Driving Tours in North Dakota - Raising North Dakota (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Destinations Special: Summer Road Trips
Raising North Dakota (Cont.)


	"Mute testimony to nature's grim fury": decaying North Dakota farms in the thirties and forties (Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photography Collection)

TOWNS LIKE SANGER are one of the reasons I love North Dakota, what I call the Halloween State, a haunted land crowded with ghosts and suffering from an acute inferiority complex—a place described by one of its famous natives, the late CBS news anchor Eric Sevareid, as a "meaningless rectangle" on the "cold, flat top of our country." Cold and flat, to be sure. But, for me, fraught with significance. When I first crossed into North Dakota the week before, I had been exhilarated instantly by the drama of abandonment, the pageantry of forced marches in the direction of zero, the comedy of vines pulling down walls.

The Census Bureau reports that, during the 1990s, North Dakota's white population declined from 604,142 to 593,181. Of North Dakota's 53 counties, 47 of them

When I first crossed into North Dakota, I was exhilarated by the pageantry of forced marches in the direction of zero, the comedy of vines pulling down walls.

lost population. When you get to the 2000 Census Web page for the state, it reads like the parish registers of French villages during the Black Death: Bottineau had lost 862 souls since 1990, almost 11 percent of its population; Cavalier, minus 1,233, a 20 percent decline; Renville, down 550 for a net loss of 17 percent. In 1990 there were 5,383 people living in LaMoure; in 2000, only 4,701. In 1950, Hettinger boasted 7,100 names on its rolls; in 2000, a mere 2,715.

Old people die in North Dakota, of course, just as babies are born. What accounts for much of this staggering loss of humanity is the chronic illness of the farm economy, especially in the western parts of the state—the river country sometimes called the Coteau du Missouri—and across North Dakota's midsection. The decline in agricultural income is due to depressed prices for cattle and grain coupled with the rising costs of fuel, equipment, and fertilizer and a lingering drought that, in some parts of the state, has entered its third year.

More for me, I thought as I drove toward Slope County, in the state's parched southwestern corner, feeling only a small twinge of guilt



	"Mute testimony to nature's grim fury": decaying North Dakota farms in the thirties and forties (Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photography Collection)

for lusting after land in a place where people are losing theirs. According to a couple of guidebooks I was packing, Silent Towns on the Prairie and Ghosts on a Sea of Grass, Slope's county seat, Amidon, is a ghost town. Because it lies inside the Little Missouri National Grassland and just north of White Butte—at 3,506 feet the state's highest point—I got excited: Here was protected range and, I hoped, embarrassingly cheap real estate. But on the cold and windy day that I drove into town, I was disappointed to discover that the joint was jumping.

"Do I look like a ghost?" a cattle rancher asked me outside the courthouse after I showed him my books.

Doris Preiss, the deputy county treasurer, whose brother is the mayor, told me that she'd heard rumors of Amidon's death, but they were exaggerated. "None of our houses are abandoned," she said. "Well, yes, we're losing people all the time. I'm 68, and one of the youngest in town. But then there are also people like Linn."

Thirty-something Linn Holloway, the deputy auditor, and her husband moved to Slope County from the Seattle area, where he'd been a shipfitter; he now works as a welder, commuting 50 miles north to Dickinson. They bought 40 acres outside town with three barns, a big shop, and a solid four-bedroom house, all for $74,000. Then they moved in some horses.

"Although everything's brown this year, we've got snapshots showing our place in July, a couple years back, as lush and green as anything in Seattle," Holloway said.

I hoped she didn't see me salivating. Once Kitty and I sold our Montana riverfront, we'd have $300,000 to shop with. Kitty was eager to leave our bottomland, because the sun rarely appears in the winter and the air is smudged by the puke belt surrounding a paper mill upwind, pollution that aggravates her allergies. I began calculating the number of acres you'd need to surround yourself with to eliminate the friction that causes neighbors on abutting ten-acre ranchettes to despise one another. Fifty? Probably something more like a hundred.

"North Dakota is a well-kept secret," Holloway told me. "You don't have to lock your house when you go on vacation. You can leave your car running on cold days in front of the stores in Dickinson. You can buy houses in Slope built before World War I, well-maintained, with original oak paneling and floors, for less than $30,000, and move them wherever you want. People are always moving houses around."

That's the good news. But as I reminded myself while driving out of town, North Dakota is no place for wimps. The summers are hot, and the winters will break your balls. (The record high is 121, at Steele, and the low is minus 60, at Parshall.) Dakotans like to believe that their long winters encourage reflection and reading, and the open view across the prairie inspires a broad-minded intellectual armature. The Ojibwa Indians, according to North Dakota anthropologist James Howard, found their spirits lifted and a new swagger in their step when they were forced from their dank forest heartland around the Great Lakes and out onto the shiny plains.

On the downside, the state is past due for a biblical shitstorm like the Winter of the Blue Snow, which began in 1886, when a bulge of arctic air strangled the northern plains for six months and gale-force winds piled snow into drifts so high that the following spring, cattle ranchers like the young Theodore Roosevelt came across their dead beeves suspended in cottonwoods. The Winter of the Blue Snow helped put an end to the fenceless, open-range era of cattle ranching and ruined Roosevelt's operations around Medora. Still, as he said later about his character-building stint here, "if it had not been for my years in North Dakota, I never would have become president of the United States."

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