Some Of The Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota

I have a pretty good North Dakota library. I know of at least three or four private North Dakota book collections that are probably bigger or better, but I’ve spent some time and money working on mine, and while I haven’t read every one of my North Dakota books cover to cover, I’ve read at least a little bit of every one. I’ve been reading some I hadn’t finished the past few months and re-reading some favorites (North Dakota winters are good for that), and fretting that most of us North Dakotans don’t know as much about our state as we should. Some really good writers write some really good stuff about our state. So, to encourage you (and me) to read more North Dakota books, I’m going to start a little series here called “Some Of The Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota.”

In this series, I’m going to grab excerpts, mostly from books, although from time to time I may reprint whole articles and hope the authors don’t sue me. I’ll try to keep them down to five or six hundred words. I’ll tell you a little about the author and give you enough information on book excerpts so that you can find the book yourself. I’m betting most of these will be in a public library somewhere in North Dakota. Start with your own public library. If they don’t have it, they can usually get it on inter-library loan for you.

I buy a lot of my books from abe.com. You can also try alibris.com, and more and more, amazon.com is finding used North Dakota books as well. In Bismarck, the Owl has a nice little North Dakota bookshelf with fairly reasonable prices. Feel free to suggest other sources in comments at the end of this article.

I’m not going to lend you my books. I’ve done that too many times and had to go buy a second copy because I couldn’t remember who I loaned a specific book to and never got it back.

I’ll take nominations from you, if you want to send me pieces of your own favorite writings (or send me books – I have no qualms about accepting books from others – that’s different). If you and I disagree that what you send really is some of the best, then we’ll let Lillian – she of the MLS and 25 years experience as a Librarian – cast the deciding vote. But mostly I’ll trust your judgment.

I’ll just give you a couple of samples today, and then get to work putting together a lineup. And waiting for suggestions from you.

The first excerpt is from “Badlands and Broncho Trails,” published in Bismarck in 1922, a short book by Lewis F. Crawford, former superintendent of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, among other things, and it is his comparison of North Dakota’s Badlands and the mountains. It has a good made-up word in it. I don’t know how he got that by his editors, but I say “Good for him.” It also has a little sexist phrase in it, but never mind that. It was 1922, and probably earned him the title of "gentleman."

Size is only one element of grandeur. Beauty is usually made up of fine lines and rich colorings, and depends largely upon its transitoriness. It defies the camera. Beauty, whether in woman or nature, is never static. The camera always is. Mountains are too vast to get a close up view and too far away to give distinctiveness; they are grand, sublime, majestic, but are static lifeless pictures, unchanging through the ages, everlasting to everlasting. The Badlands are willfully coquettish. Mountains are the cold marble statues with unspeaking lips and unseeing eyes; the Badlands are the living actors with flushed faces, beaming countenances and pulsing blood. The sublimity of the mountains is awe-inspiring and reduces the beholder to nothingness, while that of the Badlands is palpitating, alluring, ecstatic; the one soul subduing, the other soul accruing.

The second is a short poem by Paul Southworth Bliss, from his collection “The Rye is the Sea,” published in Bismarck in 1936, and the last, as far as I can tell, of his 8 volumes of poetry, much of it about North Dakota. The poem was written in Mandan, he says, on a spring day in 1936, a day much like today, and I thought of it as I watched the brief thunderstorm this morning (that was a treat, wasn’t it?). Bliss gives a date and location for each of his poems. I like that.

SOUTHWIND IN APRIL

Southwind in April stirs
Marsh elders in the lane;
Kinghead and cockleburs
Are white in the rain.

Red willows in the river,
Deep-flooded but warm;
Gray cottonwoods a-quiver
In the April storm.

Southwind in April--how
It draws winter’s sting!
Southwind in April, now
I know it is Spring.

--April 26, 1936, Mandan, N.D.

I’ll tell you more about those two authors later, because I like them both a lot, and will share more of their work with you. I hope you like them too.