Railroad workers in 1910 one mile west of Regent, North Dakota.
I just finished a lunch of homemade chicken soup (with lots of fresh lemon juice and cilantro), and before I grab a coffee and get back to the busywork, I thought I would upload a photo of historic railroad industry in western North Dakota circa 1910. The photo was taken about a mile west of Regent, as track was being laid to connect the rural agrarian areas of the American interior with the city centers and rail hubs of Dickinson, Bismarck-Mandan, Fargo, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and so on.
Looked at from an agrarian context, railroad construction was big throughout the world at this time, as nation-states increasingly relied on agricultural production to feed an ever growing populace, and this led to increased competitions over global resources. I suppose a modern public historical treatment of pumping Euro-Americans into colonizing the continent’s interior might come by way of AMC’s “Hell On Wheels” or HBO’s “Deadwood,” a kind of post-Civil War historical days of our lives with amplified skull-duggery, dodgy behavior, and shenanigans. But don’t simply rely on Hollywood to shape the way the past is understood. It’s best to get into those archives and see the documents for yourself.
It has been a couple years now that I have served on the board of the North Dakota Humanities Council. It is incredible in the sense that a board member is brought within range of all that this NEH-funded council does. While great ideas abound, sometimes we are only logistically able to make it to a sampling of the events around the state. If it was somehow possible for the council to be funded where board members could quit their day-jobs, we indeed would be present at each and every event. But unfortunately my landlord, cell phone provider, and the bill issuers in general refuse to accept my historical articles, papers and daily blogs as payment for their services. Thus, I have to keep at my day job to keep the lights on around here which in turn keeps me from some of the great NDHC programs.
A couple days ago, I received a thank you from Dr. Wanda Agnew of United Tribes Technical College (an institution that has one of the most renowned global pow-wows every year). Dr. Agnew said the “funds provided by the North Dakota Humanities Council gave us the opportunity to make the Key Ingredient American By Food Exhibit and Special event OUTSTANDING!” The goal of this event was to connect the UTTC campus populace, Tribal Sovereign Nations, and folks in the Bismarck-Mandan area with ideas about traditional Native food systems, deepening the understanding of how pre-Industrial agriculture, farming and gardening worked. It has only been in the last 125 years or so (out of at least 6,000) that homo sapiens have increasingly industrialized what we shovel into our mouths. I have thought about and acted on this in recent years.
In any case, within this blog are the three hand-bill diagrams Dr. Agnew sent along with the thank-you that point to how food, culture and humanity intersect with three different tribal systems (oyate) on the northern Great Plains. They are the Anishinaabe, Lakota, and Sahnish. We are leaving September and heading into October, so note how the traditional calendars describe the seasons: for the Lakota, September-October is the time when trading with other tribes occurs, when buffalo berries are gathered, and when the earth experienced its hard frost and went into hibernation. For the Anishinaabe, chokecherries and wild potatoes and cranberries would be gathered, and deer would be hunted (which also coincides with our modern deer hunting season). For the Sahnish, this time of year marked the corn and harvest ceremonies. Okay, off to start the charcoal grill. Happy weekend to you.
In the last couple weeks, or in the last week, I’ve noticed how the national and international news have ran stories on Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Fargo, North Dakota. Sioux Falls and Fargo fall along the north-south Interstate 29 corridor in far eastern Dakotas, and they originally served as railroad gateways to the northern portion of the Great Plains and American West. They share some similarities because of this. As well, they got one of the earliest urban foot-holds, and they also attracted colleges (back when the distinction between college and university was still quite distinct — a college could be a part of a larger university).
In the first pieces — here, and here — on the “Fringe City” of Sioux Falls, The Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows compared and contrasted this South Dakota city with Burlington, Vermont. The problem with this, of course, is realized when one looks at the history of both cities. Burlington, Vermont is a place with a dense population, and dense populations surrounding it. Sioux Falls and Fargo, in contrast, are places with comparatively dense populations, and they serve a rural surround that is much more sparsely populated. If you’re from Bismarck, ND (like I am), you will have in your collective memory stories about certain economically privileged friends in grade school and junior high and high school regularly getting to go to Fargo for the weekend so their parents could purchase them designer clothes. These friends could then return and inform the rest of us what was hip and cool. This, I have found, is one of the personal historical memories that I use to argue why I would be totally cool with a return to the school uniform (something Angus Young appropriated and continues to own on stage quite well). But that is another topic for another blog.
The main point is that it reflects the reliance and tension, at least from the 80s and 90s, that Fargo and Sioux Falls and the rural surrounding areas generated: individuals living in these cities both loved them, and they loved to have contempt toward them as well. This, in turn, is a larger theme of the Great Plains, as you’ll hear similar stories from what central and western Nebraskans and Kansans have to say about their eastern cities.
In the second piece, Fallows opines on the architectural history of Sioux Falls, and this reflects the larger theme of architectural history in the American West. Go to any town in the Dakotas, and a large chunk of the monumental architecture dates from before and just after the turn of the 19th century. This is often the period when the wood structures either succumbed to city-wide fires, or were torn down to make way for superstructures with sturdy granite and brick foundations (Fallows mentions the Richardsonian Romanesque architecture of Sioux Falls, and a comparable building in Fargo would be North Dakota State University’s Putnam Hall). This is also a period of history that had some of the greatest economic and un-ashamed monopolistic magnates, individuals with operations based out of the Twin Cities (for example, one of the prime reasons North Dakota has a state bank and a state elevator has to do with big Twin Cities bankers knowingly or unknowingly fleecing North Dakota farmers — eventually, North Dakota farmers said we’ll just create our own bank and mill if we can’t get decent rates and grain prices from Minneapolis and St. Paul).
The iconic Fargo theater signage in downtown Fargo, North Dakota. ESPN’s College Game Day is looking to use this as a backdrop for their coverage of Saturday’s game. Photo by Aaron Barth, from October 2012.
In the realm of Fargo, Slate.com ran a short piece on a proposed skyscraper to be built in downtown, Fargo (about 6 blocks from where I live). Skyscrapers (and grain elevators for that matter) on the prairie, I argue, look all the more cool because they are set against the horizontal backdrop of the Great Plains. Fargo, and North Dakota, are indeed booming, and not just because of petroleum. This Saturday, ESPN’s College Game Day is coming to downtown Fargo, to broadcast the football game between North Dakota State University and Delaware State University. While NDSU and the University of North Dakota (Grand Forks) no longer play one another in the historic regional football rivalry, I think both universities are getting more mileage for the state by playing non-North Dakota audiences. Even if a North Dakotan has absolutely no affiliation with NDSU or UND (which, considering the state is about 700,000, would be almost impossible), all of non-North Dakota watching this ESPN game may at some point attach said game to future encounters with North Dakotans. It’ll be up to us to figure out how we want to respond to that. I’m all for it.
In the Fargo Forum story, Loren and Jennifer Morlock were present at the Medora Planning and Zoning Board meeting (held at the Badlands Pizza Parlor), and their Dakota Cyclery bicycle shop has been a long-standing fixture in one of the historic buildings. In the article, Loren said, “In our building, people come in with video cameras just to look at the structure and the building… People think it’s one of the coolest places for a bike shop that there is — we get that once per week. It works so well. I think there needs to be more research done before we just knock this stuff over.” Loren is spot-on here.
Now contrast this with one of the opening chapters in Jonathan’s novel, The Badlands Saloon. The main character finished his first year of art school in New York City, and returned to take a summer job in “Marysville,” aka Medora. He called his long time friend, Tank Wilson, who he knew from Bismarck, to see if he could fix flat bicycle tires for a summer at his bike shop in Medora — I mean “Marysville.” Jonathan further describes Marysville as follows (compare this with the Fargo Forum story as well):
In town there was the Old West Shooting Gallery and bumper cars, everything done up in an Old Western style. The sidewalk that ran past the Badlands Saloon and the old-timey pizza parlor was a wooden boardwalk like the ones in the John Wayne movies. The town had become a strange version of itself, the old and the new functioning in some sort of syncopation, a generic vision of what towns once looked like when there were cowboys and Indians and wagon wheels and campfires. But there was an authenticity to it all, too. Marysville had been around for so long that it embodied several pasts at the same time, each one elbowing out some room for itself among the newer versions of the Old Town. (Twingley, 2009: 15)
These are the fixtures in a nationally-published novel by a local Bismarck artist and writer who lives in New York City (Twingley’s blogspot is linked in the Blogroll sidebar to the right) and Loren Morlock and others are spot-on when they oppose the razing of historic structures. I just thought I’d share some of what came to me when I read about their efforts this morning. Medora has a soul, and it is best not to gut it, lest we raze and smother the deep culture intrinsic to historic buildings, and historic preservation. Development is good, but there are an infinite number of ways to go about it without having to crush the material culture of yesteryear.
The memorial tree at the Bear River Massacre site in southeastern Idaho. Photo from July 2013.
This last July, Molly (an accomplished artist who is also my girlfriend) and I had a chance to tour the northern inner-mountain American West. One of the stops on this road tripped concerned a massacre site from 150 years ago, this at Bear River in southeastern Idaho. It seems appropriate to talk about and consider memorials and remembrance, especially today (09/11/2013).
While at Bear River, I documented the site, and this morning I thought I’d finally get around to posting an audio-video short to help others who aren’t immediately able to visit get a slice of the sense of place. In the video there are three official memorials, but what I was really pulled toward the day we visited was the un-official memorial tree. This in my mind was all the more authentic because of its un-official-ness: often times, official memorials get politicized (or they can), and this officialdom and politicization undermines the sacredness intrinsic to reflection and mourning that can be emotionally spontaneous. Infrastructure can also undermine that reflection, something Muir went on about at length in the 19th century, and something we’re contending with in the Bakken today.
Back to the July 2013 audio clip, though. Toward the end of the clip, I started closing in on the un-official memorial tree at the Bear River Massacre site. For a glimpse of some of the memorials and remembrances, click on the link referenced above (or the Bear River Massacre tag below). Or best of all, visit the site directly.
This past weekend Molly and I visited Buffalo, New York, primarily to attend one of our friend’s weddings. While in Buffalo, we enjoyed the hospitality of Rich and Susan Bring Tobe. Rich and Susan know the deep culture of Buffalo, New York, and they showed us a variety of historic architecture and landscape architecture (including homes by Frank Lloyd Wright, and parks designed by Frederick L. Olmsted). In addition to this, they also pointed out the home where Theodore Roosevelt was sworn into office, this after William McKinley died from an assassin’s bullet in Buffalo. Before Molly and I departed yesterday, we stopped to take some photos of the home. I thought I’d upload and share one here (the house is on the National Register of Historic Places, the site narrative linked to here).
This also got me to thinking how altered the monopolistic trust-busting might have been had Teddy not become president through this awful tragedy (that’s kind of the way with life, though: redemption can result from tragedy, at least in this case). Of course, had McKinley survived, we would not even know how things would have been otherwise. But that’s another discussion entirely (arguably presented much more intelligibly by Doc in Back to the Future).
While in Buffalo, I also got to thinking about just how many chicken wings Teddy could have inhaled at the Anchor Bar, the birthplace of the “Buffalo” wing (in Buffalo, they just call Buffalo wings “wings” much in the same way that the French refer to French onion soup as “onion soup.”).
I’m about ready to dash out the door, pick up Molly from work and grab lunch at Lucy’s with two long-time friends, Tiffany Johnson and Justin Vinje. But I wanted to upload a photo from last night, my second practice with Fargo-based punk band, Les Dirty Frenchmen. Last January-February, two of the Frenchmen, Todd and Troy, collaborated with the Punk Archaeology un-conference at Sidestreet Grille and Pub. A couple months after that, they said their drummer was moving to a non-Fargo location (I think the Twin Cities), and they asked me to consider taking up the drums for LDF. I said sure, I’d be glad to.
I keep fiddling with the panoramic feature on my iPhone 4s, and so here is what it looked like from the drummer’s perspective last night in the LDF top secret practice space. I think we might start working on some new songs, too. One of those is titled, “Budget Fracking,” a kind of absurdist nod to the Bakken of western ND. Long live local punk.
Last week I returned from the National Archives in DC, and over the weekend I attended and was one of the speakers for the 150th Whitestone Hill observances not too far south of Kulm, in Dickey County, southeastern North Dakota. There has been much said about Whitestone Hill (it is a piece of genocide in American history), and much more to be said too. I have a forthcoming article in The Public Historian (“Imagining a Battle at a Civil War Mistake: The Public History of Whitestone Hill, 1863-2013” Vol. 35, No. 3, August 2013) that concerns the remembrance of this site, and this induced me to note, at least to myself, how history is never final.
During the August 24, 2013 day of observances, I took some notes, photos, and video. Here is a link to the line-up. I thought I’d share some more notes from the day here, but they are not exhaustive (I tried to scribble when I could). Kevin Locke opened the observances around 9:00AM with a Native prayer, and he spoke to the temporality of life. He described this in Dakota and Lakota language, and also noted a word that defined something that was fleeting, a philosophical universal of life. Also, the essence of the word “Dakota” means peace, ally, friend.
Under the tent, the morning at Whitestone Hill. Ladonna is speaking at left.
Also: Frogs were everywhere at the site that morning. With every couple steps, a couple little jumps would happen in the grass below. Upon closer inspection, you could see the little frogs. This, of course, provided untold of amusement for youngsters and biologists, and basically any of us city types who don’t regularly get to see frogs in this kind of battalion strength.
I caught up with a good friend, Dakota Goodhouse, and he said he arrived a little late because his son asked him to have breakfast. Note: having breakfast with your son is a good idea, especially if your son wants to.
One of the coolest things ever, especially at these sites and on our northern Great Plains, is coming upon a tipi. Even better, coming upon more than one tipi. And even better-better, coming upon one tipi, and the raising of another. Here is a short video of that. There is a charcoal marker on the top of the last tipi pole, the one where the canvas is fixed to and hoisted up (in pre-canvas days, before Euro-American industrialization nearly wiped out every last bison, these bison hides would be used). Notice the kind of community that simply “happens” with the raising of a tipi.
It’s akin to the pre-Industrial raising of a barn, or relocating a Mongolian ger from one pasture to the next: everyone gets involved, either directly or in supportive spirit. There are smiles everywhere as well. Architecturally the tipi is so fascinating because its verticality rises right out of the horizontal landscape that is the Great Plains. It gets your attention for sure. The new east-facing elevation of the State Historical Society of North Dakota has a brilliant entryway with, impressionistically, a tipi-looking piece of modern art. I think it is excellent.
Tipis at Whitestone Hill, August 24, 2013. Note the verticality in contrast to the horizontal landscape of the Great Plains. Everyone should raise more tipis.
Understandable resistance to the name of Whitestone Hill as a “battlefield.” Photo from August 24, 2013.
Before heading off to the National Archives, I thought I’d do a quick post on my personal perceptions of being in Washington, DC this morning. I’m looking out over Franklin Square about the corner of 14th and K Street. As I glanced at the brightening cityscape from the rising sun about 15 or 20 minutes ago, it reminded me of years ago, sitting in my parents’ livingroom in the mornings, usually my dad and I, watching and listening to the early morning C-SPAN Washington Journal, this from Bismarck, North Dakota. Some cereal or oatmeal eating would be going on, as well as orange juice and coffee drinking. On occasion the C-SPAN commentator would remark on the rising sun. So this is the view I have this morning, not from the television (before flat screens) on the northern Great Plains, but from DC itself. There is the reality of being in Washington, DC, and then there is the idea of Washington, DC from afar.
A morning view of Franklin Square in Washington, DC, from August 21, 2013.
Just over a year ago, a great uncle of mine, Charles E. (“Bud”) Barth passed away. Charles was a front line medic in the European theatre of the Second World War (also in the Battle of the Bulge). Years prior I had the chance to get to know him better, even interviewing him for the United States Veteran’s History Project.
Because I blogged on Charles both here and here, another relation of someone attached to the same medical unit was able to find what I blogged, track me down, and e-mail me additional photos of Charles with his WWII unit. Here are those two photos of Charles with his detachment, these sent to me by the daughter of S/Sgt Kutik (who served alongside Charles).
Note: Charles originally hailed from Braddock, Emmons County, North Dakota.
An informal photo of Barth’s medical detachment. Charles (kneeling) is second from the left, just next to the standing soldier. The case of beverages in front of them is labeled, “Pepsi.”
409th Medical Detachment, Barth is front row, second from the left.
