Plains Folk

Plains Folk

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."

Episodes

The Bullhead Craze

July 12, 2025 • 4 mins
The common bullhead catfish on the northern plains is the black bullhead. The state record for North Dakota is 4 pounds, 9 ounces, taken from Devils Lake by a lad from Fort Totten. I’ve never seen a bullhead even half that size.
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History and Memory

July 7, 2025 • 4 mins
There is an outpouring this summer of events, as well as books from North Dakota State University Press, pertaining to the Germans from Russia, the state’s largest ethnic culture.
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Juneberries on the 4th of July

June 28, 2025 • 3 mins
There are hundreds of commercial saskatoon plantations in the prairie provinces of Canada; here we have few, although the Nowatzki pick-your-own operation near Langdon has been going for a couple of decades. Perhaps this is a neglected commercial opportunity, but I am personally sort of happy that juneberries in North Dakota remain largely in the realm of folklife. People have their favorite picking places and guard their secrets.
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Young Love in the Juneberries

June 21, 2025 • 4 mins
In late June 1898, a North Dakota boy—I suspect he was a serviceman en route to the Philippines—got homesick and wrote home to his mother in Jamestown. The question on his mind?: “Are there lots of juneberries at home? I would rather fall into a patch of juneberries, chokecherries, or bullberries than to have all the tame fruit in California.”
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Talking About the Weather

June 14, 2025 • 4 mins
I’m on my way to St. Paul for the annual meeting of the Agricultural History Society (yes, there really is such a thing, comprising an impressive community of scholars), where I’m supposed to present a paper entitled, “A Hidden Hand: The Significance of Climate Change in Great Plains History.”
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The Weekend of Lawrence Welk

June 7, 2025 • 4 mins
We’re just home from a Lawrence Welk weekend, and by that I mean, total immersion in all things Welk. Three things came together.
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The True Patriot

May 31, 2025 • 4 mins
Reading the documents on the rise of Syttende Mai celebrations in North Dakota in 1906, I was more than a little alarmed at the themes and tropes that emerged. In matters of ethnic identity, I am prepared to accept a certain measure of cultural chauvinism, but the remarks of future senator Asle Jorgenson Gronne in Grand Forks went way beyond that. They stereotyped immigrant cultures (including his own!), they invoked white supremac...
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Syttende Mai

May 24, 2025 • 4 mins
During the early heyday of Norwegian immigration to the northern plains, during the First Dakota Boom of the 1880s, nobody celebrated Syttende Mai. Occasionally a newspaper, doing its best to make a cultural translation, would note on 17 September the occurrence of what it called “Norwegian Independence Day.”
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The Tree of Life

May 17, 2025 • 5 mins
Was there ever a town whose name better expressed the buoyant optimism of the prairie frontier than Westhope, near the Canadian line, in Bottineau? Local chroniclers have credited the name to a phrase, “Hope of the West,” emanating from the railroad men who founded the town in 1903, but I want to believe the sentiment was honest. Westhope.
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Our Songs

May 10, 2025 • 3 mins
Things were pretty raw out on Duck Creek, northeast of Hettinger in Adams County, in 1907, but the Milwaukee Railroad had arrived. Soon, over in Lemmon, on the South Dakota line, there was a flourishing newspaper, the State-line Herald. By which we know that “the boys” on Duck Creek, as the editor said, were singing some stanzas about their life as homesteaders.
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The Baldwin Ranches of Dickey County

May 3, 2025 • 4 mins
Pushing boxes and pulling folders from the massive Baldwin Corporation Records held for the Institute for Regional Studies at NDSU Archives, I come to the realization we have a lot to learn about life on the plains by rereading the considerable — I should say massive — documentation available in the reading room. Given that the papers of the Baldwin Farms in Dickey County alone comprise 32 feet of records, it’s a heck of a job.
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Baldwin Farms

April 26, 2025 • 4 mins
Having spent a fair bit of time in Ellendale over the years, I always wondered about the history of that elegant insertion in the business district, with its triple-arch facade, known as the Baldwin Building. I knew there had to be a story there.
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1889

April 19, 2025 • 3 mins
The year 1889 is so full of meaning in the history of the Great Plains. To Samuel Western (that’s his real name, seriously), it connotes the writing of constitutions, five of them, all in the Great Northwest — North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho — as authorized by Congress in the Omnibus Bill of 1889. He writes about them in his new book from University Press of Kansas, The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Lost Pro...
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The Pasque

April 12, 2025 • 4 mins
This sort of notice appeared ritually in the newspapers of the settler society on the northern plains sometime in April — I quote from the Griggs County Courier Democrat, 29 April 1909: "The pasque flower or prairie crocus, the first flower of spring, is showing its head above ground."
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The Trachoma Outbreak

April 5, 2025 • 4 mins
There was a certain irony in the determination of immigration authorities and aroused citizens of the early twentieth century to turn back immigrants at Ellis Island on account of the eye disease, trachoma. It was true that many Germans from Russia and others arrived with telltale granules of the disease under their eyelids. But it was also true that trachoma was already established extensively in the United States. It could not be...
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Graft Pure and Simple

March 29, 2025 • 4 mins
Trachoma, the contagious eye infection, was a serious complication for Germans attempting to immigrate here from Russia. I’ve already talked about the cases of Magdalena Klipfel of Ashley and Benedict Fried of Richardton in the early 1900s. Germans from Russia were not the only ones affected by public fears of trachoma among immigrants.
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A Coyote in Manitoba

March 22, 2025 • 4 mins
Trachoma, an infectious eye disease now handled readily with antibiotics, was considered a menace, the major cause of blindness, early in the twentieth century. It came to public attention in 1897 when Dr. Porter S. Wyman, surgeon general of the US Marines, issued a report calling trachoma a “dangerous contagious disease,” after which inspectors at US ports of entry commenced watch for it. Inspections of all immigrants--lifting of ...
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Debarred!

March 15, 2025 • 4 mins
In her 1941 book on the early history of McIntosh County, Along the Trails of Yesterday, Nina Farley Wishek writes of her life with the Germans from Russia among whom she lived. One chapter is entitled “German Maids Whom I Have Known,” for as the wife of the town’s leading business figure, Mrs. Wishek employed domestic help. Like other upper-class women across the prairies, she recruited her help from among the immigrant farmers’ d...
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A Peasant Past

March 8, 2025 • 4 mins
Most of us have a hard time admitting that the days of our youth are now history, and I’ll admit a certain ambivalence on the question myself, but History is my job, and so I have to face up to the task of chronicling and interpreting the experience of what I have named, borrowing a label from Larry McMurtry, the Last Picture Show Generation on the Great Plains of North America.
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The Scent of Kraut

March 1, 2025 • 4 mins
Coming in from the icy parking lot, you don't really find your footing until the scent fills your nostrils. The place is the foyer of St. John Nepomucene Catholic Church, on the south side of Piesk. The scent is kraut, pungent and welcoming.
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