CONTEMPORARY NORTH DAKOTA
Nothing, probably, arouses the indignation of a loyal North Dakotan or South Dakotan more than hearing his State referred to as "Dakota." Just as an earnest Californian would display indignation at being disposed of as merely a "Westerner", so the man from North Dakota resents having his identity fogged over by the blanket term "Dakotan." And rightfully so; for, while he finds no fault with his neighbors, he is quite different from them, and quite within his rights in insisting on the distinct character of his own State.
The person who asks, "What sort of place is North Dakota?" may get a variety of answers, all of them true, and still be far from a complete picture of the State. He may be told vaguely, "It's out West somewhere," or more specifically, "North Dakota is a wheat State," or "Isn't that where the farmers have this Nonpartisan League?" These answers are only partly correct, for they barely touch on the two major problems, economics and politics, in regard to which North Dakota is now coming of age.
This is a young State. Ruts left by the wagon trains of early explorers, military expeditions, and home seekers have not yet been effaced from the prairies. Red men and white men, who hunted buffalo and fought at the Little Big Horn, who saw the railroads push their gleaming paths across the Plains, who recall a puny young man named Theodore Roosevelt hunting in the Badlands with his short-stocked rifle, still survive to tell their tales. In those fledgling days, the land was rich with promise. Bonanza farms unfolded their ample acres of wheat, thousands of cattle roamed unchecked in the gullies and over the plains of the western counties.
The word spread, and from Europe and the eastern States came men and women to break the new soil. Sod houses and barns and frame homes and windmills set their seal on the prairies. Tons of wheat, thousands of cattle and sheep and horses attested to the fertility of North Dakota.
For more than half a century the soil was exploited recklessly. Then suddenly exhaustion and drought drove home the growing realization that this exploitation could not go on. Water conservation, diversified farming, and dams quickly became part of the agricultural scheme, and are repairing the damage of unthinking abuse. Huge mineral resources have been recognized and are being developed commercially, bringing a new aspect to North Dakota's economy.
Marketing of farm products has had reverberations in the economic life of the State, and has made its people alert to changing social trends. Characteristically, in the eastern portion of the State, where soil is richer, and rainfall more plentiful, the people are more conservative; while to the west, where the climate is more arid and the soil less productive, the "isms" flourish, providing a stronghold for the leftist elements of the State's tumultuous political parties. Because of antagonism to control of early agrarian activities by out-of-State business interests, the Nonpartisan League, with its socialistic platform, was formed, and many of its enterprises have been established, some successfully, some otherwise. Cooperative economy is prominent in the social consciousness of agricultural North Dakota, and such groups as the Farmers' Union emphasize the trend toward cooperatives, strengthening their position by supplying members with purely social activities, as well as with hard economic problems into which to get their teeth.
Freely admitted is the rural character of the State, and there is seldom an attempt to cover native crudities with a veneer of eastern culture. The few writers in the State recognize and honor the possibilities of their native material; and each year finds a scattered handful of books, usually verse, telling of the North Dakota known to them and to seven hundred thousand other North Dakotans.
What is the North Dakota they know? A State of unbounded plains and hills and Badlands—elbowroom. Superb sunsets. High winds and tumbleweed. Farms and plows and sweeping fields. Gophers flashing across the road. Little towns crowded on Saturday night, and busy cities shipping out the products of North Dakota and supplying the needs of the producers. Sudden blinding, isolating blizzards, and soft, fragrant spring days with tiny sprouts of grain peering greenly through the topsoil. Pasque flower and cactus, flame lily, and fields of yellow mustard. The sad, slow wail of a coyote on the still prairie. People—Norwegians, Germans, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Icelanders, but all Americans. Square dances in barn lofts, and college "proms" with corsages and grand marches. Teachers building fires with numbed hands in stoves of icy one-room schools. Men in unaccustomed "best clothes" sitting in majestic legislative halls of a skyscraper statehouse. Political fires, sometimes smouldering, sometimes flaring, always burning.
Endless facets are apparent in the temper and tenor of life, thought, and action of the people of this State, still a new people, pioneers—
"Brave spirits stirred with strange unrest,
They found broad waters and new lands,
And carved the empires of the west."