Why I Write

The major benefit of writing these articles shows me how little I know and how much I need to learn about a subject before putting pen to paper. I remember well how I started writing them. The book titled WARHORSE was popular a few years back along with a movie of the same name. What about all these horses on the battlefield and where did they come from? Further reading into the subject revealed that European farmers could no longer furnish the necessary number of animals for the battlefields, so buyers came to the United States to purchase them. They covered the countryside and found a goodly supply of them in the Dakotas, including right here in our home area. 

     The creative juices started flowing enough to compose a story about it and follow a whim to send it to this paper’s editor. When the next edition arrived, I could’ve fallen out of my chair. She had placed it on the front page! Well, one article has followed another, and several years and and nearly three hundred stories later an active curiosity still tells me to continue researching and writing. 

    Lately my topic concerns different landforms in Ransom County.  As a youth the drifts and depressions of the sand hills east of Sheldon became familiar. My mother’s family went there each year to pick chokecherries, and I would climb and slide on those hills until we went home with my shoes filled with sand. Four cemeteries in that area hold the final resting place for many departed relatives which results in our regular visits.

     Curiosity about those hills led to finding historical material. People had settled there and tried to farm it, but dry years proved much of the land unsuitable for cultivation. An interesting character named Rexford Tugwell, aka Rex the Red, entered the scene as a member of FDR’s administration. To make the long story short, he saw to those farmers being offered incentives to move off the land and free it up to become the Sheyenne National Grassland.

     The Sheyenne River flows with gusto through our county, and many times I have crossed and recrossed its deep channel and driven through its beautiful valley. What about it, I wondered. One man has traced its beginning at the headwaters and driven along its length while recounting geology, history, and stories of natives and settlers who comprise its culture. Titled “STEPPING TWICE INTO THE RIVER: Following Dakota Waters,” Robert King took a year to leisurely drive along its span of miles and make comments.  

     When King came to the area where General Sibley’s Camp Hayes, Dead Colt Creek,  and Okiedan Butte sat directly across the river from each other, I especially took note. From there upriver to the not-quite-successful gold fields near Lisbon, a wealth of information makes one want to write about it. All the while being interested, I’d completely forgotten a book  on my shelves, the new in 2016 NORTH DAKOTA’S GEOLOGIC LEGACY by John P. Bluemle. It  holds information galore about our state’s landscape including Ransom County.

     Over his career as the state geologist, Bluemle worked in every corner of the state which makes him the top expert in our landforms. In speaking about the sand hills, he writes, “The Ransom County dunes are beautiful places to enjoy undisturbed native prairie in the Sheyenne National Grasslands, the only National Grasslands in the tallgrass prairie region of the United States.” He gives an apt description of how the wind works on and reshapes those hills.

          He informs us about the Standing Rock and its makeup of metamorphic gneiss, a combination of quartz, feldspar, and mica. He may have been the one who wrote the signs located at the site because the wording looks very familiar. The rock was brought to North Dakota from Ontario by glaciers. The hill itself was pushed by a glacier a distance of about three miles and stands 110 feet above the surrounding area. The whole site stood as a place for Indian ceremonials and offerings.

     In 1970 Bluemle studied the geology of Ransom County long enough for one of his children to be born in Lisbon. He formed some conclusions about the gold strike near Lisbon. Referring to the preglacial period, he thinks any gold here probably came northeastward in a stream flowing from the Black Hills three million years ago.

     Going back to the stated premise of this article, there exists many things that I know little or nothing about, but if I can identify it, it is fun to explore and add knowledge to my world. Joan Baez, the folksinger, says it well, “As long as one keeps searching, the answers come.”