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
October 25, 2025 • 4 mins
The first newspaper notice of the City of Saginaw, the railway hunting coach of outdoorsman and author William B. Mershon, is in the Fargo Argus of 6 September 1883. Described as “plainly but elegantly fitted up,” the Saginaw carried nineteen hunters, their dogs, and equipment. “Dogs and guns were to be seen everywhere,” writes the reporter. “The coach seemed a hunter’s perfect paradise.”
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October 25, 2025 • 4 mins
The waterfowl hunters of Dakota Territory were mainly townsmen, who ventured into the countryside and returned with ducks and geese to distribute among neighbors. These middling folk shared the venatic landscape with a more effete and elite class of hunters who traveled in style.
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October 18, 2025 • 4 mins
As the folk culture of duck hunting burgeoned in late nineteenth century, hunting accidents proliferated. Many shotguns still had hammers, which were sources of accidental mischief. Also, ammunition became less expensive in the late 1870s as manufacturers replaced brass with paper for shotshell casings.
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October 11, 2025 • 3 mins
When I came to North Dakota, from another prairie state, in 1992, many things seemed familiar, others not so much. For one thing, as the owner of an enthusiastic Labrador retriever, I found local habits of waterfowl hunting perplexing. I remember heading out for opening day at a nearby waterfowl production area, setting decoys, and rather quickly taking a limit of teal, the usual thing for opening day here, as it turns out.
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September 20, 2025 • 4 mins
In late nineteenth century, rabies scares animated communities all over the northern plains. Most were brief, and published reports lacked analytic detail. Certain episodes, however, attracted attention and produced documentation that gives us some insight into prairie community dynamics.
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September 13, 2025 • 3 mins
At the community level on the prairies, people of the late nineteenth century took threats of hydrophobia, or rabies, seriously. Authorities and editors knew news when they heard it, but did not want to incite reactionary panic, the phobia of the phobia.
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September 8, 2025 • 4 mins
In May 1886 a physician in Watertown, Dakota Territory, was bitten by what press reports said was a “mad dog.” The doctor immediately booked steamship passage, “gone to Paris,” the papers said, “to consult Pasteur.” Just the year previous, 1885, Louis Pasteur had announced discovery of his somewhat tortuous vaccination procedure for rabies.
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August 30, 2025 • 4 mins
There is a word out of fashion in this era of specialization, referring to a notable type of individual, the “polymath.” A polymath is a person of multifarious talents and expertise who walks in several intellectual or artistic worlds and blends them with imaginative results.
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August 23, 2025 • 4 mins
It was Father Bill Sherman who brought the authorial papers of Z’dena Trinka into the collections of the Institute for Regional Studies, and thus available to researchers at NDSU Archives. Using Father Bill’s book, Prairie Mosaic, too, we can situate this Bohemian-American author into her circumstances on the northern plains.
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August 16, 2025 • 3 mins
Come September, there will be champagne times. For now, we have first chapters.
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August 9, 2025 • 4 mins
You can see it taking shape in pages of cursive in the letterpress copybooks of J. B. Power, Land Commissioner of the Northern Pacific Railway Company. Following the financial panic of 1873, he had to find some way to revive interest in land investment; he had all those land-grant sections on his hands, and no one was buying. The success of some modest homesteaders raising wheat, and the existence of a lot of discontented bondholde...
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August 2, 2025 • 4 mins
In the early days of the Institute for Regional Studies, at NDSU (established 1950, the country’s oldest academic studies center for the history of the Great Plains), there were certain faculty members of the AC who demonstrated a truly entrepreneurial spirit, doing wonders with really no appropriated budget. Chief among these was an English prof named Leonard Sackett, a legendary collector of manuscripts. I’ll write more about him...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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