Our Best Days Are Behind Us
You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe said, but I do, and I do so without discomfort. Although I get a little tired of replaying the buzzer-...
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Plains Folk
Plains Folk is a commentary devoted to life on the great plains of North Dakota. Written by Tom Isern of West Fargo, North Dakota, and read in newspapers across the region for years, Plains...
Episodes
20 of 38 episodesSomething in the Earth
One thing I noticed was, there are a lot of eagles along the middle reaches of the Missouri River. Bald eagles in the trees, eagles soaring...
The Plains I Love
So I think the main reason my friends in McIntosh County invited me down to speak at their chokecherry festival this year was that a few yea...
Chokecherry Adventures
I’ve been describing the community culture of berry-picking that emerged during the 1880s, focusing first on juneberries and then on chokech...
Young Folks Are Busy Picking
Our unfortunately named native black charry, the chokecherry, has become a festive feature of life on the northern plains. In recent years t...
America 250
There’s a sense across the country that we have made a dog’s breakfast of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of American independence. I d...
The Dakotas
Not a native of the Flickertail State, nevertheless, in the course of decades, I have acquired a complex of defensive sensitivities about it...
Our Ability to See Places
In my mail appears a thoughtful gift, a book, inscribed to me by one of the authors: The Missouri: America’s Longest River, edited by Jon K....
Homesteading Virtues
It says something about me as a historian that I am preoccupied with the origins of things. I mean, I seldom just launch into an abstract in...
Cowboys and Indians
A half-century ago—actually, a little more than that—I charted my course as a professional historian by choosing to specialize in Western Am...
Tractors on the Wrong Road
I know I used to have one, but it’s disappeared, along with the cause it celebrated—one of those old black-mesh American Agriculture ball ca...
The Chapeau de Morès
In sublime overview of the valley of the Little Missouri River, in the Badlands of North Dakota, stands a simple but elegant residence from...
First Fascist
A powerful new biography of Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, here generally known as the Marquis de Morès, has conseq...
The Corn-cob Pipe
James W. Foley Jr., who on his passing in 1939 was eulogized as “North Dakota’s unofficial poet laureate,” has always intrigued me. Not beca...
Cooking with Olive Johnson
An old friend left an orphan cookbook on our doorstep, and it proved to be of more than passing interest. It is a centennial cookbook from t...
Unfinished Business
Two conferences of regional scholars, one in Lincoln, Nebraska, the other in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, have taken the future of the Great P...
Aurora
Since publication of Thom Tammaro’s new book of poems, Aurora, by North Dakota State University Press, I have been present at two venues whe...
Lilac Days
Finally I found it, this song people were telling me about; found it in the Alfred G. Arvold Collection of the Institute for Regional Studie...
New Life Will Arise
There is this group of people that gathers now and then in a converted gas station in Rapid City for what they call the Morning Fill Up. The...
The Hungry Bachelor
Christmas Eve, 2015, on the Montana Hi-Line, somewhere near Glasgow, in a one-room school called Willow Bend. Miss Miller had prepared her p...