On Second Thought: the JOURNEY STORIES issue

2ECOND THOUGHT A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council

Summer 09

on

[the JOURNEY stories issue]

features [contents] JOURNEY STORIES SECTION 2

The On-Again, Off-Again Mexican Border

By Jim Norris

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Can the Diametrically Opposed Landownership Views of Indians and Whites be Reconciled?

By Greg Gagnon

16 The Long Journey to Dakota Territory:

Snapshots in Time

By Jerry Tweton

22 Knowing How the Journey Ends: The Arthur

Marschke Story

26 Journey Stories Smithsonian Exhibit in

North Dakota 32 Cavities

By Janelle Masters

NOTEWORTHY 36 Leaving Home

By Liz Collin

40 Kicking the Loose Stones Home

By Paul VanDevelder

44 Rooftop Cocktail Parties

By Jonathan Twingley

PLAIN THINKING 48 It’s the Return That Kills Us

By Clay S. Jenkinson

ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the North Dakota Humanities Council.

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www.nd-humanities.org

note from the executive director ERNEST ABOUT HISTORY Every history textbook I read in high school prominently featured a timeline at the beginning of every chapter. At the time, I just fed those spaghetti strings of dates, places, and people to my brain and regurgitated the required facts on subsequent tests. I certainly didn’t feel in any way connected to past events.

The problem was that that thread just wasn’t substantial enough to hold meaning and so snapped under the weight of my imagination. I was so bored by the onslaught of impersonal facts pertaining to dead people and times, that I would hide Hemingway novels under my textbook and read them during class.

It’s little wonder that I would bump into a timeline and go no further. A timeline is built like a fence. It’s not until I learned to jump the fence and trespass in the dwelling places of the past that I found that history is about truths, not facts; stories, not archives.

According to Carl Jung the mind is a historic site. In his writing he sketches the psyche as a building that has been constructed and updated throughout history. The entire structure rests on a filled in cave, in which stone tools are found.

The foundation walls in the cellar are Roman.

The ground floor appears to date from the sixteenth century but was actually reconstructed from an eleventh century dwelling. The upper storey is clearly modern construction. We primarily reside in this top floor and are only dimly aware that our lower levels are a bit outdated.

Surprisingly, it is when we descend into the darkness of the basement that “we come upon the nearest and most intimate things.” As our thoughts wander down into the depths of human events, the past becomes an intimate

encounter with the universal human spirit.

A journey into the past is a journey into the self. Our destinies are intimately tied to the meaning of history because at some point we all face the same riddle: We are alive, but for what purpose? According to Jung, the solution to this conundrum requires finding a way to “connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present that threatens to slip away from it.” If we do not tend to our foundation it will crumble from beneath us.

It appears that the very thing that captivates me about A Farwell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea, the human struggle with a perishable reality, is the key to historical meaning. As Cornell West stated in a recent Rolling Stone interview, “To be a scholar of the humanities—to be human—is to begin with the dead, to see that our futures are linked to our pasts, to acknowledge, deep in our bones, the truth of our own dying selves.” History has meaning and our fate is wrapped up in it like a funeral shroud.

When we read Homer’s Odyssey, recount the escape of Harriet Tubman, or look at a Rembrandt painting, we break through the endless line of births and deaths and connect with something both timeless and formless. In these moments, we encounter the cornerstones of civilizations where the absolute depth of human emotion and the highest form of human consciousness meet.

This is the affinity that gives our lives meaning and it is the weight of this inheritance that drives us to create our own historic alcove for the ages.

History reads like a Hemingway novel once you learn to ignore the dates.

Brenna Daugherty Executive Director

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The On-Again, Off-Again Mexican Border

By Jim Norris

Borders, border security, fences, electronic surveillance measures, immigrants, and undocumented immigrants are words often in the news these days.

Our concern about these matters in the United States is a reflection of fears engendered partly by 9/11, partly by our current economic woes, partly by the recent election-year politics, and partly by the media’s need to have something to talk and write about. Our nation has gone through this cycle of “alien” anxiety numerous times before with immigrants from various parts of the globe. We worried about the papist Irish before the Civil War, we excluded Chinese and Japanese in the late-1800s, and we sought to secure our nation from eastern European “anarchists” prior to World War I. So, too, has concern about Mexican immigrants and the security of the border with Mexico gone through various cycles of interest, which is why I refer to it as the “on-again, off-again” border.

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[journey stories section] Before launching into a narrative on the Mexican-U.S. border, it will be helpful to think about what a border represents and why people cross them. A border, or a nation’s boundary, delineates the territory claimed by that nation. Since that part of our planet is owned by the nation, we infer that the nation’s government should guard and protect that land mass. Moreover, we usually accept that a country strives to preserve its holdings most often from people not originally from the nation; we control our borders to keep others from gaining control over us and our resources. People cross borders, going from one nation to another, usually because they are compelled to do so or they are invited. Historians of immigration usually cast this as “push-pull” factors.

What pushes people from their native land, and what pulls them toward another? War, famine, disease, and financial woes most often force people to migrate. The place they opt to go is most often based on economic opportunity and/or escape from fear.

We established the border with Mexico as a result of war: the Mexican-American War or, as it is called in Mexico, the War of the North American Invasion. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, that concluded the conflict, stipulated that the boundary would be from the Rio Grande to within a few miles north of El Paso, Texas. However, the United States decided it wanted more Mexican territory because engineers believed the easiest site to build a transcontinental railroad through the Rocky Mountain chain was a place called the Mesilla Valley, in Mexico. Fearful of another war with the United States, Mexico this time decided to sell to the U.S. the Mesilla Valley. Thus, the Mexican-U.S. border received its final shape (save for some inconvenient shifts in the Rio Grande’s flow).

Not that the Mexican border was an important entity in the lives of United States’ citizens, however. Over the next sixty years, there was not really any need to care about the boundary because not many people lived nearby, and push-pull factors, by and large, were not present. For the Mexicans and Americans that did live nearby, border crossings were unimpeded, unless one happened to be an Apache being pursued by either the Mexican or American army, or one was engaged in criminal acts, such as cattle rustling. Otherwise, one crossed the border whenever so inclined without any formalities.

The first push-pull situation along the border emerged just before World War I. Railroads began to bring more Americans into border regions at the turn of the century, especially in Texas. As U.S. citizens settled in greater numbers along the Rio Grande, many of the newcomers began to develop large-scale agricultural operations. This required, of course, greater numbers of workers to maintain the railway system, clear the land of brush, erect irrigation systems, and cultivate and harvest crops. This “pull” factor coincided with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. The decadelong conflict ravaged Mexico, resulting in the loss of millions of lives and devastating the Mexican economy. Perhaps as many as 250,000 Mexicans were “pushed” across the Rio Grande looking for jobs and safe havens. Moreover, during World War I, U.S. railroad companies and agribusinesses, fearing labor shortages, pressured the federal government to encourage Mexican workers to enter the country. Thus, the first bracero program occurred, which enticed another 80,000 Mexicans to enter the United States in 1917-18.

Prior to World War I, the United States had really never done much to keep people out of the country. While hostile attitudes toward certain immigrants emerged during the 1800s, most notably regarding the Irish, not much was done to retard their entry. It was not until 1875, that the federal government enacted legislation against potential immigrants when Congress created a category of “undesirables,” which included criminals and prostitutes. In 1882, the Chinese were barred from entering the United States. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the government added political anarchists and “the feebleminded” to this list of undesirables and established a fourdollar head tax on each immigrant.

What pushes people from their native land, and what pulls them toward another?

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However, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and communist uprisings in several European countries immediately after the war helped spawn a fear of immigrants in this country. In response, the federal government established quotas on immigrants based on nationalities. In 1924, Congress enacted a landmark measure regarding immigration. Referred to as the Immigration Act of 1924, or the ReedJohnson Act, Congress decreed very low yearly quotas on the number of immigrants who could enter the country, required a passport or visa for entrance, raised the head tax to five dollars, and expanded the list of undesirables (most notably adding alcoholics and people suffering from epilepsy). Even more importantly, Congress, for the first time, appropriated money for the creation of a border security force (Border Patrol). With minor adjustments, the Immigration Act of 1924 governed immigration into the U.S. for the next four decades.

Interestingly, the Immigration Act of 1924 omitted a nationality from the restrictive quotas: Mexicans.

Railroad companies and agricultural interests, fearing the new immigration policy would restrict the labor pool and drive up wages, lobbied Congress to exempt Mexican immigrants. Indeed, with the expanding railroad networks and agricultural operations west of the Mississippi, such as sugar beets in the Red River Valley, the “pull” factor for Mexicans increased even more during the 1920s. Coupled with the fact that Mexico’s economy was slow to recover during the 1920s, creating strong “push” conditions, about 250,000 additional Mexicans crossed the border with little scrutiny during the decade after World War I.

Jim Norris is an associate professor of history at North Dakota State University. He is the author of After the Year Eighty: The Demise of Franciscan Power in Spanish New Mexico.

His latest book, North for the Harvest:

The Great Depression, starting in 1929, changed the “pull” conditions for Mexicans. Indeed, the United States government quickly moved to discourage Mexicans from entering the country. In 1930, the newly deployed Border Patrol received instructions to start rigorously enforcing immigration regulations along the U.S.-Mexican border. While no quotas existed for Mexicans, they still had to conform to various other requirements, i.e., literacy tests, paying the five-dollar head tax, and undergoing a medical examination. In this manner, legal immigration of Mexicans into the U.S. dropped sharply from 60,000 in 1929, to only 11,000 in 1930.

Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry, examines the complex and often surprising relationships among the participants in the sugar beet industry.

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More harshly, however, was the repatriation campaign against Mexican residents that occurred between 1932 and 1935. During those years, the federal government encouraged state and local government entities to

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pressure Mexicans to leave the U.S. The most common tool in this drive became New Deal relief measures; state, county, and city boards that managed New Deal programs simply refused to provide assistance to Mexican people. On the other hand, if Mexicans were willing to leave the country, their transportation was paid to the border. Through this measure and others—sometimes more threatening—perhaps as many as 500,000 Mexicans were forced out of the country, many of whom were citizens of the United States.

Only briefly, during these two decades, did the United States government attempt to stem this flow of humanity over the border with Mexico. In response to labor union pressures on the federal government that the flow of Mexicans into the

Prior to World War I, the United States had really never done much to keep people out of the country.

The “on again” border did not last long. By the end of the 1930s, New Deal programs had created enough jobs that Anglos, who perhaps had been reduced to working in agriculture, could once again shun stooped labor, such as sugar beet cultivation. Border Patrol agents also reduced their strict scrutiny of Mexicans entering the country. When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor and millions of Americans rushed to join the armed forces, fears of labor shortages induced the United States government to negotiate with Mexico for agricultural workers. The “pull” for Mexican workers again intensified. Within six months of the U.S. entry into World War II, the so-called Bracero Agreement with Mexico was signed.

In fact, this bracero arrangement also set the stage for a long running, massive violation of the U.S.-Mexican border. A stipulation that Mexico insisted upon in the agreement stated that Mexico could forbid braceros to be utilized in any American states that practiced widespread discrimination against Mexican people. Texas had numerous segregation laws in place against both African Americans and Mexicans. When the state refused to remove these segregationist measures, the Mexican government barred braceros from working in Texas. Texas farmers, fearing labor shortages, were outraged and called on their political leaders to do something. Unable to change the terms of the bracero agreement, Texas politicians did put significant pressure on federal border agents and state law enforcement to ignore immigration regulations along the Rio Grande. Hence, during the war, about 250,000 braceros entered the U.S. legally, while thousands of Mexicans entered Texas illegally to work.

This situation, braceros and illegal Mexican workers in the U.S., continued for the next two decades. For one thing, the “pull” factor remained strong. With so many Americans leaving rural areas for the city, the farm labor pool would have shrunk, driving wages higher. To counter that, farmers and agribusinesses lobbied for an extension of the bracero agreement with Mexico, which the federal government did renew each year until 1964. Mexico continued to restrict braceros from Texas, however, the lax border enforcement along the Rio Grande prevailed. In 1950, a Border Patrol official estimated in his district alone 100,000 illegal Mexican workers resided.

In addition, the “push” factor remained high during this era. Mexico’s economy did grow remarkably during World War II and the 1950s, but it could not keep up with Mexico’s massive population growth. Thus, by 1959, the less than diligent Border Patrol agents still apprehended 1.3 million Mexicans entering the U.S. They estimated that this number represented one-fourth of the total that crossed the border illegally that year.

country undermined wages and an economic recession brought on by the end of the Korean War, the U.S. launched “Operation Wetback” in 1954. Over the next eighteen months the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) with its Border Patrol agents significantly strengthened border security and sought to catch those Mexicans in the United States without documentation. Reminiscent of the repatriation campaign of the early 1930s, Operation Wetback resulted in the arrest and deportation of 1.3 million Mexicans. Again, many of these were citizens of the United States. By 1955, however, the campaign ended and the maintenance of the Mexican border reverted to “off again” status.

While the American economy remained robust in its demand for cheap agricultural labor during the 1960s, a weaker economy during the 1970s into the early 1980s led to public concerns about immigrant labor in the U.S. Furthermore, the United States was accepting large numbers of Cubans annually into the country, and the loss of the conflict in Vietnam led the U.S. to allow over one million refugees from Southeast Asia to enter the country. At a time when Mexico’s “push” factor was growing, the United States could not offer such an abundant “pull” as before. Therefore, the American public expressed more and more concern about undocumented Mexican immigrants with the INS

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Under this public pressure, Congress enacted in 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which provided amnesty for 2.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, the vast majority of whom were Mexicans, and provided legal sanctions against employers who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants. While hailed as a milestone solution to apprehending more than one million each year.

unlawful immigration, when enacted the measure had little effect on securing the U.S.-Mexican border.

Several factors continued to build pressure on the boundary.

First, more Mexicans were migrating northward to border towns. Mexico had initiated the Border Industrialization Project (popularly known as the maquiladores) during the 1960s. The maquilodores were factories owned by foreign companies (mostly U.S.) that were exempt from Mexican tariffs. In essence, foreign corporations could ship materials to Mexico to be assembled and then bring the finished products back into the United States without paying any duties. The project stipulated that the assembly plants had to be located within ten miles of the border with the U.S. The number of maquiladores there exploded in the 1980s because American companies could pay Mexican workers less wages than their American counterparts (and also evade U.S. environmental laws). By the mid-1980s, over 500,000 Mexicans worked in the maquiladores.

Unfortunately, Mexico’s population boom still vastly exceeded what these factories could employ. Thousands of Mexicans journeyed each year to border towns. Some found employment, but most did not. Making the problem more acute was that Mexico’s economy virtually collapsed in the late 1980s leading to the most severe “push” condition since the Mexican Revolution.

The American “pull” factor increased at this time, too.

The U.S. economy boomed during much of the 1990s, and employers in many cases viewed Mexican workers as an attractive human resource. Mexican workers, whether legally in the country or undocumented, often were paid less in wages and benefits than American workers would accept. Agribusinesses especially were drawn to those in the country illegally; fifty percent of all farm laborers were undocumented during the mid-1990s.

Many Americans were alarmed about the large numbers (estimates ran as high as three million per year) of undocumented Mexicans crossing the border. In California, voters passed Proposition 187 in 1994, which was to deny health, education, and other social services to undocumented immigrants. That same year, the so-called Arizona Militia formed, a group dedicated to “defending” 6

the U.S. border with Mexico from the “hordes” crossing illegally into Arizona. This anger against undocumented immigrants helped fuel the 1994 Republican “revolution.” Part of the “Contract with America” stipulated that immigrants in the U.S. illegally should be denied welfare and other benefits. The Republicancontrolled Congress then passed numerous immigration laws in 1996 that restricted public benefits for all immigrants during their first five years in the country; provided stronger criminal penalties against those entering the country illegally, smuggling immigrants, or hiring undocumented immigrants; and provided money for more border patrol agents and equipment. The U.S.-Mexican border clearly became more militarized beginning in 1996, a development enhanced by worries regarding drug smuggling into the United States.

Of course, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have led to further concerns regarding the security of American borders, especially with Mexico. More and more Border Patrol personnel have been added to police the boundary, contractors have begun a fence to be erected along the entire border, and within the past few years National Guard units have been assigned to the region. There are those who believe that the U.S. military should be included in securing the boundary, often described as a sieve, by which undocumented immigrants, drugs, and potential terrorists pour through. Vigilante groups, such as the aforementioned Arizona Militia, also patrol the border. It seems all of this is having perhaps some effect; recent news reports in Mexico indicate a significant drop in Mexicans leaving for the United States. Certainly with the severe recession currently plaguing the United States, the “pull” factor is significantly reduced.

Will this intense border security and Mexican immigration concern continue? Will the border stay “on?” Certainly as long as the U.S. is threatened by terrorism, strict maintenance of the border will continue. The only comparable historical event was the militarization of the border after Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico in 1917. That only lasted briefly, however, because Villa’s capacity to threaten the U.S. border was limited and lasted only a short time. In less than three years, Villa retired to his hacienda. Moreover, the army’s buildup on the border was never concerned with Mexican immigrants. The current effort to slow Mexican immigration, whether lawful entrance or not, will likely depend on the state of the U.S. economy. As long as American unemployment is high, the U.S. will continue the effort to restrict Mexicans from entering the country. If the economy begins to grow rapidly again, the desire to keep wages and prices low (especially on food) will likely recreate “pull” conditions and the U.S.Mexican border, at least in regard to people willing to work, will be “off.”

Because there is no ivory tower...

WHY? philosophical discussions about everyday life.

North Dakota’s very own call-in philosophy radio show, WHY? explores what it means to be human in the world today. Join Jack Russell Weinstein and his guests as they examine topics ranging from the nature of beauty, to the meaning of justice, to what it means to be a North Dakotan. Call in with your own questions and ideas the second Sunday of every month at 5 p.m. CST on Prairie Public Radio, or send in a question in advance via our website: www.whyradioshow.org.

Brought to you by the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life and Prairie Public Radio.

The Institute for Philosophy in Public Life is funded through a partnership between UND College of Arts & Sciences and the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Calendar: July 12: Why? “Exporting Democracy” with guest Paul Sum. 5 p.m. on Prairie Public radio.

July 19: Art & Democracy Film: “The Blues Brothers,” 7 p.m. at the Empire Arts Center, Grand Forks, ND. Free!

August 9: Why? “Literature in the Digital Age” with guest Crystal Alberts (Pre-recorded live in

New Rockford, ND). 5 p.m. on Prairie Public radio.

August 26: Art & Democracy Film: “Casablanca,” 7 p.m. at the Empire Arts Center, Grand Forks, ND. Free!

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Native Americans of the Great Plains lived in a highly mobile culture. Villages migrated seasonally, following the bison that provided necessities of plains life. Said elder medicine woman Pretty Shield (Absaroke/Crow), I loved to move... Moving made me happy!�

The W. Duncan MacMillan Foundation

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Can the Diametrically Opposed Landownership Views of Indians and Whites be

Reconciled?

By Greg Gagnon

Yes……BUT…..the answer is nuanced. It all depends. If one is to understand the answer, it is important to understand the historical context of landownership that requires reconciliation.

In the beginning, American Indian and non-Indian views of landownership were mutually exclusive.

They remain so today but aboriginal views have modified drastically under the pressure of historical events and American policies. For purposes of clarity, the term “American” refers to United States society and government policies. Indian indicates Native Americans and tribal governments. Of course, Indians are American citizens and the division is artificial, but it is preferable to describing political and world view differences as if somehow they were based on genetic characteristics. “White and Indian/Native American” are both constructs but are generally used to designate race which is itself a construct. Indian Americans and tribal governments generally do have a different view of land issues from that of the rest of Americans.

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Another clarification is needed. Indian tribal/ reservation governments are sovereign polities.

They are the third form of sovereign government in the United States; the other two are the federal government and the state governments.

Local county and municipal governments are not sovereign; they are created by state governments. Any discussion of views toward the land and landownership needs to begin with this understanding. Tribal sovereignty is embedded in American law and the constitution. It is supported by court decisions and congressional law. Tribal governments combine the world views of tribal ancestors with the major modifications generated by historical events over the past 400 years or so but particularly formed since the United States incorporated independent Indian nations into the American system.

The American view has remained essentially the same since revolution created the country. Based on English law, American law operates on the assumption that the United States holds title to all of the land within its boundaries. This land was acquired, as Chief Justice John Marshall opined in 1823, through the Right of Discovery vested in European Christian nations as their right to govern non-Christian peoples as “discovered” by Europeans. This Doctrine of Discovery is much more elaborate than described here and can be read in all of its legal fiction glory in Johnson v. Mcintosh. The original inhabitants of the Americas did not own land.

Indians had the rights to use the land until the United States and only the United States acquired these rights through purchase or just wars. Of course, the Indians did not see it this way. Each Indian tribe insisted that their land was actually theirs.

Americans made private ownership of land by individuals the basic principle of land use. Individuals bought or were given American land from the government and then the land belonged to the individuals who were free to use it exclusively. Private property was, and is, considered the foundation of American society. The Bill of Rights specifically requires due process compensation for land taken through eminent domain. The founding fathers did not want it to be easy for the government to take private land.

When Indian tribes were independent nations, their

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landownership principles revolved around the concept of collective ownership with land use determined by tradition. Individual Indians did not own the land.

The land was considered to have been acquired from the bounty of benevolent spiritual powers or tribal expansion into other tribes’ territories. Although the process of land allocation within tribal territories varied a great deal among the myriad Indian cultures, the principles were consistently the same. Extended families were allowed to use lands according to their needs. Large families got more land than small families but as circumstances changed, so would land assignments. Most Indian groups moved from area to area within their territories. Those tribes that were most mobile like the plains Lakota or Cheyenne had no need for even family assignments so they just used what was needed for hunting and gathering and maybe a bit of farming. Those tribes like the Chippewa which dispersed into family groups during the winter often used the same trapping areas year after year. In a sense, the family “owned” the use of this land. More sedentary agricultural tribes allocated land less frequently.

Groups not from the tribes that owned a particular territory crossed tribal borders within specific protocols. Enemies crossed boundaries between tribes at their own risk. Unknown groups sought permission once they came into contact with the tribe that owned particular land. Allies were welcome to cross boundaries as it was understood that they were mere sojourners. They could hunt and maybe even stay for awhile but they were subject to the tolerance of the owning tribe. Parenthetically, visitors were not allowed to take from the land anything more than sustenance.

For instance, any foreigners who tried to trap beaver for the fur trade or kill buffalo for the hide trade were subject to sanctions. No one minded that Lewis and Clark lived a winter and hunted for food. Had they started trapping for market, the situation would have changed. Many mountain men learned this the hard way.

Differences between American and Indian views of landownership should indicate where the conflict emerged when Americans applied their laws and understanding to the acquisition of land from tribes.

Indians viewed land as being used by tribal members as needed but not the exclusive possession of anyone; Americans saw exclusive rights for individuals as the key to land use. As Americans took more and more

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control of Indian tribes, Indians had to learn about private property and the American assumption that the federal government had the right to do as it wished with Indian land. Property rights were learned the hard way by Indians.

America’s constitution provided for the federal government, particularly Congress, to have responsibility for relations with foreign powers and Indians.

The constitution did not elaborate on the relationship between Indians and their governments within the boundaries of the United States. Americans arrogated to themselves the right to govern Indian nations because their view was that Indians were an obstacle to civilization that should be removed. Most concluded that Indians had no real landownership because they roamed the land like animals and did not improve the land the way Americans did. In the realm of legal fictions, facts do not count but power does. Early court decisions confirmed American views with some modifications.

Three decisions written by Chief Justice John Marshall established the relationship between Indians and their governments and the United States and its populations. Johnson v. Mcintosh (1823) established the precedent that Indian tribes could not sell land to anyone other than the United States. Indians had only possessory rights which the United States needed to acquire before it sold or gave the land to Americans. Cherokee v. Georgia (1831) declared that tribes were “domestic dependent nations” subject to the jurisdiction of the United States but that America had a duty to protect them. Tribes had legitimate governments based on their inherent sovereignty. Their relationship to the United States was like that of a “Guardian to a ward.” From this legal fiction came the principle of the Trust Responsibility. Which indicates the United States has a responsibility to protect Indian land rights and to provide services and assistance to Indians. Trust land is Indian land that the United States pledges cannot be removed from Indian possessory rights. Worcester v. Georgia (1832) established that states do not have jurisdiction within Indian country, but Congress can make laws that affect Indians and their governments.

The goals of the American policy were to eliminate collective use of land and to destroy tribal cultures.

Indian-American treaties reflected both Indian and American views of the land.

Indians and Americans imposed their mutually exclusive concepts on each other as best they could. Americans insisted on boundaries describing exclusive rights. Indian leaders insisted on retaining the rights to hunt, fish, and traverse lands they were “selling” to the United States. A good illustration of this can be found in the Old Crossing Treaty of 1863.

America bought the Red River Valley from the Red Lake and Pembina bands of Chippewa. Perceptions of what this sale entailed are a bit more complicated that a simple land taking for money. The Old Crossing treaty stated that the Americans and the Chippewa were allies. Allies shared land in the Indian view.

The treaty proceedings clearly indicated that Chippewa band leaders were told they would be able to hunt and fish as they always had, even if the United States bought it. Indians did not internalize the American idea of exclusivity and Americans could not understand why Indians thought they could keep using the resources of the lands they had sold. Most treaties and agreements between Indian tribes and America repeated similar misunderstandings.

By 1880 all Indian landownership was restricted to the reservations the United

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States was willing to permit Indians to keep. Land was still held in common under the aegis of tribal tradition. Indians had managed to retain about 120,000,000 acres. Americans quickly moved to impose their views on Indians. In 1887 the Dawes Severalty Act, also called the Allotment Act, forced Indians to accept the principle of individual landownership.

Reservations were surveyed into townships and sections.

Each adult male was told that a specific 160 acres were his.

Women and minors received lesser allotments. On nearly every reservation, land remained after the allotments were completed so America declared the land “surplus.� Surplus lands were then made available for purchase by non-Indians.

One result is that many non-Indians acquired land within the boundaries of reservations and demanded the right to self-governance of Americans. The process created a checkerboard effect. Indian trust land alternated with nonIndian owned parcels all over the reservation. Today, nonIndians own 28 percent of Turtle Mountain Reservation, 76 percent of Spirit Lake Reservation, 63 percent of Standing Rock Reservation, and more than 50 percent of Fort Berthold Reservation.

The Dawes Act provided for a twenty-five-year period for Indians to get used to private ownership. This was deemed enough time for them to learn to be like Americans. They were to be farmers or even ranchers wresting a living from their 160 acres just like the Americans who lived among them on surplus lands. Once the waiting period was over, Indians were to be given fee patents for their land and become just like other Americans including citizenship and were subject to land taxes. The goals of American policy were to eliminate collective use of land and to destroy tribal cultures.

Congress, urged by assimilationists, shortened the waiting period and ultimately directed Indian agents to simply issue fee patents to those they thought could handle it. Many Indians lost their allotments to delinquent tax courts or simply sold the land they could not use to Americans who had the money to buy. Before allotment was halted by a change in Indian policy in 1934, two-thirds of all Indian land had passed from Indian ownership After the 1934 cessation of allotment, Indian lands were not alienated as quickly although erosion of the land base continued. North Dakotans are aware of the egregious taking of reservation land for the Pick-Sloan project.

North Dakota gained Lake Sakakawea but the Three Affiliated Tribes lost the core of their productive land, their communities, and their social unity. Lake Sakakawea

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took 289 or 357 Indian households and scattered their members. About 500,000 acres were taken by the federal government. Standing Rock Reservation also lost thousands of acres to the flooding.

Tribal governments tried to use courts to prevent the taking and then to at least gain compensation. At first, courts decided that Indian land could be taken at will; Indians were not eligible for due process. Later courts did decide that Indians should be compensated for the value of the land at the time of the taking in the 1950s.

However, there could be no compensation for the destruction of the social fabric of the entire reservation.

Non-Indians who lost their land to the Garrison project were compensated according to the Fifth Amendment.

By 1934 approximately 50 percent of the remaining 40,000,000 acres of Indian land had been allotted to individual Indians and the rest reverted to tribal government. Indians were used to owning land in private by the 1930s and continue to accept the principle. America had succeeded in converting individual Indians to the view that land could be owned by individuals—to the idea of private landownership.

Indians retained the idea that even individually owned Indian land was part of the tribal patrimony and not to be sold to non-Indians…it remains trust land.

Tribal governments have tribal public lands just as states and the federal government have. Many tribal governments did their best to devise a means to use land for the good of their people but the Bureau of Indian Affairs continued to decide what was best for Indian land. The Bureau leased land and resources to non-Indians routinely. Bureau-negotiated contracts for coal exploitation on Crow, Navajo, and Cheyenne reservations were well below market prices. Ranchers and farmers leased land through BIA contracts at bargain prices. Often Indians were simply told that their land had been leased and they should live with it. The BIA kept the income in Individual Indian Accounts to use in the best interests of the Indians whether or not the Indians agreed. After years of litigation and efforts to change policy, the BIA retains the right of lease approval.

Continuing turmoil in Indian policies marked the post– World War II period. It heightened Indian resistance to land taking and germinated an ideology for previously existing but unarticulated views of the relationship of indigenous land to Indian cultures. From the crucible formed by America’s Termination policies, Indians

used courts, political lobbying, political alliances, and appeals to America’s conscience to defend treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, and tribal land. The Termination Policy of the 1950s intended to free the United States from its Trust Responsibility to protect Indian lands and rights by abolishing reservations and forcing Indians to become just another minority. In fact, individual termination acts abolished dozens of small reservations and legally changed 13,000 Indians into 13,000 non-Indians.

Indian leaders developed a variety of tactics to contest land issues. The National Congress of American Indians, an organization unifying tribal government voices, led the way in the fight against Termination.

There were “Fish-Ins” in the Northwest that culminated in recognition of tribal rights to harvest fish off -reservation, demonstrations in Wisconsin that led to a favorable court decision affirming off-reservation hunting and fishing rights that had been included in treaties, and the militancy of the American Indian Movement. In these cases, Indians asserted their traditional views about the usage of resources, not private ownership. Often, non-Indians reacted with violent opposition.

Another way that Indians drew support within Indian communities and from the general public was to articulate the theme of Indians as stewards, not owners, of the land. In this construct, traditional ideologies of balance and harmony for the entire world became the focus of Indian public campaigns.

Many Indians voiced the opinion that land was sacred and could not be sold. Writers like Vine Deloria Jr. and the Pulitzer winner, N. Scott Momaday, drew on tribal traditions to describe the responsibility of humans to maintain harmony in nature. Sacredness of the land became a mantra for Indian activists, traditional spiritual leaders, and many non-Indians.

This ideology reinforced the validity of Indian defense of land, particularly the idea of keeping the reservation and the rights that went with the land. Indian people accepted it as a renaissance of traditional Indian thought. Many Americans accepted the ideology too and saw it as preferable to the materialism of American society.

Ideology and American guilt created a receptive foundation for gains in the protection of Indian lands.

The alienation of Indian lands by government action

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ceased. Treaty rights were affirmed by courts and congressional legislation, and many tribal governments initiated efforts to regain lost reservation land.

Current procedures for reservations to regain land include two possibilities. First, tribes can buy fee patent land (privately owned). Then the purchasing tribe needs to petition for the land to be put into trust by the Secretary of the Interior.

Second, the federal government can reassign land from the public domain back to tribes. However these efforts to reacquire land run into a number of problems that return once again to conflicting views of landownership …just in a different sense than the original differences. Now the differences have to do with which government controls the land and its resources.

Non-Indians often feel threatened by tribal efforts to assert jurisdiction and to reacquire land. After centuries of American privilege, it is quite natural for them to feel threatened and even betrayed as Indians try to change the rules. Many non-Indians have lived on the land for generations, own their lake cabins, have established governments, and have never been subject to tribal jurisdiction.

State and county governments naturally want to retain control of their land particularly because of potential jurisdictional issues and loss of tax revenue. Individual non-Indians are concerned that Indian jurisdiction and ownership will threaten their continued private ownership. It just is not right for Indians to take the state’s lands and resources according to the Americans.

The Department of the Interior does not grant petitions to move land back into trust easily. Counties and states usually oppose tribal efforts and launch court cases to prevent it.

Tribes, on the other hand, see the regaining of their land as a core issue in tribal identity. They insist that the reacquisition of tribal land is rectifying centuries of injustice. Many traditionally oriented Indians insist that the land is sacred, particularly certain places like Bear Butte, and should be returned to tribes for proper stewardship.

With this brief background in mind, a return to the original question is appropriate. Can the diametrically opposed views of landownership be reconciled? The answer remains a qualified yes. Tribes have indicated their willingness to make sure that restoration of reservation borders would not penalize non-Indian owners. Indians accept two principles of landownership created by Americans: private property and government jurisdiction. In effect, tribes are willing to continue the arrangement that now exists as long as they have the jurisdiction over what goes on within their own borders. As long as American governments and Indian governments are willing to negotiate issues of landownership in good faith with respect, reconciliation of opposing views is indeed possible.

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Non-Indians often feel threatened by tribal efforts to assert jurisdiction and to reacquire land.

Greg Gagnon is an Associate Professor of Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota. Native Peoples of the Northern Plains: An Introduction to Indian Studies, will be published in August 2009. Dr. Gagnon has made several invited presentations at the annual Governor’s History Conference and has offered several programs for the North Dakota Humanities Council including “All of the Things You Ought to Know About Indians and Were Afraid to Ask.”

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History as Theater As the country commemorates the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, North Dakotans will have the chance to hear from the president himself, on stage at the

Everett Albers Chautauqua Program.

The parlor of the first governor of Dakota Territory, William Jayne, provides the setting for the visits of three historical figures who lived through, wrote about, and played a significant role in the shaping of the United States in the nineteenth century.

Governor William Jayne is portrayed by Dr. D. Jerome Tweton.

Dr. George Frein portrays President Lincoln.

Dr. Carrol Peterson portrays Walt Whitman, whose famous poem, “O Captain, My Captain!” was written after Lincoln’s assassination.

Charles Everett Pace appears as Frederick Douglass, freed slave, abolitionist, and statesman.

The president, the poet, the slave—all speak of this land and liberty. Those three giants of the Civil War Era come to North Dakota’s Chautauqua stages to remind us of yesterday’s issues, but also to stimulate us to think about now and the future.

2009 Everett Albers Chautauqua July 24 – 26

Grand Forks, ND

July 27 – 29 Bottineau, ND

July 31 – August 2 Beulah, ND

Visit www.nd-humanities.org for complete schedule information or call 1-800-338-6543.

Bring Chautauqua to your town.

Contact the NDHC for more information.

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Immigrants arrive at Ellis Island for processing after journeying across the Atlantic Ocean.

George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress

The Long Journey to Dakota Territory:

By Jerry Tweton

They came by the thousands to North Dakota from Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the British Isles, Central Europe, European Russia, and even the Near East. The individual reasons for leaving their homelands to journey to America varied, but the desire for a better life in a new land unified those thousands of immigrants in a powerful way.

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For the most part those who came from Northern and Central Europe left because there wasn’t enough land to support growing families. Only the first-born son would inherit land, leaving other sons out in the cold. Too, the waning of the industrial revolution caused economic hard times. The numbers who migrated to North Dakota from Northern and Central Europe were staggering. For examples, Norway, 46,000; Germany 16,500; Sweden, 12,000; Denmark, 5,300, Austria, 5,100.

Representative of those thousands are the Carroughs from Ireland, Ernest Kohlmeier from Germany, the Jerels from Switzerland, and the Fugelstads from Norway. Their stories provide a window through which to observe their journeys to America and North Dakota.

Eighteen-year-old Jennie Carrough migrated with her parents and four siblings from County Down, Ireland in 1880. An uncle who owned land in the United States’ Midwest lured the Carroughs to make the transatlantic journey with a promise of land. “The trip was fairly rough, and many of the passengers were ill,” she recalled.

The food was frugal and poorly cooked. The ship, the Indiana, was decrepit; after the 14-day voyage the Indiana was condemned and taken out of service. Jennie, however, loved every minute of the trip which almost everyone else abhorred. A three-day train trip took the family to Iowa. She married Henry Laughlin soon after the arrival in Iowa; the couple completed their journey to a homestead near Carrington.

Ernest Kohlmeier was twenty-two years old when he was overcome by wanderlust. It was 1884. A friend of his tried to talk him into going to India. His employer, however, persuaded Ernest to go to the United States because, in his words, “In case of war you are safer there. They do not mix in with our wars.” His six-day journey on the steamship Fulda from Bremen to New York City was uneventful, as was the train ride to Dakota Territory.

He landed near St. Thomas where his brother had successfully homesteaded. Eventually he preempted 160 acres in Rolette County.

In 1871, Andrew Jerel sold his farm near Braatz, Switzerland. With uncontrollable grief because of his wife Agnes’s death, he could not remain where everything reminded him of her. So, he decided to take his children to what he called “the land of plenty.” In Hamberg, Germany, the Jerels boarded the Homonia. Fifteen-year-old Agatha recalled the awful seasickness of the passengers on the boat. Three incidents especially remained in her memory. One of the passengers became ill and died. “They dropped her in the ocean,” Agatha remembered. ”I thought that was terrible at first, but later when I heard that the sharks would tip the boat over if they didn’t drop the body overboard, I felt different.” A near-collision with a larger steamer put the passengers in a terrible panic.

“The next morning it was rumored that if the Homonia had been struck by the larger boat, we would have all perished.” Two days later the ship’s boiler failed, filling the passengers with fear. Repairs took three days, but the Homonia made it to New York City on May 2, 1871. The train took the family to Wisconsin where Agatha fell in love with and married Lorenz Arms. The couple eventually took up land near Wimbledon.

Terkel and Abigail Fuglestad, both in their late twenties, packed their clothes and set sail for America. The family’s small mountain farm would not support the couple, so they moved to Stavanger on Norway’s west coast where Terkel sought employment. He eventually found work in a shipyard, but hard times hit Stavanger in 1883, and Terkel lost his job. Just as the Fugelstads were set to begin their journey, he received word that he could have a job as Stavanger’s city gardener. But, alas, word came too late to cancel plans to sail to America. “It was God’s will, so it was for the best,” Terkel explained. “So good-bye Norway, and I left for the strange country of the Dakota prairies.”

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The Fuglestads sailed from Rotterdam, Holland and arrived in New York fourteen days later. The couple was “near starved” after living on spoiled vegetables and half-raw biscuits for two weeks. Fortunately, they had brought a loaf of rye bread with them from Norway, but during the processing procedure, someone stole it.“ ”We jumped up and looked around, but the bread was stolen right out of our hands,” Terkel recalled. A short time later, Abigail’s ball of yarn disappeared. Terkel wondered if this was a warning of what they could expect in their new land.

Their steamship ticket called for them to continue their journey as freight goods on the Great Lakes from Buffalo, New York, to Duluth, Minnesota. They shared their “accommodations” with fourteen milk cows, a “flock of Finlanders,” one Swede, and of course, boxes of freight.

After a week’s journey as Great Lakes’ cargo, they were unloaded, along with the cows, the Swede, and the Finlanders at a Duluth pier.

The journey continued by train, another week of torturous travel, which carried the Fugelstads to Valley City. Abigail’s brother met and guided them across the prairie to near Hannaford. Terkel: “At last we came to our destination where our future home was to be.” The journey had ended.

Just over 32,000 Germans who lived in the Black Sea region of Russia made the journey to North Dakota.

In the 1760s, Catherine the Great, who desired to strengthen Russia’s agriculture, lured thousands of Germans to farm in that area to the north of the Black Sea. She provided free land, but just as important, she pledged that the Germans could remain German.

They could live just as they had in Germany and were exempt from service in the Russian army. In the 1870s into the 1890s, Tsars Alexander II and Alexander III voided Catherine’s promises in order to “Russify” the Germans. The Germans were to become Russians. These actions, along with the lack of land for fourth and fifth generation Germans in Russia, prompted a mass exodus.

Unlike those from Northern and Central Europe, who usually migrated as individuals or families, the Germans from Russia left in large family groups of up to fifty people. Representative of the journeys are the Maier, Mosbrucker, and Flegel families.

Christian Maier, Jr., was a fourth-generation German eking out a living on a very small farm near the Black Sea. Because of the scarcity of land for his generation,

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he decided to take his wife, Carolina, and daughter, Amelia, to America. It was April, 1886. His parents and younger brother opted to join the journey. The train trip to Bremen was uneventful but they had to wait there for eight days; they had missed their ship. Joined by seven other Black Sea families, the Maiers departed aboard the steamer Vera. Storms plagued the families with seasickness. “While I lay flat on my back in my room I wished I had remained in Russia,” Christian Jr. confessed.

After the nine-day voyage and the three-day train ride, the Maiers arrived at Ellendale and finally settled not far from Ashley.

Philip and Eva Mosbrucker and Philip’s parents farmed small parcels of land just north of the Black Sea. Some of his father’s friends who had already migrated to North Dakota urged him to sell out and join them where land was “free,” building materials cheap, and free coal plentiful. Having difficulty making ends meet, he took their advice; the sale netted $400. The proceeds from the sale provided both families with enough money to purchase passage and start a new life in a new land. On December 27, 1888, joined by several other Black Sea families, they departed Rotterdam aboard the Mostom, a ship hardly fit for the sea. “I will never forget how close we came to sinking,” Christian Jr. recalled. Six days out, a terrible storm arose that lasted for three days and nights.

Everybody on board knelt in prayer. The food was “not fit to eat” and accommodations were “not very clean.” The Mostom did make it to New York harbor and a pleasant train trip carried them to Mandan where friends greeted them. They homesteaded in Oliver County.

In 1889, August Flegel and his wife, Carolina, made the difficult decision to leave their Russian home near Kulm in the Black Sea region because they had a difficult time making a living on a five-acre farm. Carolina’s brother, Jacob Rieker, dreaded the five years he was required to serve in the Russian army and opted, along with other members of his family, for the journey to America.

To raise money for the long sojourn, August sold his livestock, household furniture, farm equipment, and land for 700 rubles, about 350 American dollars. This would be more than adequate, he thought, to get to America and begin a new life for himself, his wife, who was in her ninth month of pregnancy, and three children, August Jr., age seven; Mathilda, age four; and one-year-old Nathaniel. They were joined in the journey by ten other German Russian families, numbering over fifty adults and children.

The large party planned to take the train to Bremen, Germany, the port from which most Germans from

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hit an iceberg. The damage was minimal, but, as August remembered, the incident “threw the passengers into a panic.” Most became seasick and as a result the third-class section of the ship “became pretty messy.”

Near the end of the ten-day crossing, the Flegel family faced one more obstacle. Their daughter, Mathilda, was not listed on the Flegel passport.

The official threatened to send the four-year-old girl back to Bremen unless August paid for another full fare. He, of course, did, leaving the Flegels with very little money.

The two-day train ride to Eureka, South Dakota, where hundreds of Germans from Russia stopped on their way to finding a homestead in North Dakota, went smoothly.

Carolina gave birth to a healthy baby and the Flegels completed their journey by filing on land in Emmons County, North Dakota.

A Northern Pacific Railroad survey crew, including a Japanese immigrant, poses ca.

1885 near the Green River, Washington Territory.

University of Washington Libraries, UW2315

Russia sailed. Getting out of Russia proved to be difficult. Johannes Rieker was stopped at the border on grounds of desertion. The Rieker family remained with Johannes until they escaped across the border on a dark, moonless night.

Aboard the train to Bremen, the baby of the Krafts died suddenly. Not wanting to cause a further delay, the infant’s body was hidden in a basket. Upon arrival in Bremen, the body was turned over to a steamship agent who tended to necessary arrangements.

The Flegels and the other families waited a few days for their ship to come in.

Meanwhile, it was discovered that Jacob Rieker had no money for passage.

Reluctantly, August loaned him enough for his ticket. “I still had enough to pay my way to America, but very little else,” August recalled.

The crossing journey was not pleasant. Five days out of Bremen, their ship

One historian has concluded that the immigrant “had a more treacherous and uncertain voyage than did the astronauts who went to the moon.” That may be an exaggeration, but leaving a known life in a known land for an unknown life in an unknown land did take tremendous courage. As the journey accounts reflect, the trek to, across, and from the Atlantic was not easy. The newcomers were driven by the dream of land that awaited them in the farmers’ last frontier, North Dakota.

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Listen to the Journey A most treasured American freedom is the right to travel, to go where we please, to explore or to relocate our family and life. Throughout history, Americans valued their right to mobility. Thousands of immigrants traveled to this country to claim that exact freedom. Many were searching for something better in a new land while others had no choice, like enslaved Africans relocated to a strange land or Native Americans already here, often pushed aside by newcomers. America’s transportation history is about more than trains, boats, buses, cars, wagons, and trucks. The development of transportation was inspired by the human desire for freedom. Looking back and understanding the past can lead us forward.

That is precisely what Journey Stories allows us to do. The Smithsonian exhibit, curated by William Withuhn, takes us through the journey of how we came to this place called America and how our journeys did not end or even begin with a boat trip. Everyone has a powerful journey story somewhere deep in their own heritage. Do we know that story? The tale of a young man who left a child and her mother in Norway to look for a better life in America, and never returned to retrieve them; or the Chippewa man forced to move to a reservation who had the most precious mark of his identity, his own name stripped away and replaced by a randomly assigned English name that held no meaning. Tales of abandonment, perseverance, longing and hope are woven tightly into our national identity. The Journey Stories exhibit allows us to examine the individual threads whether broken, frayed, or intact, to see the profound sense of liberty that ultimately stitches every American citizen together.

We are honored to host the Smithsonian Institution’s Journey Stories exhibit and are deeply thankful to the communities of Enderlin, Beach, Wahpeton, Casselton, Washburn and Ellendale who will welcome this exhibit into their hometown. Thanks also to our state scholar Barbara Handy-Marchello whose dedication and insight into this project has guided us to ask questions, pay attention and listen to our own journey stories. I implore anyone who is human, who has a story, who has a history, to experience this exhibit.

Sarah Smith Warren North Dakota Humanities Council Program Officer State Coordinator for Journey Stories

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Louise Erdrich at “Great Books for Many Readers” during the 2008 Festival in Sioux Falls

October 2-4, 2009

Where Readers and Writers Rendezvous

Each year, thousands of readers across the region partake in the South Dakota Festival of Books. This year the festival is in Deadwood, SD, and the lineup of activities is sure to delight.

Confirmed authors include Elizabeth Berg, Quincy Troupe, Dan O’Brien, Linda Hasselstrom, Craig Johnson, Elaine Alphin, David Wolff, Jerry Wilson, Gary Schmidt, Jill Esbaum, Robert W. Larson, Carolyn Digby Conahan, Don Montileaux and many, many more.

For more information, visit www.sdhumanities.org or call 605-688-6113

Bring the Smithsonian to Your Town The NDHC is now accepting applications from communities interested in hosting KEY INGREDIENTS. Visit www.nd-humanities.org or call 701.255.3360 to learn more.

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Knowing How the Journey Ends:

The Arthur Marschke Story

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“The world must be made safe for democracy.” With those words on April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress to ask for a declaration of war against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Turkey, thus coming to the aid of England, France, and Russia. As congress cheered and began to carry out the president’s request with patriotic zeal, Wilson returned to the White House, put his head down on his desk, and cried. He knew that many of the young men and women he was sending into battle would die on foreign soil, and the weight of that responsibility was almost unbearable.

Five months and eighteen days later on September 20, Arthur Marschke, the twenty-six-year-old son of Ida and August Marschke, who farmed near Enderlin, journeyed to Fargo to be inducted into the army. The new enlistee was joined by his boyhood sweetheart, Esther Robinson, for what the Enderlin newspaper called “a hasty wedding and all too brief honeymoon.” After two days in Fargo, Arthur bid farewell to his new bride and boarded the train for Camp Dodge, Iowa, an American Expeditionary Force training center.

Like most camps, Dodge was hurriedly constructed in the months following the declaration of war. It provided “basic” arms instruction and a vigorous physical fitness program. Thankfully, by the time Arthur arrived, recruits were no longer training with wooden rifle cutouts and broomsticks.

After basic training at Camp Dodge, he was ordered to Camp Pike not far from Little Rock, Arkansas. At Camp Pike he was assigned to the Machine Gun Company of the 101st Infantry. While there, he received the wonderful news from home that Esther had given birth to a boy whom the couple named Leroy. Soon after, he received a photograph of Esther holding the son he might never meet. Arthur kept it with him at all times.

In July 1918, the expected news came: The 101st Infantry was headed for England and France.

The Atlantic crossing was, in Arthur’s words, “very rough.” As he wrote to his cousin, “The ship I was on was not very large so it tossed around at a great rate, first the front end would rear up into the air and then plunge down as tho it was going to the bottom of the sea and at the same time rock from side to side with the water splashing clear up over the top of the ship once in a while.” This caused “a lot of seasickness among the boys.” A generation before, his parents had crossed that same ocean, emigrating from Germany to an unknown life in North Dakota. Arthur was relieved that his ship had avoided German U-boats which infested the shipping lanes to England, but he too faced an unknown future.

He enjoyed his three days in England, which he described as a “very pretty country.” In France the “miles and miles of vineyards loaded with grapes” impressed him as did the white and gray stone buildings and homes. He sampled French wines but, as he wrote to his cousin, “They do not appeal to my taste.”

Little did Arthur Marschke know that by August 1918, the AEF’s 101st Infantry would be ordered onto the blood-soaked ground where the fiercest fighting on the Western Front was taking place: Verdun. The well-fortified city of Verdun and its environs guarded the northern entrance to the plains of Champagne, the approach to the French capital, Paris. The French were determined to hold Verdun; the Germans were just as determined to take Verdun and drive on to Paris.

The German assault started on February 21, 1916, and the initial battle raged on until December. Attacks and counter-attacks; German offensives, French counteroffensives. French artillery fired 24 million rounds at the enemy; the Germans 21 million at Verdun fortifications.

Exhausted, the German army fell back in December.

The French army had held Verdun. The price in human life was tragically high, but, the battle for Verdun was not over as Arthur Marschke would soon discover. It did

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not end until the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.

The scars of war became increasingly evident to Arthur. “I’m going to [the] front over shell torn ground and ruined buildings, many of which were just a pile of rocks. Some of the shell craters are 20 to 30 feet in diameter and 10 to 12 feet deep. So you can imagine the terrific force expanded when one of those explodes,” he wrote to his cousin, Hartha, on August 26.

The Germans were still attempting to take Verdun when the AEF was thrown into the battle. “The first day at the front with shells zizzing thru the air, thudding into the ground and then the crashing explosion nearby, and many times overhead, was rather disquieting, but the second night with even a heavier crashing of exploding shells all around and over us we hardly noticed it and slept well,” he wrote to his cousin, probably understating his situation to comfort folks at home.

Mid-September found the 101st Infantry digging in because, as Arthur wrote home, “The Germans are rather peeved on account of us chasing them back so far, and are sending shells and shrapnel over at all times of the day and night, and dropping bombs from aeroplanes in the daytime.” He described the ravages of the war: “There is no work or life of any kind going on. The fields are all idle and most of the towns deserted. Vineyards are stunted in growth and grown to weeds.”

A quiet, rural farm boy thrust into the center of a vicious world war, Arthur found solace from the killing fields in the natural world. While sitting alone in the woods, he was excited to see little red squirrels frolicking in the trees and was comforted by the fact that “beechnut trees grow here in great quantities so the squirrels need not go hungry.” Rabbits were lively in the bushes and he “met a red fox on the path who disappeared into the brush when it seen me coming towards it.”

Arthur wrote home to his wife and parents regularly, so when his letters stopped coming, the family began to worry. Alarmed over the fate of their son, the Marschkes sent an inquiry to the War Department. The army’s

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As he lay dying on the field of battle, he pulled out the photograph of Esther and Leroy with their address scribbled on the back, and using the German he had learned from his immigrant parents, begged an enemy German soldier to send the photograph home to his wife in Enderlin. response was bone-chilling. “ARTHUR MARSCHKE MISSING IN ACTION,” the headline in the Enderlin Independent informed its readers. The newspaper held out hope: “While all Enderlin mourns with the bereaved relatives, yet there is one ray of hope and we will not give up the thought of seeing Arthur until the last report of corrections is available.” There was no ray of hope. Two weeks before the end of the war on October 28, Arthur Marschke was killed holding off a German advance at Beaumont not far from Verdun. After weeks of heart-wrenching waiting, the family received official notice: “Killed in Action.”

But Arthur’s story does not end there. As he lay dying on the field of battle, he pulled out the photograph of Esther and Leroy with their address scribbled on

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the back, and using the German he had learned from his immigrant parents, begged an enemy German soldier to send the photograph home to his wife in Enderlin. The German agreed, and we can only assume that Arthur died comforted by the knowledge that his last love letter to his wife and son would find its way home. War, however, does not yield to human compassion and later in the same battle, the unknown German soldier was also mortally wounded, taking the first person account of Arthur’s final moments with him. Yet, before he died, he asked his comrade, Herman Suit, to carry out Arthur’s wishes. Suit agreed.

At home in Enderlin, Esther, August, and Ida Marschke knew that Arthur had been killed, but were still haunted by the unknown. Had he received a proper burial? Had he suffered? Was he alone?

Then four years later in late September 1922, Esther received a letter and the photograph from Herman Suit. German regulations had not allowed Suit to fulfill Arthur’s dying request until four years after the end of the war. The German veteran informed Esther that Arthur had fallen during an AEF attack on the German forces at Beaumont near Verdun on October 28, 1918, and was buried in a mass grave on the battlefield. Because of the uplifting human spirit of two German soldiers, the Enderlin folks now knew how Arthur’s journey had ended, and Arthur’s dying wish had been granted. There was valor on both sides of the battle line.

Historian Joy Hakim put the Great War in perspective: “Like the Civil War in America, it became ugly and hateful. Nine million men died— more than the whole population of New York City today. It left scars and wounds that refused to heal. It changed the fate of the world. But no one knew that when it started.” When the war ended, 1,305 North Dakotans were among the dead. Arthur Marshcke and the other 1,304 had made the supreme sacrifice for their country.

A special thank you to Fredric Bohm for granting access to his family archives. www.fredricbohm.com

Arthur Marschke

JOURNEY STORIES EXHIBIT now open in Enderlin, North Dakota

Enderlin City Auditorium May 29 - July 11, 2009 1:00 - 5:00pm Tuesday - Sunday Featured Events:

Thursday, June 11, 7:00 p.m.

Clay Jenkinson discussion and lecture “Epic Journeys” (Enderlin Municipal Library) June 25-27, 7:30 p.m.

June 28, 2:00 p.m.

Musical in the Park (Baxter Park, Railway St.) “Oklahoma!”

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Community Journey Story Events 2009:

Historic Opera House building in Ellendale, ND. Taken by Sarah Smith Warren.

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Beach: July 18-August 29 Contact: Golden Valley County Museum 701872-3938

Journey Stories Exhibit Golden Valley County Museum Monday-Friday 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.

Saturdays 9:00 a.m.-9:00 p.m.

Horses probably own the largest portion of transportation history. They were used for moving humans and cargo over rough terrain and great distances in Asia, Europe, and, after the 16th century, in South and North America. Horses were bred and trained for racing, plowing, pulling, pleasure riding, and war. Even after the automobile transformed personal transportation, many people preferred the stability and strength of horses to the unpredictable internal combustion engine. Vic Klein was one of those people. He came to Golden Valley County in 1911, thinking he would visit briefly before going on to Montana where he hoped he would work with horses in some capacity. But he found a job on a Sentinel Butte ranch and stayed. Eventually he bought his own ranch and raised and trained his own working horses. Around 1925, after he returned from World War I Army service, Vic Klein’s horses were stolen. He had them grazing in a common pasture with the horses of several outfits when rustlers rounded up the whole bunch and drove them into Medora to be freighted to Iowa by train. Klein notified the sheriff and got on a train to track down his horses. He traveled to St. Paul, took another train for Iowa, and there he found his horses. He had the thieves arrested and took his most prized possessions back to Sentinel Butte.

J.V. Klein on the first saddle horse he raised in Beach, ND. Photo submitted by: Judy Ridenhower.

Featured Events: Saturday, July 18 2:00 p.m. Ribbon Cutting Ceremony & Celebration (Golden Valley County Museum) 4:00 p.m. Chuck Suchy Concert (Gazebo Park) Bring along your lawn chair and enjoy this special concert.

July 18-August 29 Journey Stories Exhibit (see info in blue box, above) July 29-August 1 Beach Centennial Celebration (Golden Valley County Museum) Local artists, school children displays, events and crafts featured at the museum.

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Wahpeton: September 5-October 17 Journey Stories Exhibit Richland County Historical Museum Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday 1:00-4:00 p.m.

Also by appointment Contact: Wayne Beyer 701-642-2811

Photo by Sarah Smith Warren. Taken in Wahpeton, ND.

Lured by stories of the fertile soil and treeless prairie ready for the plow, John and Asenath Brackin moved their family to Sonora, near Wahpeton, in 1895. John had already established a timber culture or tree claim three years earlier by planting hundreds of trees on his quarter-section, leaving his son Frank to tend to the claim until the rest of the family arrived. The Brackins moved the family of seven and a cousin from Alexandria, Minnesota in five horse-drawn wagons. Encumbered by their heavy load, their progress was slow and their supplies began to dwindle. With few other options in the vast and open plain, the family was forced to supplement their food supply with wild duck eggs and squirrels.

Featured Events: Tuesday, September 8, 6:00 p.m.

Journey Stories Opening Ceremony (Richland County Historical Museum) Featuring writers Lise & Heid Erdrich Photo Contest Exhibition ‘Village of Falling Leaves’ Art Sculpture Contest Display Self-guided Historical Walk September 5-October 17 Journey Stories Exhibit (see info in blue box, above)

Additional Events: Self-Guided Historical Walk Oral Histories Ox Cart Coloring Contest Geocaching

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Casselton: October 24-November 30 Journey Stories Exhibit Casselton Heritage Center (Old Stone Church) Tuesday-Friday 12:00-6:00 p.m.

Saturday & Sunday 1:00-5:00 p.m.

Also by appointment Contact: Julie Burgum 701-347-4797

Like many other farm workers of the time hoping to earn a dollar a day, William Guy Sr. hopped on boxcars to follow the wheat harvest north to the Canadian border. In the fall, on his way home to Indiana, the train he was on stopped at Fargo near the North Dakota Agricultural College (NDAC, now NDSU). From the boxcar, Bill Sr. could see a barn about onehalf mile away. He decided he would go there to try to find a place to sleep. It turned out to be the College horse barn, and there was plenty of work to do there. Bill Sr. was offered a cot to sleep on in the tack room, and a job cleaning the stalls. He figured it was better than the boxcar, and accepted the job.

Between times spent cleaning the barn, Bill Sr., completed his bachelor’s degree in agriculture and would go on to become manager and CEO of the bonanza farm known as the Amenia and Sharon Land Company. In that capacity, he oversaw the Amenia Seed and Grain Company, 26 farms, and his newly adopted company town of Amenia. He was also president of the Northwest Farm Managers Association. Bill Guy’s journey from Indiana to North Dakota opened a door of opportunity for himself and his family. His son, William Guy Jr., was elected Governor in 1960, a post he held for 12 years.

Photo taken in Casselton, ND, by Steve Carvell Photography.

Featured Events: August 14 & 15, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.

Summerfest (Casselton Heritage Center [Old Stone Church]) Journey Stories Quilt display September 26, 2:00 p.m.

“Railroad to Bonanza Farms” (Spirit of Life Center [St. Leo’s Church]) How the Casselton area was first settled

October 1 Casselton local family history book on sale October 23, 5:30-7:30 p.m.

Journey Stories opening ceremony (Casselton Heritage Center [Old Stone Church]) October 24-November 30 Journey Stories Exhibit (see info in blue box, above) November 17, 7:00 p.m.

Humanities Scholar Clay Jenkinson presents “Epic Journeys” (Media Center Central Cass School)

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Washburn: December 7-January 18 Journey Stories Exhibit Washburn Memorial Building Contact: Milissa Price 701-462-8558

When Oscar Anderson returned to his hometown Washburn in 1950, after a career as a sailor on merchant ships, he found a town that had not changed much from his youth. It was a business center for regional farmers; coal mines provided employment; residents could buy whatever they needed in Washburn’s many stores. A little more than 1000 residents lived in this town defined by two major transportation routes. Missouri River boats had carried goods and people up and down the river for centuries, and Washburn remained a river port until 1898. The other transportation system was US Highway 83 – known as the “longest main street in the world” - which followed Main Street in downtown Washburn. Cross-country drivers slowed to 25 miles per hour and stopped to eat or buy gas in one of several cafes or gas stations. What Washburn lacked was a bridge across the Missouri River. Residents who wanted to visit Beulah had to drive to Bismarck and cross the Memorial Bridge, or go north (after 1954) to Garrison and cross over the dam. Travel became a little more convenient when Oscar Anderson built a ferry boat he named Sioux to carry cars and drivers across the rapid river current. Anderson operated the ferry from 1952 to 1962 when a snag damaged the boat. It wasn’t until 1971 that construction began on the Washburn bridge.

Featured Events: December 7, 7:30 p.m.

Journey Stories Opening Ceremony/Ribbon Cutting (Washburn Memorial Building) 6:30 p.m. Social Hour December 7-January 18 Journey Stories Exhibit (see info in blue box, above) December 18, 7:00 p.m.

Journey Film and Student Readings (Washburn Public School) January 16, 11:00 a.m.

Clay Jenkinson discussion and lecture, “Epic Journeys” (Fort Mandan Visitor Center)

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Ellendale: January 25-March 14 Journey Stories Exhibit Historic Opera House Saturday 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.

Sunday 1:00-5:00 p.m.

Also by appointment

On February 6, 1904, Mary Bell Flemington of Ellendale cracked a bottle of champagne on the bow of the Dakota, James J. Hill’s new cargo and passenger ship. It was a long way from Ellendale to Connecticut shipyards and New York City, but the young University of North Dakota student was poised for the journey. Dressed in a stylish coat trimmed with mink, Mary impressed New York reporters who attended the christening of the ship. She told them that New York was nice, but, “I wouldn’t trade the view of the prairie from my father’s back door for all New York.” The New York reporters also noted that North Dakota’s temperance women had asked that the ship be christened with water, rather than champagne. The bottled champagne apparently presented no moral constraint for Miss Flemington though her father had written the prohibition clause for the state’s constitution.

Photo by Ken Schmierer.

Featured Events: June 14-21 Railroad/train activities (Coleman Memorial Museum) Train stories and memorabilia display

August 16-18, 6:30 pm Melodrama dinner-theater, $10 (Fireside on Hwy. 281) August 29, 7:00 pm Homestead Seminar (Senior Center on Hwy. 281) Free and open to the public

August 30-September 1 Homesteading exhibits (Historic Opera House) September 26 & 27 Ellendale Applefest October 3, 2:00 p.m.

Quilt Trunk Show (Historic Opera House) October 10-14 Scavenger Hunt in local Ellendale businesses October 25, 7:00 p.m.

Musical dinner-theater (Fireside on Hwy. 281)

November 10-23 ND Museum of Art exhibit “Animals: Them and Us” (Historic Opera House) November 30, 6:00 p.m.

Christmas on the Prairie (Main Street)

December Events Christmas on the Prairie Parade of Lights Book event

January Events January 25, 2010 Exhibition Opening & Gala (Historic Opera House) January 25-March 14 Journey Stories Exhibition (Historic Opera House) January 31 Clay Jenkinson discussion and lecture “Epic Journeys” (Historic Opera House)

November 1, 2:00 p.m.

Tom Isern book discussion of “O Pioneers” (Senior Center) 31

Cavities

Sitting on the rocks of the Viking graves, We snacked on crackers and watched the squealing gulls and oystercatchers irritated at the intrusion of their hunt and home.

Our guide of the Hebrides crouched in a tunneled crevice in the earth where Stone Age people had lived, hunkered, their dark eyes peering out at the pouring rain that now lashes this house called Tighard.

A vertebra of a killer whale leans against our dwelling. the spinal cord that once propelled it only a cavity the shelter enduring, the sheltered perishing.

We move through the house planning meals.

We stoke the fire, keep our journals, think of the past and ask the time, on our own small and quiet quests for food and the ancient longing to be filled. —Janelle Masters

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JourneyingHome TWO NEW YORK CITY WRITERS RETURN TO

THEIR ROOTS. COREY SEYMOUR

New Rockford, ND native Author of Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson Featured speaker for The Big Read in North Dakota October 5-16, 2009 Bowman, Cooperstown, New Rockford

JONATHAN TWINGLEY Bismarck, ND native Author of Badlands Saloon Book tour and author presentation July 16, 2009, Moorhead July 18, 2009, Bismarck

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Upcoming Events

BEACH

DICKINSON

Oct 15-17 Theodore Roosevelt Symposium

(Dickinson State University)

Chuck Suchy Concert

(Gazebo Park)

July 18-Aug 29 Journey Stories Smithsonian Exhibit (Golden Valley Museum)

ENDERLIN May 29-July 11 Journey Stories Smithsonian Exhibit

(City Auditorium)

July 18 Journey Stories Exhibit/ Opening Ceremony

(Golden Valley Museum)

BEULAH

July 31-Aug 2 Everett Albers Chautauqua

(Beulah Middle School Auditorium)

(AmericInn Lodge Conference Room)

BISMARCK

July 18 Author Chat and Presentation with Jonathan Twingley, author of “Badlands Saloon”

(North Dakota Heritage Center)

Oct 11 Conversations with Clay Jenkinson “The Poetry of No Man is an Island – John Donne preaches his own funeral sermon”

(Sidney J. Lee Auditorium, Bismarck State College)

Nov 12 Raymond A. Schroth Lecture “The American Journey of Eric Sevareid”

(North Dakota Heritage Center)

Nov 15 Conversations with Clay Jenkinson “The History and Future of the Missouri River – The damming of the Missouri River at Garrison” (Sidney J. Lee Auditorium, Bismarck State College)

BOTTINEAU

July 27-29 Everett Albers Chautauqua

(MSU Bottineau) BOWMAN

Oct 15 Big Read Events featuring Keynote Speaker – Corey Seymour (Bowman Regional Public Library)

CASSELTON

Oct 23-Nov 30 Journey Stories Smithsonian

(Exhibit Casselton Heritage Center)

COOPERSTOWN

Oct 8 Big Read Events featuring Keynote Speaker – Corey Seymour

(Griggs County Public Library)

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FARGO – MOORHEAD

July 12 Why? Radio Show “Exporting Democracy” with Guest Paul Sum

(Listen Statewide) 5 p.m. on Prairie Public Radio

July 16 Author Chat and Presentation with Jonathan Twingley, author of “Badlands Saloon”

(Rourke Art Gallery)

Aug 9 Why? Radio Show “Literature in the digital age” with guest Crystal Alberts

(Pre-recorded live in New Rockford, ND) (Listen Statewide) 5 p.m. on Prairie Public Radio

Sept 13 Why? Radio Show

(Listen Statewide)

Oct 11 Why? Radio Show

(Listen Statewide)

GRAND FORKS

July 19 Art & Democracy Film: “The Blues Brothers,” 7 p.m. Free!

(Empire Arts Center)

July 24-26 Everett Albers Chautauqua

(Empire Theatre)

Aug 26 Art & Democracy Film: “Casablanca,” 7 p.m. Free!

(Empire Arts Center)

MEDORA

July Author Chat and Presentation with Jonathan Twingley, author of “Badlands Saloon”

NEW ROCKFORD

Oct 5-16 Big Read Events featuring Keynote Speaker – Corey Seymour

(Dakota Prairie Regional Center for the Arts) WAHPETON

Sept 8 Journey Stories Opening Ceremony

(Richland County Historical Museum)

Sept 5-Oct 17 Journey Stories Smithsonian Exhibit

(Richland County Historical Museum)

For complete event listing visit ww.nd-humanities.org

DICKINSON STATE UNIVERSITY PRESENTS:

THEODORE ROOSEVELT FAMILY MAN IN THE ARENA

OCTOBER 15-17, 2009 Theodore Roosevelt had one of the most visible families in American history. Unlike most Presidents, whose families are carefully sequestered from the American public, Roosevelt was content to make the whole family the story: a son's first deer kill, the wedding of Alice Roosevelt in the White House, another son's difficulties with football at Harvard, or a Shetland pony's ride up the White House elevator. This symposium will carefully examine family life among the Roosevelts.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15 FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16 DSU Campus

Betty Boyd Caroli The Roosevelt Women, America’s First Ladies, Inside the White House

With Scholars: Kathleen Dalton – Keynote Phillips Academy, Andover, MA Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life

Panel: A Discussion of Each of the Roosevelt Children

by DSU faculty members and visiting presenters

Stacy Cordery Monmouth College Alice Longworth Roosevelt, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker

FOR MORE INFO, VISIT:

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 Field trip to site of Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch Clay Jenkinson DSU Theodore Roosevelt Humanities Scholar Symposium Moderator

sponsored by:

www.theodorerooseveltcenter.com or call 1-866-496-8797 27

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Leaving Home

By Liz Collin

For a long time these plains suffocated me with their lack of brevity. Their sheer mass and cunning congruence tricked me into believing they were bland. Despite my outward progress, there is still a small screaming child inside of my head that agrees wholeheartedly with Debra Marquart about the manner in which North Dakota should be viewed.

Liz Collin (top left) is a 2009 graduate of Bismarck High School and enjoys all types of writing, especially poetry. She is an avid fan of music in all genres and plays guitar and writes in her spare time. She divides her time between writing, music, a stint as a reporting intern at the Bismarck Tribune, and working with mentally challenged people at Pride, Inc.

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In

her memoir, the highly acclaimed The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in The Middle of Nowhere, she observes at the end of her prologue that “for a long time, it seemed to me, North Dakota looked best only when glanced at briefly while adjusting the rearview mirror.” There was a mesmerizing force that those words settled into my brain with at the age of fifteen. A deep and gnawing restlessness had set into my bones; I felt ready to leave.

A journey is something that sounds long and difficult; the dictionary explains that a journey is sometimes marked as a passage to adulthood and responsibility. The word journey implies to me a deep, distant desire to test the self, test the mind. I have always associated the term with upheaval and strife, sometimes bitterness, sometimes victory and wisdom.

As a young person still waiting to take my definitive journey of life, it was helpful for me to read about Debra’s. It reminded me that the reason journeys are exciting is because they are hard. They are hard because they test the veracity of the soul. They test the conviction in your blood, and the unmoving set of your jaw. Without these tests, how would we find ourselves? In this sea of so many stereotypes opening all around us like coffins, waiting for us to jump in headfirst, how do we stand our ground and mean what we do, and mean what we pray?

And if you think you’re so hot, watch out, the book tells me-- because at one point or another, everyone is young and desperate to get lost. And getting lost is easy when you don’t know where you’re going.

Debra writes in her memoir about her crazy Aunt Emma, the one the old people whispered about in German. She had been beautiful, a young woman who moved to paradise after the death of her mother and her inevitable suffering on the Great Plains during the Depression. Her journey to California seemed to Debra an exhilarating one, and she writes, “When we were shoveling out six-foot snowdrifts at twenty degrees below zero, I imagined Emma in that California life, sitting on her sunny verandah in silk pajamas and bedroom slippers with marabou froufrous on top, eating hand-picked peaches slathered in cream as she watched the ocean swirl and wisp.”

This was hardly the truth about her aunt for very long. After her move from North Dakota, the woman lost everything in the swirling Sacramento River during a boating accident that killed both her fiancé and best friend. The letters she sent her sister later echoed tattered fragments of paranoia, schizophrenia, and loneliness. But what would it have taken to keep a young, confidently beautiful woman looking for excitement away from the edges of land? What would it take to buff the high-gloss finish of the tempting power of a river waiting to be challenged?

Debra writes, “Of course Emma would go to that river, find the location of the most swirling, dangerous currents again and again.

We are all drawn to that deep, down-turning place that wants to pull us under. But without a mother or another woman to tell the story about what happens to the little girl who goes to close to the cliff, the little girl who wanders too far into the forest, the little girl who doesn’t know to look for the wolf’s whiskers under the grandmother’s sleep bonnet, what chance would any of us have of surviving?”

The brave duplicity of our world can be astounding. Many people with the best of intentions inevitably become broken by the sheer force of perception, by that moment that pulls you into realizing that things are no longer as they seem.

I see in the rugged cliffs and furrows still untainted that the taming of North Dakota was a difficult task.

Steep ridges and gopher-holes complicated the mastering of this land by foot or wagon wheel, and wild game, expecting the prick of an arrow or spear, must’ve scattered quickly at the rumble of oxen’s hooves. The skies and the rivers imply the wrath of a mighty god, pouring buckets of water in unpredicted shapes and textures onto the shivering landscape below or beside.

How do you tame the sometimes inhabitable mother that taunts you?

What sort of dead-set determination does it take to categorize something so chaotic and base your livelihood off of something so wild?

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...sometimes the light of home shines brighter than the light of adventures met.

Debra writes about her great grandmother, Barbara Hulm Marquart, who traveled, pregnant, from Russia by boat, rail then oxen in 1885, to claim a strip of land in the central part of our state. Debra’s greatgrandmother, upon seeing this section of land, fell to the ground in desperation and cried, “It’s all earth and sky.”

Marquart goes on to write, “My great-grandmother Marquart did not last long in America. She died in childbirth in February 1900, fifteen years after her arrival, attempting to deliver her eleventh child, a daughter who would die with her that day.”

An anomaly I knew nothing about until reading Debra’s memoir are the consequences of a break in the mother-line. The mother-line, of course, is the broken or unbroken string of maternity reaching far back into one’s genealogy. A rupture in the line ends with children who have no mother, suffering the many losses of family recipes, stories, culture, family knowledge, and a sense of place within the bloodline. Debra quotes Jungian psychotherapist Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, who writes that, without the tender roughness of the mother presence, we might “wander like motherless children in the too bright light of masculine consciousness.”

Of the binding force of a feminine presence, Marquart goes on to write about her grandmother, “There are many stories of women who did not rise from their beds, but hers is not one of them. She who saw no importance in her own story. She who lives inside us now like a shimmering web, catching us, keeping us right.”

With all these stories of death and insanity, losses and fleeting gains, I see more and more the resiliency of the human spirit. There are realizations that simmer more violently with age and experience, and many of those involve the shattering moment in a young person’s life when they realize that things are not always quite how they imagined them to be. Coming to terms with these realizations is easier to me now that I understand that we are all just terrible victims of circumstance.

Your first love, lost. When it happened to you, did you notice it at first? The undeniable shift of blood into the brain, the sinking feeling settling deep into your bones when you finally understood that it was over?

38

Marquart writes movingly about this very circumstance, and extends further the metaphor of twin perceptions— the way things may seem isn’t necessarily the way things are. On her first almost-lover, she writes, “So young and too soon, we go out into the world after nights like this thinking that it will always be this way—that our blood will always burn for someone, not understanding how desire collects hurts and gripes, cautions and misgivings, how it is tempered, numbed, and peeled away in degrees.

After this, the initial loss, we wander through the world and look for signs of the familiar in the faces of those we meet. We get more outrageous and bold, more inventive and self-destructive in our search for it; we meet fellow travelers along the way, also in search for it. Of everyone we encounter, we ask, ‘Are you my lover, are you my lover, are you?’ But it seems we have all forgotten the face of the beloved. He would be unrecognizable to us, even if we passed him on the street.”

The syntax of things can be crushing sometimes, and a journey may seem like the only way out. Most of the time, it is—provided one takes the time to stay found, to back away from certain danger even though it may be tempting. As adults (and I can say this now that I am finally eighteen), I see our senses become sharpened meticulously as we get older. Is there ever a specific moment when our brains wake up to realize that we are suddenly not the idealistic children we used to be? Or is it something slow, degenerate, a force that shifts us as we lie sleeping, rendering us emotionally bare and with no recollection to explain this haunting stillness?

And even though the winters are cold here and the buff grass gets frozen, crumbling into dust under heavy hooves, I see, thanks to Debra, that sometimes the light of home shines brighter than the light of adventures met. As a native to this place, I know that the flatland in our midst is as beautiful as it is tragic, and I resound wholeheartedly with Marquart’s yearning for home, for it is my home too. I have, so far, felt the pull to see and leave; but I know that when it is time, my child-mind will begin crying quietly for home and I will return, exhilarated and disheveled, exhausted from my journey but glad to be home.

Marquart has captured the land as it should be caught: ancient and mesmerizing, steamy and frigid, an unforgiving mother with bounty and bareness entwined.

Bismarck State College is pleased to present for the second year this series of lectures for the public.

Each “conversation” begins with a presentation by Clay Jenkinson, and includes discussion between Jenkinson and BSC President Larry C. Skogen. Questions from the audience complete the conversation.

October 11, 2009 ...................The Poetry of “No Man is an Island” – John Donne preaches his own funeral sermon November 15, 2009 ...............The History and Future of the Missouri River – The Damming of the Missouri River at Garrison December 6, 2009 ..................Abraham Lincoln’s “Footprint” In North Dakota January 24, 2010 ..................Wounded Knee February 21, 2010 .................Mussolini’s Last Day April 25, 2010 ........................The Day Neil Armstrong Walked on the Moon

Sundays at 3 p.m. in Sidney J. Lee Auditorium Public welcome to all programs Jenkinson, a Rhodes and Danforth scholar, is a published author and one of the leading public humanities scholars in the United States. He hosts a nationally syndicated radio program from Bismarck, “The Thomas Jefferson Hour,” and works as a speaker, consultant and facilitator. Jenkinson also directs the Dakota Institute of the Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation and serves on its board.

For more information, call BSC Continuing Education, Training and Innovation at 701.224.5600 31

[noteworthy]

As they often do, the idea for this book began with a very simple rhetorical question: how did we get from there to here? How, in a blink of time, did we morph from a tiny republic of three million mostly illiterate and ethnocentric Europeans, in 1787, to a nation of 300 million mostly well-educated and genetically diverse Americans who represent every ethnic group and culture on the planet?

Kicking the Loose Stones Home

By Paul VanDevelder

Excerpted from “Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire Through Indian Territory,” by Paul VanDevelder, published in April 2009 by Yale University Press.

Copyright © 2009 by Paul VanDevelder.

Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

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It’s a ridiculously loaded question, of course, and I had probably asked it many times before without ever giving the answer any serious thought - for its very ridiculousness.

With extraordinary patience, effort, and scholarship, historians and journalists have been writing thousand page books for well over a century in hopes of answering tiny slivers of that question. But on a warm June day in 1996, I must have been in an expansive mood. My mother and father and I happened to find ourselves a mere hundred miles apart, on opposite sides of the Great Smokey Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, so from our homes on opposite coasts, we had made a date the previous week to meet in the small mountain village of Cherokee on the North Carolina side of the mountains, where my mother was planning to visit the Eastern Band Cherokee tribal headquarters.

Having learned a great deal about sleuthing valuable information from historical records in a Library of Congress course on genealogy, my mom was hoping to track down some elusive answers to questions about her mother's murky family of origin.

Like most American families whose widely flung ancestors arrived on these shores more than a

[noteworthy]

generation or two ago, the thick trunk of our family tree is held upright by a deeply tangled and ever-expanding ball of roots. The family gene pool, as they say, is now as deep as the ocean we crossed to get here. In our case, most of these roots are easily traced backward until, willy-nilly, they disappear into the mists of time in Holland, England, Ireland, and Scotland. But due to reasons my grandmother took with her to her grave, her robust genetic make-up one that produced high cheekbones, bright eyes, great physical stamina, and thick curly hair - occupied its own special place in our family's treasure chest of speculation and rumor.

None of us ever heard my grandmother claim any particular lineage or country of origin. Any suggestion that she might have Indian blood flowing through her veins was met with a flash of anger and fierce denials. But Julia's life-long denials were not enough to stop her daughter, who, after all, had a stake in finding some answers. What's more, my mother knew enough about the South, about the lowly station of the Indian in the stigmatized social pecking order of the early 20th century, to recognize a culturally reinforced denial system when she saw one. So, with microfilm in hand, the three of us stepped into the small air-conditioned library beside the tribal offices and proceeded to thread the film from the National Archives through the glass plates of the reader, and onto the pick-up spool. Then, having no particular strategy or master plan, we probably did what most people do - we started walking backward toward those distant mists of time where all lines merge and disappear.

By searching the tribal rolls we hoped to find some relic or fragment of our family's story, one that filled in the remaining blanks to those familiar questions: Where did we come from, and how did we get from there to here?

As we peered at the screen and watched thousands of names on the tribal rolls scroll backwards through the decades, type written names soon became hand written entries in photographed ledger books. We slowed down, our lips moving in silence, as we read the names approaching the turn of the century. Then, with one slight twist of the knob, the picture froze on the screen. My mother's finger reached out and pointed at a name. I fiddled with the focus and magnified the page. Instinctively and simultaneously, our three heads moved closer to the screen. A moment, a very long moment, passed in speechless silence as we searched each other's eyes with astonished smiles. ”That's your great-grandmother, when she was a little girl, and all her brothers and sisters,“ said my mother. “My mom‘s mom. Well how about that! We were Indians, too!“

There we were, all tangled up together in one enormous and enigmatic ball of roots, indigenous citizen fused with the immigrant. The three of us were astonished and elated and not a little bewildered, as though we were meeting a long lost set of first cousins for the very first time. I was, if nothing else, the genetic embodiment of our nation's story. As I drove away from the little library in Cherokee, this seemed like a story worth telling, a crossing worth the storm.

Strewn throughout this story are the bloody fragments of things Americans have held dear and loathsome for more than two centuries. It has cowboys and Indians and aristocrats and common folk. It has legendary orators and egoistic geniuses, a 'new world order' and lost causes galore. But the protagonist, as stated or unstated in all tales that are truly epic and truly American, is the land itself, that landscape of paradox where boundless optimism and limitless possibility inevitably ran up against a bulwark of human appetites and stubborn desires. On the eve of his inauguration as our nation's first president. George Washington recognized that paradox in full measure. As his biographer Joseph Ellis tells us, Washington realized with mounting dread that “…what was politically essential for a viable American nation was ideologically at odds with what it claimed to stand for." A strong central government would inevitably come to mortal blows with the southern tyrants who were jealous of its authority, and if history could be used to measure the essential ingredients of man's nature, for good and ill, then for Washington a day was already marked in the future when the newly solemnized rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness“ would be vanquished by “venality, corruption, and prostitution of office for selfish ends.“ His Excellency's genius, concludes Ellis, was in his faultless and prescient judgments.

Out of that paradox, out of the deep fissure that divided political ideals and fervid aspirations, grew a resilient but lightening-struck sprig that become a nation, one that was fertilized across time by great themes that continue to shape our story: promise and possibility, betrayal and loss, and the ever hopeful quest for reconciliation. To fully appreciate how all this came about it is important for us to recognize that the dominant paradox in our story was written into America's script three centuries before Columbus stepped ashore on the island of Salvador, in 1492. In 12th Century Europe, a succession of brilliant Catholic Popes – men who wielded iron fists in order to rule and bring order to the geopolitical chaos known as medieval Christendom – also created

41

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the laws that enabled them to send crusading armies into the Holy Lands to confiscate land from Muslim ’heathen‘s and infidels.“ As we will see, after those laws evolved through the discovery-era courts of Spain and through the Elizabethan courts in England, they acquired the names by which we know them today: the Doctrine of Discovery and its more familiar offspring, eminent domain. More than half a millennium after the Pope‘s Christian armies sacked Jerusalem, the Medieval papacy‘s building blocks of empire would evolve into the legal fulcrums that the U.S. Congress used to open up western lands to migration and settlement – our story.

In our literature – where we sometimes find the best stories about ourselves – the American epic began taking shape the moment Fennimore Cooper turned Natty Bumpo loose into the primeval forest of his Leather Stocking tales. The path that Natty follows west marks a new frontier in human experience, a boundary that separated a new “American story” from the stuffy parlor dramas of England and France that were played out by gifted proxies on the eastern seaboard.

“Eastward I go only by force,“ wrote Thoreau, “while westward I go free.“ By the mid-nineteenth century, the story of going free had been spun through with enough romantic dust to lure a ceaseless procession of settlers toward the setting sun for half a century. Wagon caravans cut ten-inch deep ruts into limestone bedrock in eastern Oregon that are visible today. And on they came, many tens of thousands of them, drawn into the wilderness by desires so fierce and a sky so vast that the silence drove some of our heartiest dreamers to madness. By 1845, trail bosses started referring to the Oregon Trail as “the longest graveyard in the world.“ Yet onward they came, undeterred by the challenges, boldly kicking loose stones toward a home they had never seen, toward a distant day when the dream would either materialize in glory or disintegrate into ashes.

As indispensable to migration as the Conestoga wagon was the single legal tool that made it all possible - the Indian treaty. Indian treaties, hundreds of them, were bargained for by U.S. Congress as the “supreme law of the land“ under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution.

In time, as the contest for sovereignty between the states and the federal government ran irrevocably toward Civil War, Indian treaties would be grafted onto federal laws in a manner that subordinated state laws and regulations to compacts with the tribes. Just as George Washington feared in the closing days of his presidency, this fatal quirk of federalism would translate into incomprehensible misery for the American Indian in the 19th century. Nevertheless, as settlers gathered in increasing numbers on the western frontier and clamored for the right to subdue and populate the new 42

Yet onward they came, undeterred by the challenges, boldly kicking loose stones toward a home they had never seen, toward a distant day when the dream would either materialize in glory or disintegrate into ashes.

Edens of California and the Pacific northwest – the treaty was the government‘s most useful tool for securing a restless society's feverishly desired end. Throughout the half-century long era of westward migration, solemn “supreme law of the land“ compacts with the Indians became the immigrant's stepping-stones to empire.

This is the story of those metaphorical stones, including one stone in particular, and the paradoxical forces that laid them end to end, and the journey we made across them to the fulfillment of our nation‘s presumptions to “Manifest Destiny.“ By the end of his life, Cooper‘s Natty Bumpo realizes that the freedoms he imagined, freedoms so beautifully symbolized by the vast panorama of the American West, were cruel illusions. When Natty lies dying on the prairie as an old man, what he hears as life runs out of him is the sound of wagon wheels approaching in the distance. “The one true thing about every American frontier that seems concrete and immutable,” writes Charles Pierce, “is that it does not last. Sooner or later, everything that makes it a frontier collapses into maps and charts and roads and cities, and it becomes a place where we all go and live.” It is in those places, those towns and cities where we finally ran out of wilderness, that we are compelled to reconcile the paradoxes that brought us together in the first place. Like the currents of the Mississippi, or the force of gravity, a young and restless American society could no more escape the violent pull of westward migration than it could avoid the consequences of betrayal and loss that were its end product. But reconciliation, says the western writer William Kittredge, is America's only way out of that legacy, the only sensible path to a future worth living – our Last Chance Saloon.

For the weaver of tales that germinate in such storied soil, no source can substitute for walking the frozen ground in a February wind, for listening to the solitary voices of people whose bones were formed from its dust, or for the sizzle of starlight on a winter night, and the song of a meadowlark on a spring morning. In any search for the true and authentic America, one whose residue of betrayal and loss are redeemed by the endurance and reconciliation of its resilient citizens, there are no proxies for the people whose lives and voices animate these pages.

Because democracy demands thoughtful and informed citizens.

The North Dakota Humanities Council

is an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NDHC, and the other 55 state and territorial councils, were founded by the federal government on the premise that, “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present and a better view of the future.” Simply put, a nation that does not know why it exists, or what it stands for, cannot long be expected to flourish.

In this vein, the NDHC uses the tools of history, literature, philosophy, ethics, and archeology to understand and enhance American culture.

Support democratic ideals. Become a member of the ND Humanities Council.

See enclosed envelope for more information.

Recent Donors Philanthropist $1,000 - $2,499 Beulah CVB Cass County Historical Society Grand Forks Historical Society Pacesetter $500 - $999 Brenna Daugherty Ellen Feldman & Ronald Brockman Bottineau Community Theatre Minot State University - Bottineau Patron $250 - $499 Amy Bryn Bob Dambach Kate Haugen in honor of Leona Stadler Joseph Jastrzembski Bonnie Krenz Carol Ratchenski Jan Rowse Powers Lake Women’s Civic Club Bowman Regional Public Library Lake Region State College Velva School & Public Library Founder $100 - $249 Virginia Dambach Eliot Glassheim Kenneth J. Glass Sarah J. Smith Warren Associate $50 - $99 Verna Aleshire in honor of Harold Aleshire Richard Pokorny Contributor $49 and Below Gladys Dockter Edward & Vivian Mashek Selene Phillips Lynette Shattuck David Vorland Rick Wockovich Mary Olson

43

[noteworthy]

Rooftop Cocktail Parties

By Jonathan Twingley

My grandma had an uncle who lived to be nearly a hundred years old. His name was Abraham Running and he never had a regular job, he never married and he didn’t have any kids. Abraham Running had no conventional role in the world, and he certainly wouldn’t have fared very well in the world we live in now. Uncle Abe was a strange kind of character—a Bible-beater who never went to church, a hand-rolling cigarette smoker, a hot-dog-eater and he only ever took a bath when he absolutely had to. He made a slim living as a painter, but not for galleries or museums.

Abraham painted barns and houses and bedrooms in western North Dakota a hundred years ago, before the Interstate Highway was born. He lived with a black Labrador in a little lean-to out on the open prairie after his family disowned him, but he wasn’t unhappy. I visited him for the first time one summer when I was in college and he had some great stories to tell me and we laughed a lot.

He was ninety-six years old when I met him.

One time when he was young and looking for work, he told me, a woman had hired him to paint blue polka dots on her unborn baby’s bedroom ceiling. Abraham showed up at this woman’s house that evening with his worn-out paint brushes and a bucket of baby-blue house paint. She invited him into the house and showed him the bare little bedroom where she wanted the polka dots painted on the ceiling. She gave Abraham a ladder and left the room.

Abraham Running had never gone to school, but he was a clever man. He climbed the ladder up to the ceiling of the bedroom and used the paint can lid as a stencil to trace out the polka-dot circles on the ceiling with a lead pencil. He did this while the woman was out of the room, and he did it artfully, tracing the polka dots onto the ceiling to reflect the Little Dipper and Polaris—the North Star—somewhere out there above them in that prairie celestial sky.

As Abraham dipped one of his worn-out brushes into his can of baby-blue house paint he was distracted—the

44

[noteworthy]

woman who’d hired him was on her hands and knees on the bedroom floor, frantically spreading out copies of the McKenzie County Farmer, the local newspaper.

“What’re you doin’?” Abraham Running asked her from up there on the ladder, a half-lathered brush in his hand.

“I can’t read and paint at the same time!”

I felt a little bit like that a few summers ago. I was healthy and young, studying how to be an artist at a famous New York City art school in Lower Manhattan, trying to read the writing on the wall. It was an expensive art school and I’d come to New York City with a firm understanding of who I was: Six foot four, lanky, homegrown and a little bit handsome, I suppose, in an innocent sort of way, curious, too, eyes wide open. But how do you study to be an Artist? That turned out to be the only thing I wanted to know from the teachers there and it was costing me a lot of money to ask the question. After a year in New York City I’d been to about a thousand rooftop cocktail parties, and at each one about nine out of ten people, when asked “What do you do?” usually answered: “Oh, I’m an Arteest.” Video Arteests, Installation Arteests, Performance Arteests, Protester Arteests, Cardboard Arteests, a whole Crayola boxful of flashy people who could describe themselves a lot better than I could. I wasn’t so sure. Things were still in the oven for me. New York City wasn’t just a fork in the road, it was a portal to a universe that was going to take some figuring out and I was always suspicious of those kids who already had job descriptions. I was figuring out that I’d been an Arteest all my life, and also that that word—Arteest—wasn’t taught in grammar schools in North Dakota. We spelled the word differently where I grew up.

I’d sent out a single graduate school application six months earlier. I was about to graduate from the little liberal arts college I’d been attending in western Minnesota, just across the Red River from Fargo, North Dakota. I had researched graduate schools a bit, but applied to only one in the end, a rather prestigious art school in New York City. I put the application in the mail just for the hell of it, on some level, because I had to do

Excerpted from The Badlands Saloon: An Illustrated Novel, by Jonathan Twingley. Copyright© 2009 by Jonathan Twingley. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

45

[noteworthy]

something. A bachelor’s degree in Art doesn’t carry a lot of water in this world, and there was always that practical little part of my brain that said: “Listen, sonny-boy, if you get a master’s degree you can teach someday, and you’ll probably have to, because it doesn’t make any sense making a living painting pictures. Use your head.”

But I had never laid awake at night in North Dakota dreaming of leaving, like some kids did. I’d always been pretty much content wherever I was. I was just like that, I guess, content to spend my days and nights drawing and painting, way out of my head in whatever was happening on the canvas at the time. I didn’t need to go anywhere to really travel. Art is like that.

As it turned out, though, my application to the art school in New York City was accepted and it was time for me to pack a bag. I’d been living with my parents that summer in Bismarck, which is the capital of North Dakota, pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the state, right there on the Missouri River. For money I’d been traveling around the Upper Midwest—South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana— drawing five-dollar caricatures of people at outdoor art festivals, exaggerating their noses and ears and eyes all out of proportion for a quick laugh. It wasn’t High Art, what I was doing, but it paid my tuition each fall and I assumed the money would spend the same way in New York as it had in Minnesota.

And whenever I imagined the campus of the art school I saw a sprawling-lawn campus like the university I’d been studying at in Minnesota, with trees and fountains and gardens. I arranged for a car to pick me up at the airport— just me, a suitcase and a bagful of brushes and pens and sketchbooks. If you’ve ever taken a car into Manhattan from LaGuardia Airport you know that monumental feeling and the raging butterflies you get crossing the bridge over the East River, the buildings-upon-buildings rising up in front of you like in an animated film, but nothing Mickey Mouse about it, a concrete Grand Canyon that not even Walt Disney himself could’ve ever dreamed up.

I’d given the driver the address of the dormitory I’d signed up for on Twenty-third Street and Lexington Avenue—a formerly grand hotel called the Livermore. He dropped me off, I paid him and he left. And there I was: No sprawlinglawn campus in sight, no gardens or fountains, just the screams of taxicabs roaring down Lexington Avenue and the people-herds, the beggars and the beauties. I was in shock. In hindsight, I should have tried better to more realistically imagine where I was going, but I didn’t and the reality was incredibly exciting/terrifying/out-of-body, all at the same time. Because I’d never really even thought about a world beyond my mom and dad and little brother 46

back there in Bismarck, or the lazy little college town in Minnesota. How could anything even really exist outside of that world I grew up in? Sure, I’d seen the cities of the world in late-night cable TV movies, but those were all just fiction to me, just somebody else’s fantasy. I had all sorts of fantasies, but my whole real world had been North Dakota, and I’d been more or less happy there in that world, content.

I checked into my tiny little room at the former old hotel and saw my first New York City cockroach. That first week I only left the building for slices of pizza across the street at the Pakistani/Mexican deli/pizzeria. The rest of the time I spent looking out my dormitory window with a sketchbook, just drawing the traffic and the people with a pencil, trying to put everything in perspective, trying to make this new world real.

The graduate program I enrolled in was a good one.

There were sixteen or seventeen other students with me in the program, a diverse group of people—several Koreans, a woman from Italy, a kid from Santa Fe who was really into Zen Buddhism, who carried himself solemnly and made pictures of flowers and streams and rocks.

There were a couple of middle-aged students, too, taking a break from their real worlds to blow off some steam.

There was a girl from California and a comic book artist from Long Island. And me. I was the token Midwesterner, it turned out, but that wasn’t especially unique because nobody’s unique in New York City.

It was a two-year program, after which I’d be Oliver Clay,

[noteworthy]

Master of Fine Art, or at least that’s how the paper would read. That first year involved the usual things—projects and critiques, lots of walking around exploring the city, drawing and painting in the studio till the early-morning hours. It was a spectacular world and a spectacular time in my life. The second month I was in New York City, Allen Ginsberg gave a reading at St. Mark’s Church down in the Village—right there where he lived—where he and Jack and Bill Burroughs had bent all those minds. It was a rainy night and the wind was whipping around Twentythird Street and I was walking along there down Second Avenue, happy as the clams. New York City felt like a dream to me. It wasn’t Bismarck or Minnesota or wherever I’d ever been before, but someplace altogether new. I was far from home and feeling adventurous, off course and there. There there there.

My cheap little umbrella broke along the way so I threw it into a beat-up old New York City garbage can and got to the church early and wet. Allen Ginsberg was there mingling around, shaking hands and kissing the young boys on the lips. I’d never seen that before, but I knew Ginsberg’s poetry well. I’d read Howl on the roof of the art department building back in Minnesota at sunset and it was a revelation—forceful/free energy that couldn’t be tied down by any poetical norms or traditions. It was like a rifle shot reading that poem.

I sat right up in the front row that night at St. Mark’s Church, ten feet away from Allen Ginsberg as he read his poems and sang righteous hymns like Ballad of the Skeletons. People were whooping and hollering and it was really something to be there. Midway through the evening he was telling a story—setting up a poem—and a lone voice up in the balcony of the church hollered out—kind of a long, loud slur: “Thhhaaaattt’ss not how it haaaappened, Allen.” It was Gregory Corso, standing up there in the balcony in a haze of blue smoke, leaning against the railing and everybody in the audience down below laughed.

Ginsberg looked up at Corso there in the balcony of the church and asked: “Well, how did it go, Greg?” The whole thing was a hoot.

The evening raged on and on like that and the rain had stopped by the time the reading was over and I walked back to my little rented room on Lexington Avenue with wings on my heels.

Later that first year I got a call from a classmate of mine saying that Allen Ginsberg had died. She was friends with friends of Ginsberg’s and she knew that I liked his energy.

She told me that there was going to be a private memorial service for him at a Buddhist temple there in Manhattan the following morning, gave me the address and said

to get there early. I was exhausted at the time—I’d been painting all day and half the night—but it seemed like one of those things that a guy shouldn’t miss if he can help it, so I walked across town early the next morning, over to West Twenty-second Street to a nondescript building and took the elevator up to the seventh floor. I took off my shoes and entered that little urban temple and knelt down on loafy pillows. There was incense burning and pictures of Allen Ginsberg and flowers on a little altar at the front of the room and eventually the celebrities started to arrive, and then the monks started their moaning and cymbalclinking, smoke and smoke and smoke. The ritual was intricate and lasted for hours and hours and nobody said a word—at least not in the English language. The whole thing was a long ways from the Sunday-morning Lutheran church services I was used to back in North Dakota. I felt like a spy behind enemy lines, except there weren’t any enemies there, just strangers who felt like friends, and poetry.

I went back to my dreary little jailhouse dormitory room on Lexington Avenue that afternoon and made drawings from memory of everyone who’d been there that morning at the Twenty-second Street/seventh-floor Buddhist temple, all the stars and musicians and the lesser celebrities that’d come to pay their respects. I put those drawings into a manila envelope and brought them uptown to Rolling Stone magazine on Sixth Avenue—the Avenue of the Americas—because it all seemed like a perfect journalistic piece for them, a guerrilla paparazzi batch of drawings that they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. I was sure they’d be thrilled to have those drawings. But I never heard from the editors at that magazine.

It was an exciting year, that first one in New York City, but I hadn’t left the Midwest because of any great unrest. I was torn between the two places in a lot of ways. Minnesota, in the fall, when the leaves on the trees were exploding with hot colors on quiet streets, or the Missouri River on the Fourth of July, Bismarck and the State Capitol building— the tallest building in North Dakota—a thousand miles of windblown country roads in every direction, where the cows are your only audience. And New York City with its smells and neighborhoods, pizza delivery boys on bikes, suicidal bicycle messengers and all-night everything; Broadway and Coney Island, Rockefeller Plaza, Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building and King Kong. New York City was an explosion like a star that might burn itself out someday, but not tomorrow and not anytime soon. Both places made perfect sense to me and I loved both places for different reasons. When you grow up in wide-open, prairie spaces, dreaming becomes a big part of reality. And New York City itself was a dream, a real-time movie set where my life—at least for a little while—felt newborn-baby new.

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[plain thinking]

It’s the Return That Kills Us

By Clay S. Jenkinson

In the most basic sense, each of us is on a journey from birth to death. If you are reading this essay, your journey is not done yet, and unless you plan to engineer your own death, you do not know how or where or under what circumstances the journey is going to end. It’s a mystery. Some of you know where you will be buried. Some not. Death is the only absolute. Death, said Hamlet, using a journey metaphor of his own, is “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

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[plain thinking]

We travel to escape. We travel to discover. We travel to encounter. We travel to find the grail. We travel to see the Wizard. We travel for kicks. We travel to leave flowers at Graceland or the memorial wall. We travel because we were instructed to deliver a message or plant a flag in the Sea of Tranquility. We travel to get a question answered— at Delphi or Tibet. We travel to get rid of ourselves. We travel to find ourselves. We travel because we are restless. We travel because we are looking for something that we think doesn’t exist at home.

St. Paul (then still Saul) was on the road to Damascus, smack in the middle of his career as a persecutor of Christians, “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,” when “suddenly,” according to the Book of Acts, “a light from heaven flashed about him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’” After Jesus told him to shape up and do what the beleaguered Christians bid him do, “For three days [Paul] was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.” This is a journey story in the most profound sense of the term. I believe that in some sense, at some level, this is what every journeyer seeks, what every sojourner most fears and most yearns for, the journey that alters the course of a life. Or in Paul’s case, the course of the world.

In the ideal journey story, we start out in some functional but imperfect state.

In the ideal journey story, we start out in some functional but imperfect state. Have a series of adventures on the road that have the cumulative effect of challenging our way of seeing life and even our core identity. At some point this brings on a crisis in which we discover something that makes it impossible ever to see life in quite the same way again.

It’s the return that kills us.

Meriwether Lewis came home from his Voyage of Northwestern Discovery and killed himself. Just three years after his triumphant transcontinental trek (“my late tour” he liked to call it), Lewis (now the governor of Louisiana Territory) stopped at a lonely roadside inn on the Natchez Trace (October 1809), had dinner, smoked a pipe, retired to his room, put a pistol to his head and breast, and committed suicide. Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin came back to earth in 1969 after the stupendous technological success of Apollo 11 and had a nervous breakdown. “When you’ve been to the moon,” he said, “what’s left?” Sir Richard Francis Burton returned to London from Africa in 1858 expecting to be feted as the explorer who finally solved the mystery of the source of the Nile. When he landed on native soil, he learned that his mere lieutenant, John Speke, who had returned to England 16 days previously, had betrayed Burton and claimed the Nile source for himself. In Africa, Burton discovered Lake Tanganyika. Back in London he made a sad discovery about human nature. The problem in returning to the shore is that a giant step for a man is almost always swallowed up and trivialized by the small steps, small dreams, small imagination, and small generosity of mankind.

Homecomings are difficult. Coleridge’s ancient mariner discovers that a: it’s impossible to explain the thing that is so important to you and makes so little sense to everyone else; and b: the epiphanies of the great journey are, in the end, a great burden that has to be carried through life by anyone who does not merely shrug them off. By the end of his travels, Gulliver believes he is finally fully sane and enlightened. Everyone else

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[plain thinking]

Clearwater, the Snake, and the Columbia Rivers and reached the Pacific Ocean in midNovember, 1805. He had gone where no white man had gone before.

regards him as having gone mad from the accumulated stresses of his journeys.

It may be that homecomings are so problematic because they remind us so sadly of how little we are actually “metamorphosed” by the journey. At the end of each of my serious solo journeys I have made stern but enlightened resolutions of things I am never under any circumstances going to do again—watch TV, eat pizza, slip into sedentariness, let money matter in my life . . . . The essential comedy of life—the weakness of my character—can be measured by how many days or weeks pass before the first Big Mac enters my gullet and I’m watching reruns of Three’s Company.

On June 13, 1805, Meriwether Lewis “discovered” the Great Falls of the Missouri River (“this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object”). A month later he “discovered” the source of the “mighty and, heretofore, deemed endless Missouri River.” Like a colossus he bestrode the Missouri “with one foot on either side of this little rivulet and thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River.”

After making historic first contact with the Shoshone Indians west of today’s Dillon, Montana, and surviving the transit of the Bitterroot Mountains (“those tremendous mountains”), Lewis descended the

50

And yet when the many banquets and the interminable heroic and patriotic toasts were finished—as at some point they inevitably are, for Lewis or John Glenn or Michael Phelps, and the traveler has been re-absorbed into the drab routines of the diurnal world, and there’s no more dining out on the narrative--then the trouble began and Meriwether Lewis spiraled down into alcoholism, melancholia, and early death in a shabby hostelry. President Jefferson made the mistake of appointing Lewis to a ho hum political office at the portal of the very wilderness he had opened, but Lewis’s life would probably have descended into chaos no matter what he tried to do after his return from the Pacific. When you have been to the source of the Missouri River, what’s left? And how do you write about experiences that are so far beyond the diurnal routine of life that they cannot be communicated to those who dwell fully in the diurnal routine of life?

At a key moment in his journey, on August 16, 1805, in the middle of absolute nowhere, Lewis handed his tricorner hat and his rifle to the Shoshone leader Cameahwait, and let Cameahwait place his ermine skin tippet onto Lewis’s shoulders. Lewis made this fabulous gesture—handing over the last two tokens of his status as a “civilized man,” his hat and his gun, to his Indian host—to prove that he was not leading the Shoshone leadership into an ambush.Then, in one of the great moments in American history, Lewis found it possible to step outside himself and gaze in from the outside. As far from a glass of wine and a newspaper as it was possible to be, several thousand miles from Thomas Jefferson’s stabilizing personality, Meriwether Lewis looked into a mirror. He was standing in a place where no mirror had ever yet appeared, in Lewis’s phrase, in a landscape

[plain thinking]

“which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man.”

Here’s what Lewis saw in the mirror: “my hair deshivled and skin well browned with the sun I wanted no further addition to make me a complet Indian in appearance.” At that moment in the heart of the American West, Meriwether Lewis realized that he was “completely metamorphosed.”

It need hardly be said that Lewis’s metamorphosis could not have occurred at mile 20 of the 7689-mile transcontinental journey. It could not have occurred if he were, on August 16, 1805, safely surrounded by the crowd of 33 that departed from Fort Mandan. He could not have become “a complete Indian” if he had driven a pickup camper to that same spot in Montana. It was the combination of privation and anxiety and fear and aloneness in the vast wilderness that led Lewis to that moment. In the course of 15 months and 2500 miles of hard travel, Lewis had shed layer after layer of the thin skin of civilization until he was reduced to an elemental existence. That was the foundation. More than that, however, was the challenge that the Other represented. Cameahwait was a fellow human being with a completely different operating system. Any time we truly let ourselves see human life radically refashioned in the Other but with equal validity and dignity, it calls into question the cultural habits we consider “normal” and cling to with such tenacity. Lewis had to earn that moment. In a sense, he walked 2500 miles from an outpost of his culture to get his soul ripe for a close encounter of the profoundest kind. It’s the journey that is the one essential factor in this story.

Take the journey away and there is no metamorphosis. Add the industrial revolution to the journey, and it is instantly less likely to bring about such an epiphany.

When Lewis came back to civilization he had his portrait painted in Philadelphia, the second city of the British-speaking world, the cultural capital of the United States, by the French artist C.B.J.F. de St. Memin. I believe that the famous portrait of Lewis standing in a somewhat effeminate pose wearing the ermine skin tippet given to him by Cameahwait was his attempt to capture and freeze the moment in which he was “completely metamorphosed” in the American West. I believe that was the greatest moment of Meriwether Lewis’s remarkable life. I believe that moment was Lewis’s peak life experience precisely because of how far he had ventured from the safety of the cultural reinforcements of our home civilization. It was Lewis’s moment of maximum exposure. It was a moment of cultural nakedness, but it was also a moment in which, no doubt for the first and last time in his life, he exchanged his core identity with that of the Other, in this case a principal leader of the Shoshone Indian nation. To exchange cultural tokens in this way was not a mere survival strategy at a pivotal moment in the expedition in the presence of an anxietyridden western tribe. It was a moment of supreme risk for Meriwether Lewis. It can be argued that it was a risk that Lewis should not have taken. Four years, one month, and 25 days later Lewis would be dead. Lewis’s road to Damascus portended not a conversion but a collapse of core character integration.

Any time we truly let ourselves see human life radically refashioned in the Other but with equal validity and dignity, it calls into question the cultural habits we consider “normal” and cling to with such tenacity.

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Literary London

May 2010

Travel in the footsteps of Dickens!

Visit the haunts of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Jekyll!

Experience the city of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats, Milton, and Wilde! Dr. Jamieson Ridenhour will lead you on a series of walking tours through the two thousand year old center of culture and empire: London, greatest of literary cities.

atrom

Travel & Tour

think.

We have ways of making you A state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the mission of the North Dakota Humanities Council is to enrich the civic, intellectual, and cultural life of all North Dakotans.

Programs MUSEUM ON MAIN STREET

TR FORUM

The Museum on Main Street program brings the resources of the Smithsonian Institute to communities across North Dakota.

In cooperation with the Cowboy Hall of Fame, the NDHC explores the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt.

EVERETT ALBERS CHAUTAUQUA

NORTH DAKOTA CENTER FOR THE BOOK

Chautauqua scholars bring first-person portrayals of historic figures to stages across the state.

NORTH STAR DAKOTAN To provide teachers with an educational and well-written illustrated text as they teach North Dakota history in their classrooms, the NDHC has produced seven newspaper tabloids called the North Star Dakotan, complete with teacher’s guides. Now available online at www.nd-studies.org.

PICTURING AMERICA At a time when most students still must trek to a major city to view great art, the National Endowment for the Humanities is working to bring some of our nation’s most remarkable works directly to them.

INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PUBLIC LIFE In partnership with UND, the institute brings philosophy out of the academy and onto the airwaves.

ERIC SEVAREID SYMPOSIUM In April 2010, the NDHC, in cooperation with the Dakota Institute, will take an indepth look at one of North Dakota’s most famous native sons.

With a firm belief in the cultural significance of literature, the North Dakota Center for the Book uses the resources and prestige of the Library of Congress to stimulate public interest in books and reading.

DAKOTA DISCUSSIONS In an effort to revitalize public dialogue, Dakota Discussions offers film and book discussions as mediums for renewing civic connections.

READ NORTH DAKOTA Read North Dakota encourages readers, writers, and educators to enjoy good literature rooted in our own place by identifying relevant book titles and authors on a web site, in printed materials, and through discussion groups in the community and the classroom.

Visit www.readnd.org.

LETTERS ABOUT LITERATURE Letters About Literature is a national program that encourages strong analytic reading skills and the ability to express oneself clearly through writing, both of which are foundational for success in higher education, as well as career potential.

GRANT MAKING The NDHC offers grant funds to institutions or organizations to enhance their ability to deliver humanities programs and opportunities.

Join the Discussion. Support the humanities in your community by becoming a member of the North Dakota Humanities Council. www.nd-humanities.org 45

North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@nd-humanities.org

www.nd-humanities.org

We have ways of making you think.

Board of Directors CHAIR Joseph Jastrzembski, Minot VICE CHAIR Carole L. Kline, Fargo Najla Amundson, Fargo Barbara Andrist, Crosby Frederick Baker, Bismarck Jay Basquiat, Bismarck Tami Carmichael, Grand Forks Virginia Dambach, Fargo Eric Furuseth, Minot Kara Geiger, Mandan Eliot Glassheim, Grand Forks Kate Haugen, Fargo Janelle Masters, Mandan Jim Norris, Fargo Christopher Rausch, Bismarck STAFF Brenna Daugherty, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Sarah Smith Warren, Program Officer D. Jerome Tweton, Senior Consultant The North Dakota Humanities Council is a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Not all those who wander are lost” — J.R.R. Tolkien