The Language of Cottonwoods

Essays on the Future of North Dakota

Clay Jenkinson

• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781646631001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

North Dakota is regarded as flyover country, but extraordinary narratives play out on this improbable Great Plains landscape. North Dakota is the home of one of the world's largest nuclear missile fields, one of the first mosques in America, a zany collection of roadside attractions, resurgent Native American communities, one of the nation's most productive oil fields, and the magnificent Little Missouri River badlands.

Join Clay Jenkinson as he searches for spirit of place, cultural identity, sacred landscapes, and a future for rural America at the center of the continent, where Lewis and Clark wintered, Sitting Bull resisted the conquest, and Theodore Roosevelt became America's leading conservationist and the exemplar of the strenuous life.

Part travelogue, part love song to the prairie, and above all, a vision for a cultural renaissance at the heart of the continent, The Language of Cottonwoods will make you laugh, cry, and think, and inspire you to visit North Dakota.

Medicine Rock:

Seeking the Sacred in the Middle of Nowhere

“The sacred is like rain. It falls everywhere but pools in certain places.”

—Lakota elder

The official state map of North Dakota highlights two places with red ink in Grant County, a larger-than-average, irregularly shaped county south and west of the state capital in Bismarck. One of the designated highlights, at the top of the county, is Heart Butte Dam, a modest dam on a still more modest stream that creates a modest but important summer recreational area in a state that has few lakes. The other highlight, at the bottom of the county, is the Cannonball Stage Station SHS (State Historic Site). Grant County has a population of 2,300 or so, most of whom live along the east-west ribbon of ND state Highway 21. In the villages of Lark, Carson, Leith, Heil, Elgin, and New Leipzig. Heil and New Leipzig give you a good sense of the demographics—White folks whose forebears were Germans and Germans from Russia. According to the most recent census, there are thirty-four Native Americans and two African Americans living in Grant County, which encompasses 1,666 square miles, more territory than the sovereign state of Rhode Island with its 1,212 square miles and a population of 1.6 million. The term we like to use out here is “sparsely settled.” If this abandoned piece of America sounds like it might be chosen as a rural haven for White supremacists, stay tuned.

The official state highway map of North Dakota does not mark Medicine Rock SHS. Although the State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND) owns, maintains, and interprets the eleven-acre sacred site, it prefers not to advertise its existence, not wishing to encourage merely casual tourists to venture for this purpose into the heart of the empty quarter in south central North Dakota. Partly this is a way of protecting the unsupervised site from vandals. Partly it is a way of limiting the number of people who cross the fields and pasture of the private property owner who ranches at the base of the butte that serves as the pedestal beneath the Medicine Rock. Mention of Medicine Rock SHS is probably also omitted from state maps to prevent visitors from disappointment.

Aside from a historical marker at the top of the butte, a chain link fence that tightly envelops the Medicine Rock itself, and the residuum of petroglyphs once incised by man or God on the sandstone outcropping, there is nothing there. Even in an empty state it is about as isolated a place as you could imagine. If only the ranch headquarters were not nestled on the south end of the butte, you could really enjoy some agoraphobia there.

If Medicine Rock weren’t marked on county maps and more detailed North Dakota atlases, you would never find it. You might not find it even with those maps, because Medicine Rock is more or less identical to half a dozen other nondescript sandstone outcroppings in the vicinity, any one of which might be the home of the sacred oracle. A tiny, hand-painted white sign (Medicine Rock ) attached to a fencepost at the end of the east-west gravel road (78th St. SW) points toward the bluff. Medicine Rock is surrounded by private ranch and farmland in every direction. A man named Delbert Rosin lives on the farm at the base of the bluff. His son Andrew lives in a new home nearby. The Rosins plant their crops right up to the crotch of the hill until the incline makes it impossible to maneuver a tractor safely. They turn their cows loose on the corn stubble in the fall. The result is a dark excremental simulacrum of a polka dot grassland. Welcome to North Dakota sacred ground.

Blue late-model Subaru full of gas. A pristine unopened bag of red Twizzlers “licorice” at my side. Camera. Smartphone (camera). The DeLorme North Dakota Atlas and Gazetteer, featuring back roads, recreation sites, and GPS grids. Light coat. Heavy coat. Gloves and stocking cap. Serious boots just in case. Winter emergency kit. The indispensable 1938 WPA Guide to North Dakota. A fresh pouch of Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco, string, a cotton bandanna handkerchief, and a pocketknife. And a perfect Saturday-in-late-March companion, a friend who would never deface a monument, almost never trespass, and could never be disappointed in visiting a lightly interpreted, largely insubstantial historical site in the middle of nowhere.

To get to the Medicine Rock you leave Bismarck in an internal combustion vehicle. There’s compromise number one, for no true pilgrim in the pre-Euro-American era got there except on foot or, only at the very end of the period, on horseback. If you had to walk to Medicine Rock from the Missouri River, up the serpentine Cannonball River, you’d have a couple of days to think about your spiritual questions before you reached the site. Not much else to do on that journey except keep an eye out for clear pools of water, watch for potential enemies, kill a deer or a buffalo if you happened upon one at a hungry moment, and gaze at the endless broken countryside. And pray. From high above the land the countryside looks mottled and dimpled in every direction forever, like an LP phonograph record that has baked all summer in the sun, with the thin brown ribbon of the Cannonball winding in oxbows and s-curves through the viewshed, in no great hurry to reach the buxom Missouri. If it weren’t for the Homestead Act (1862), the Dawes Act (1887), and the plow, you’d be in the heart of America’s central grasslands, a vast region environmental historian Dan Flores calls American Serengeti.

You drive from Bismarck to Mandan across the Missouri River, and then south of Mandan on ND 6 to Flasher and then to Carson on ND 21. These are wee vestigial villages so abandoned that they scarcely register as human gathering places. Carson is, however (ahem), the county seat of Grant County, population: 284. Probably one in ten residents is employed by the county. Which presents something of a paradox. At birthhood, states were divided into a plethora of counties (3,142 nationwide) so that everyone in every jurisdiction could drive a buggy or a horse to the local seat of government and back again in a single day. That’s why North Dakota has fifty-three counties, one for every 14,000 people. The county officers (the registrar of deeds, the local judge, the state’s attorney, the county treasurer) were meant to serve the larger population in a frugal, efficient, and localized way. Now, ironically, it is the surrounding population that props up the county government, not the other way around, in part because in North Dakota’s twenty-some most marginal counties a significant percentage of the local population now works directly for county government. Whenever some outside consultant suggests that North Dakota consolidate its counties (from fifty-three to say twenty or fifteen or even five) to save money, avoid duplication of services, and to acknowledge that conditions of transportation are not in the twenty-first century what they were in the late nineteenth, the rural people of North Dakota cry out in anguish. No matter what they say publicly about the beauty of “local government” and “knowing your county commissioner,” their chief concern is where local folks would work if no longer for the county.

In towns like these, the gas station and convenience store is out on the highway. One, two or three saloons. Maybe a post office. Perhaps a senior citizens’ center in an empty downtown store. Possibly a joint tanning booth/latte facility. It’s at least possible that one of the old bank buildings is now an Airbnb. I might be describing Carson, but it could equally be Robinson or Wing or Sykeston or Leonard or any number of other ghostly towns on the plains. On any given day you are most likely to find folks in the bar or the post office. I love these towns, though I would not live in one of them.

There are four churches in Carson: one Presbyterian, two Lutheran, one Catholic. Are they sacred places? They represent a Judeo-Christian heritage that began more than 2,000 years ago in a place far, far away across the globe. No matter what the “author” of the Book of Mormon Joseph Smith might say, the origins of Christianity had absolutely nothing to do with the Western Hemisphere or the New World, unless God annexes continents the way Dallas does suburbs. Christianity was not shaped by the landscape of the Great Plains, or by the climate, the quality of sky, the wildlife, the grass, the wind (John 3:8), the watercourses, or the spirit of place of North Dakota. It was alien to the spiritually intense indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years and had learned not only to live very lightly on the land (a violation of Genesis 1:28), but also to harmonize their cultures quite beautifully into the larger circles of life available here, in this place, 6,399 miles from Bethlehem. Jesus never saw a pronghorn antelope or a prairie dog. Or Wall Drug. But if the Catholics of Grant County, ND, have gathered at St. Theresa Catholic Church for ninety-two years, surely that place is sacred in its own, somewhat more contingent, way.

You drive from Carson almost to Elgin, to the eastern suburbs of Elgin (population 642). The town website says it all. “Elgin is nestled in the rolling hills of southwestern North Dakota. Elgin has a strong business sector, with Jacobson Memorial Hospital Care Center at the hub. Our community has a wide range of churches [five], available housing [more by the month], and a great school system.” I’d say south central North Dakota. “Nestled” is the kind of word you pay your young webmaster/marketer to craft, fresh from her communications degree at NDSU. The headline of the Elgin website declares, “Not in the fast lane. Life in the best lane.” All communities make the most of whatever they have and make the best of what they lack. Still, if this is the best lane, I’ll eat my head. I suppose there are people in the greater Elgin metroplex who regard life there as close to ideal, but if you need more than gas or a loaf of bread and orange juice, you will be driving either to New Salem (36.8 miles) or Mandan (58.2) for basic Maslovian amenities. Home entertainment systems are nearly the only remaining entertainment.

But wait! Grant County High School won the State Class B Girls basketball championship in 2018—Grant County 53, Killdeer 44. Small communities remember these moments for decades. Often enough a fading billboard on the edge of town announces the heroic achievement to anyone who passes through. If you have never seen a whole rural community go gaga over a successful sports team (parades, receptions, ecumenical religious services, “Coyote Days” sponsored by the Main Street merchants, many heedless breachings of the wall of separation between church and state) you have not experienced one of the most delightful and life-affirming rites still left in America. To observe an entire town make the pilgrimage en masse to the state Class B tournament in Bismarck or Minot (after four pep rallies and a prayer service), in a tight purposeful caravan, to eat together at Applebee’s and then go on together to the game, every person as excited as if it were thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• North Dakota 101
• An Acquired Taste
• Spirit of Place on the Northern Plains
• So Who Are We Now?
• On Certain Effigies:
• Medicine Rock:
• “Where Alph the Sacred River Ran:”
• The Heart of Everything That Is
• Capitalism on Crack:
• The Mosque, the Missile, the Martyr, the Methane—and the Mass
• The Future of North Dakota
• The Language of Cottonwoods
• Appendix:
• Acknowledgments