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“I may not know who I am,” Wallace Stegner
once wrote, “but I know where I came from.” He knew how important
it is to situate yourself. This is what he called “the sense of place.”
Unfortunately, many people of the Great Plains are not so clear about
the sense of place as was Stegner. Sharon Butala, who lives and writes
near Stegner’s old home of Eastend, Saskatchewan, told me she wrote
an essay to be included in a new book being published in Canada, and she
referred to her home country as “the Great Plains.” The publisher
had the essay reviewed by an academic in Winnipeg who insisted she could
not call her own country “the Great Plains,” that the only appropriate
term in Canada was “the Prairies.”
This was odd, as it was Henry Kelsey, explorer for the Hudson Bay Company,
who first called the grassy middle of North America “Great Plains”
when he emerged from the northern forest in what is now Saskatchewan in
1690. I also checked the map in the classic travel narrative of the Canadian
west, W.F. Butler’s Great Lone Land, 1872, and right there in the
middle of the Canadian Prairies it says, “Great Plains.”
In the United States it is the term “Midwest” that causes confusion
about the Great Plains. People think that “Midwest” is a term
referring to something midway east and west, between the East and the
West. In fact, as the geographer James Shortridge explains, the term “Middle
West” arose to designate something between north and south. In the
19th century there was the Southwest, and there was the Northwest (Montana,
the Dakotas, and Minnesota), and then there was the Middle West—
basically Kansas and Nebraska. In the 20th century, though, the labels
“Middle West” and “Midwest” expanded to the east and
north.
Midway into this century people in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota
coined the term “Upper Midwest” so as to include themselves
in this emerging region. Subsequently people in eastern North Dakota who
sent their insurance premiums east to Lutheran Brotherhood, rooted for
the Vikings, liked to shop in Minneapolis, and kept cabins in the Minnesota
lake country also adopted the “Upper Midwest” label. The problem
is that no part of North Dakota is at all Midwestern. North Dakota is
the most plains state of all—the most level, the least timbered,
the most perfectly semiarid. So some namers of North Dakota began to speak
of “the Upper Great Plains,” which is to say, they are really
mixed up.
Then folks in Montana got into the naming game by commencing to call eastern
Montana “the High Plains.” Probably they had seen too many Clint
Eastwood movies. The High Plains are a distinct province of the plains
stretching from West Texas through my old home in western Kansas up to
Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and nowhere near Montana. Now there is even
a newspaper published in Fargo, North Dakota, that calls itself the High
Plains Reader. Is this some sort of cruel joke? I can refer you to plenty
of people in Grand Forks who, during the Big Water of 1997, wished that
they lived on some high plains!
Situate yourself, Stegner said. Work out a sense of place that is true
to where you are.
That’s what I tried to do when I lived in Emporia, Kansas. I lived
on the same street as had the great Progressive, and undoubtedly Midwestern,
editor, William Allen White, and within smelling range of the Bunge soybean
processing plant. On the other hand, the other side of town smelled of
beef, beef from the plains. I concluded that the boundary of the Great
Plains ran right up Commercial Street, that Emporia was half Midwestern
and half Great Plains.
This taught me a lesson, so that when I prepared fifteen years ago to
move to Fargo, North Dakota, I looked for a house in West Fargo, home
of the Packers. No more Midwestern identity crises for me. As for your
own sense of place—work it out for yourself.
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