Northern Plains: Railroads and the Birth of Fargo and Moorhead (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), from visiting the primary sources within the North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, and from first-hand visits to the physical places throughout Fargo. Each individual scholar honed in on specific segments of Fargo history between the years of 1871-1893, and they developed short blog-style entries on these topics. In almost every case, digitized historic pictures either compliment the stories or contribute to the analysis, context, and content.

Bringing all of these seemingly disparate and compartmentalized mini-histories under an umbrella of sense requires us to think about cities in the American West as distillations of the resources pulled in from the countryside’s natural, renewable, and non-renewable resources. So what this means is that when we drive by a grain elevator in a rural setting, we should look at the landscape for the linear, abandoned railroad bed. Then we should think about how this was built by a variety of immigrant laborers, and how that provided a route for grain to make its way to larger elevators in urban areas with population concentrations, such as Fargo-Moorhead, Minneapolis-St.Paul, or Chicago. We can then think about how northern Great Plains agriculture is the reason there is a James J. Hill mansion in St. Paul, Minnesota, and how a state Bank of North Dakota, a state elevator in North Dakota, and regional co-ops were historic responses to fat cat Twin Cities bankers and urban industrial areas. Metropolitan bankers in the Twin Cities were not responsive enough to the needs of rural northern Plains farmers and ranchers. Rural farmers and ranchers decided to, in North Dakota, form a state bank.

It is also possible to think about the historic archaeology of dairy cooperatives as responses to large centers of eastern industry. The industrial, assembly-line manufacturing centers (sometimes called Fordism rather than Capitalism) flooded the market with cheap dairy products. They didn’t do this in some cynical or conspiratorial way. But they did it out of their own self-interest. Historical actors in the upper Mid-West and on the northern Great Plains had to figure out ways to make a living, and they in turn responded. They were not going to wait around for industrial assembly lines to become “more ethical.” This is why large local swaths of Scandinavian immigrants in Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota formed rural dairy co-ops. Through these co-ops, they could once again compete with industrial centers. The architecture of the dairy co-ops still occupy our urban and rural landscapes, and in some cases — at least in Fargo — they provide punk rock bands with basement practice space.

That is the interplay, the push and the pull between urban and rural. Again, making sense out of all of this gets a historian thinking about historiography. Here is what William Cronon said in “Kennecott Journey,” Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (1992):

Mapping out the geography of gender, class, race, and ethnicity remains one of the most important but least studied aspects of environmental history. (Cronon, 1992: 45)

It has been two decades since Cronon said this, and as it pertains to our history of Fargo project, it is important to keep in mind how the individual cultural actors within the history of Fargo perceived the natural and urban world, and also how they acted and reacted to ecology, or nature’s metropolis.

Notes scribbled down during a punk archaeology meeting with J. Earl Miller and Phil Leitch on November 26, 2012 at Sidestreet in downtown Fargo, North Dakota.

On November 26, 2012, around 6pm at Sidestreet Grill & Pub in downtown Fargo, North Dakota, I met with J. Earl Miller and Phil Leitch. A couple days ago Miller texted me and said Phil and I should meet and chat (one never knows what one is going to discover with a chat). So we did that.

Phil told me many things. One of these things had to do with dark house spear fishing. I thought it sounded like a punk band, but Phil said it’s something his father does during the winters on the northern Great Plains. Phil’s dad wrote a book about this practice, that of which you can purchase at this link here. I just ordered mine.

At top left are the rest of the raw notes I scribbled down. J. Earl Miller also said he wanted lard instead of cream cheese used in all frosting, both foreign and domestic. That is where the eventual phrase, “Fistfull of Crisco” within the notes came from. And then the word “Lardcore” was dropped, this a slight variation on hard core.

Anyhow, the left side of the page is what I took down while we had our hour long conversation. The right side is the follow up notes I took just after J. Earl Miller and Phil Leitch left to continue their dart league circuit (I think they played at Rooter’s this evening).

It’s a good idea to scribble down notes during and immediately after, and any archaeologist will tell you the same. Especially if this is data or a memory (objective or subjective) you want to, well, remember. Don’t trust your instincts weeks later to somehow magically recall everything that you did, this as you sit in front of a computer monitor trying to recall how it all played out. Just jot it down then and there. Then look at it two weeks from then, this when you are sitting down and trying to remember what happened. The notes will jog your memory. Seriously.

Note: Sid Vicious died on February 2, 1979. Leitch noted this early on during our meeting, and he also noted that the Punk Archaeology round table will take place on that day, February 2. Leitch also said to visit the Fargo Band Family Tree website, which is linked here.

This evening I revisited the documentary, “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten” on the Web 2.0/DIY platform that is YouTube. I have AppleTV jacked into a shamelessly huge flat-screen, and the AppleTV somehow allows me the ability to stream any YouTube selection through it. So by punching in “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten,” YouTube’s search engine returned a series of 2008 uploads by the YouTuber named “madferrett.” Smack dab on 4:02/8:24 in the fourth of eleven installments (the subtitle is “Squatting 101’ers DAY’S”), the late Joe Strummer defines Punk as straight-away Do-It-Yourself. Of this DIY ethos, Joe in the video says:

We had the nerve to rent a room above a pub, and charge people 10 p [aka, pence] to get in. That’s how we learned to play, by doing it for ourselves, which is like a punk ethos. I mean, you gotta be able to go out there and do it yourself, because no one is going to give it to you.

Here is the Joe Strummer YouTube embed:

In the long-winded scheme of things, this is also referred to as being an autodidactic, or a self-taught learner. As fellow blogger Bill Caraher and I continue conversations with any and all about Punk Archaeology, this invariably has helped develop and shape the all-important fineries of the Punk Archaeology conference scheduled to take place in downtown Fargo, North Dakota on February 2-3, 2013 (it starts Saturday evening and is scheduled to end Sunday morning).

It seemed reasonable to post Joe’s remarks, if nothing else to continue to consider what the phrase Punk Archaeology means. In one sense, there is the localized archaeology of punk within Fargo-Moorhead, where any number of bands formed up in DIY fashion to cut loose on stage. In another sense, there is punk archaeology (or Punk Archaeology, depending on how formal one wants to be), the latter word “archaeology” not only specific to the discipline of said archaeology, but also to other DIY attitudes intrinsic to sustaining the disciplines and vocations and trades, and also as in the archaeology of knowledge. Punk archaeology is all around, and often right in front of us. Back to it on this end.