The Bloody River Of The North

Erskine Caldwell is best known for two of his early novels, “God’s Little Acre” and “Tobacco Road.” He actually wrote 25 novels and about a dozen works of non-fiction, including, in 1976, a book of essays titled “Afternoons in Mid-America,” his last published work except for his autobiography, published after his death in 1987. “Afternoons in Mid-America” is a series of essays written during and after a car trip with his wife Virginia through mid-America, the premise being that he had set out to find out if it was true, as his father had explained the legend to him, that the shadows of similar objects were longer on the west side of the Mississippi River than they were on the east side. His trip led him through Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Here’s a short excerpt from his North Dakota visit.

In the seemingly limitless flat valley of fertile land in the southeast corner of North Dakota, there is an area of dark, rich soil which has been the enduring gift of a providential glacier of the ice age, and on the banks of its waterways is a tree-shaded former gathering place of a tribe of Sioux Indians. This campground was called Wahpeton by the Indians, and Wahpeton is now the home of several thousand white American farmers and storekeepers and their families.

Here, in the beginning, as if to make certain its presence upon the earth would be unfailingly noticeable for a long time to come, a river was formed by the retreating glacier and was made to flow northward through the valley—while all the other rivers both east and west of it were flowing southward, to the Gulf of Mexico. This strange backward-running river, meandering slowly through the wilderness to Hudson Bay and the Arctic Circle, has come to be known as the Red River of the North.

Two clear-running streams converge only a few yards from the Wahpeton bridge, these waterways being the broad Bois de Sioux and the rippling Ottertail Rivers. And there, in full view of all who stop to gaze upon it, the two rivers create a whirlpool that often is wildly turbulent.

Swirling from this whirlpool the Red River of the North has its abrupt origin, and it immediately begins its long passage of hundreds and hundreds of miles through the Dakota valley and deep into Canada.

The churning whirlpool at the confluence of the Bois de Sioux and the Ottertail has fascinated mankind since early times, when the tribes of Sioux Indians drove buffalo herds across the treeless Dakota plains to be slaughtered in the summer shade of the riverside elms and cottonwoods.

In the language of the Indians, Wahpeton was a descriptive word indicating the location of running water and shady woodland. And it was here in Wahpeton that whenever the Sioux gathered on the banks of the whirlpool to slaughter buffalo by the hundreds for meat and hides, the clear water ran red with buffalo blood, to give the river flowing north a vivid name. However, when the first Americans came upon the scene to barter for buffalo hides, they failed to translate correctly the Indian name for the colorful stream, and so the Bloody River of the North never came to appear by its authentic name in the charts and maps of the region.

Now, in modern times, the whirlpool of the three rivers, when seen from the Wahpeton bridge, continues to swirl and gurgle as it has for centuries past, and the only buffalo to be seen is a single ancient bull grazing diligently on the well-trampled turf at the nearby Wahpeton Zoo.

Well, Erskine, that’s one version. Thank you for that. Beyond the history lesson, I’ve been fascinated since I first read this about his choice of the word “Americans” for the white traders, dismissing the natives as Americans. I want to think it was carelessness rather than ignorance or bigotry. Maybe this isn’t “One of the Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota,” but it was fun to read.

Caldwell’s visit to North Dakota in the summer of 1974, I think it was, consumes about 30 pages of the book. At the time I was a reporter for The Dickinson Press, and I had friends (fellow college students) who worked evenings at the two major hotels in Dickinson, the Holiday Inn and the Ramada, and who would call me whenever someone famous checked into their hotels. One evening I got a call telling me that Erskine Caldwell had checked into the Ramada (luckily for me this friend was an English major and not a math major—he had actually heard of Caldwell). Turns out Caldwell was spending a couple of days in Dickinson, and I wangled an interview for The Press. The highlight of my story, as I recall, was his habit of carrying 100 watt light bulbs with him for his motel stays. In the book which resulted from this trip, Caldwell ends each chapter with a letter to a friend of his in France. Here’s the letter that appeared at the end of the North Dakota chapter. It has nothing to do with North Dakota, but I’m sharing it because it is fun—and because he told it to me in person.

Dear Marcel,

As you know, we here in the United States are slowly recovering the best we can from an ordeal put upon us by a big-business scheme to make America prosperous by manipulating the law of supply and demand. This modernization of fundamental economics was accomplished, for the most part, by popularizing throw-away Coke cans, non-returnable beer bottles, and self-destructing automobiles.

Fortunately, that era of folly and nonsense is coming to an end, but the ill effects are going to be with us for a long, long time. We are now busily boycotting brewing companies that persist in bottling beer in non-returnable containers, and we are sending children out to salvage aluminum Coke cans in city dumps, and we are sicking Ralph Nader on automobile makers who are slow to begin making everlasting automobiles. More than that, concerned citizens are urging us to buy every gasoline-saving device that comes on the market and begging us to lower thermostats in winter and raise them in summer, in order to conserve scarce oil reserves and electrical energy.
As sympathetic as I could be in this matter, nonetheless I am selfish enough to want adequate illumination for reading after dark. I’m admitting this because I’ve discovered during the past few weeks of travel that there are many motel operators who have found that they can lower their costs and increase their earnings, while at the same time be publicly commended for conserving energy, by removing ordinary-wattage bulbs and installing low-wattage bulbs in their sleeping rooms.

There are many television addicts in the land, of course, and they prefer having dim lights in a motel room while watching their favorite programs. But there are some other travelers, and I am one of them, who find that reading a newspaper or magazine or book for an hour or so is more appealing than television viewing before hopefully bedding down for a night’s restful sleep.

The bulb-switching motel operators had me baffled and muttering for weeks about dim lighting in their rooms. But no longer! Now when I go into a motel room and find a 25-watt bulb in a reading lamp, I remain calm and unprotesting. The reason I can remain unperturbed is that now when I go into the room I have my own personal 100-watt bulb which I carry with me wherever I go for the night. I read well and my eyes are not strained, and the next morning I’m always careful to remove my 100-watt (1710 lumens) bulb from the motel lamp and return the 25-watt (190 lumens) bulb to its original socket.

Of course, environmentalists and conservationists may claim that the use of 1710 lumens instead of 190 lumens depletes vital electrical energy. However, I can point to the fact that a television set consumes far more energy than my 100-watt bulb and, besides that, the latter can never be blamed for making the slightest contribution to noise pollution.

Best wishes,
Erskine