Stateside with Rosalea Barker: Dakota

Sign one, get another one free! Yes, it’s a twofer this week, my pretties, as North and South Dakota were both admitted to the Union on November 2, 1889. It’s an official secret which Act of Admission President Benjamin Harrison signed first, so they’re listed as the 39th and 40th states according to their alphabetical order.

Geographically, if not politically, Dakota is primarily divided east/west by the Missouri River, with the eastern part of the Dakotas suited to wheat growing, and the western part more suited to ranching. People of Scandinavian descent dominate the former; and those of Germanic descent, the latter. In 1915, the Scandinavians in North Dakota formed the Nonpartisan League, which stood up to the out-of-state banks, railroad companies, and grain millers by creating their own state-owned bank and mill. To this day, the Democratic Party in North Dakota has “NPL” tacked onto its name.

By contrast, in 1983, the South Dakota legislature took less than 24 hours to clear the way for Citibank to do business in that state, after the bank had fled New York’s consumer-loan rate restrictions, according to writer Kathleen Norris.

North and South Dakota are two of seven states in the US to have twice as many US Senators as House Reps. Perhaps that disproportionate power is why two states were created instead of just one. House representation is based on population numbers but every state has two Senators, no matter that they might have a population of 36,961,664 (California) or 646,844 (North Dakota) and 812,383 (South Dakota).

Some areas of the Dakotas are so sparsely populated that from time to time the suggestion resurfaces that all the population should be moved out in order to return it to its natural state as a bison range. The Homestead Act of 1863, which had the dual purpose of creating transcontinental railroads and settling the West, created neat 160-acre rectangular sections opened up to anyone who could get there and lay claim to land that had been taken from the Native Americans. But, as western Dakota native Kathleen Norris says in her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography:

“Few appreciate the harsh beauty of a land that rolls like the ocean floor it once was, where dry winds scour out buttes, and the temperature can reach 110 degrees above or plunge to 30 degrees below zero for a week or more. Say what you will about our climate, in Dakota we say it keeps the riff raff out.”

On a recent train trip I was told by someone who grew up in eastern North Dakota—which has a different landscape due to being covered by the Wisconsin Ice Sheet in eons past—about one winter when the snow fell so quickly and hard, that he and his brother dug out a snow cave around a frozen-dead horse standing upright, and had room to sit on it and still have a snow roof above them. Just recently—in summertime—the heaviest hailstone recorded in the US fell from the sky in central South Dakota.

Say what you will about the climate keeping the riff raff out, it doesn’t seem to have kept the riff raff out of office, as this little ditty about a Republican lawmaker in the North Dakota state legislature attests:

URL: http://youtu.be/voeb4Yc30Gc

Down in South Dakota, it seems there are so few Democratic voters that the party isn’t even fielding a candidate in this year’s US Senate race. Republican John Thune will be running unopposed, according to this newspaper article. It is the first time in state history that one of the major political parties will not have a candidate for that race on the ballot, and there will be no independent or minor party candidates. As the article says:

“With the exception of Senate races in the South, where Democrats in effect enjoyed almost one-party rule until 1978, unopposed U.S. Senate races have been rare.

“That dates to 1914, the first election year after the Constitution was amended to require that senators be elected by popular vote. Before that, state legislatures chose who would represent their states in the U.S. Senate.”

But on a personal level, the word “Dakota” resonates most not with politics, landscapes, weather, nor even John Wayne movies, but with a grass airstrip in New Plymouth, New Zealand, where I boarded my first DC3, aka Dakota, at the tender age of five and fell in love with flying. Here is an old British newsreel of a US transcontinental DC3 flight.

URL: http://youtu.be/6F5e-uc9AKI

Nighty night!

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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