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Like most people in my part of the country, I spend a
lot of time daydreaming my way along Interstate 94. Even if you like plains
landscapes, this can be a sleepy drive.
What helps is to become aware of the layers atop which you are skimming.
I-94 is essentially the route of old Highway 10. The frontage road near
my house, in fact, is Old 10. If you pull off at Exit 331, the Casselton
exit, you’ll find another two-mile stretch of Old 10 going west.
Detailed maps pre-dating the interstate locate a landmark called the “Can
Pile” here, on the south side of the highway. The Can Pile, a gas
station dating from the 1930s, served traffic on Old 10, and its pile
of cans still stands—decorated each year with lights for Christmas.
Let’s go a little deeper: back in the 1920s, before Highway 10, as
I learn from Clason’s North Dakota Green Guide (1920), there was
the National Parks Highway, also known as the Red Trail, Fargo to Glendive.
I pity the travelers who relied on Clason. This guide observes, “The
state is well supplied with good roads. The prairie soil makes a wonderfully
durable and easily maintained road, under moderate traffic.” Clason
calls the Red Trail a “Highly Improved Road,” whatever that
meant.
A good way to become aware of these earlier layers of experience is to
travel with the WPA guide to North Dakota, published by the Federal Writers
Project in 1938. You can follow the tours it lays out, sort of, except
where they have been flooded by dams or otherwise obliterated by unthinking
progress—anyway, it’s fun to try.
Pretty soon you become aware of all sorts of layers beyond just highway
construction—layers of human habitation. For instance, much of the
country along Old 10 was settled first by Yankees, that is, Anglo-Americans
who brought money to start businesses and bonanza farms. As in so many
parts of the plains, the Yankees made their fortunes and then gave way
to European immigrants—Norwegians and Moravians in the areas I’m
talking about.
Although outnumbered, the Yankees did not give way willingly in matters
of culture. The men joined the state historical society, the women the
Daughters of the American Revolution, and between them they tried to ensure
that Anglo-American history would define the country, making the immigrants
take mere supporting roles.
When the Dacotah Chapter of the DAR organized in Fargo in 1919, it looked
around for something to do in a land where no revolutionary blood had
spilled, and it hit on the Sibley expedition against the Dakota in 1863.
The Sibley campaign, coming out of Minnesota, was an altogether deplorable
affair by which Sibley killed a few Indians, got a few of his own men
killed, and accomplished nothing.
Sibley was clueless about conditions on the plains. His perceptions of
Indian actions are laughable. You read his reports, and it’s obvious
he is trying to sound like a Civil War commander. His accounts are full
of unwieldy movements, seizure of strategic positions, claims of victory.
He thinks he’s in a war, when in fact what’s going on is that
the Indians are luring him around the prairies, trying to keep their families
clear of any conflict and waiting for him to wear out and go home. He
also hates the country, saying that central North Dakota is “for
the most part uninhabitable. If the devil were permitted to select a residence
upon the earth, he would probably choose this particular district for
an abode, with the redskins' murdering and plundering bands as his ready
ministers, to verify by their ruthless deeds his diabolical hate to all
who belong to a Christian race.”
Still, the name “Henry Hastings Sibley” was irresistible to
Yankees seeking Anglo-American martial heroes, hence the DAR memorial
to Sibley that has stood two miles west of Buffalo, North Dakota, on the
Red Trail, since 1927.
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