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Fall 2001

From Feikema To Manfred, From The Big Sioux Basin To The Northern Plains

Arthur R. Huseboe Augustana College - Sioux Falls, [email protected]

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Huseboe, Arthur R., "From Feikema To Manfred, From The Big Sioux Basin To The Northern Plains" (2001). Great Plains Quarterly. 2208. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2208

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. FROM FEIKEMA TO MANFRED, FROM THE BIG SIOUX BASIN TO THE NORTHERN PLAINS

ARTHUR R. HUSEBOE

In 1991, when he had just turned seventy­ them. He was asked about his writing methods nine years old, Frederick Manfred was inter­ and the motivations for some of his characters viewed at his Luverne, , home by and even about his favorite Fred Manfred book. three young writers for an article that was to Then there was the inevitable question about appear in the Agassiz Review that spring. 1 He Manfred's invention of the term "" answered questions about his earliest urges to as a name for his home territory and whether become a novelist when he was writing under the creation of Sioux land was influenced by the pen name Feike Feikema, questions about William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. people who had encouraged his ambitions, and Manfred's answer, a crystallization of the doz­ about the autobiographical sources for his ens of times he had explained his creation, novels, or his rumes, as he preferred to call was that the reason for "Sioux land" was a prac­ tical one. In his manuscripts, he had gotten tired of typing over and over the names of the four adjacent states that made up his home territory-, , Minnesota, and KEY WORDS: cartography, Feike Feikema, Nebraska. Frederick Manfred, Northern Plains, Sioux­ land literature CREATING "SIOUXLAND"

Arthur R. Huseboe is Director of the Center for Western The decision to coin a name for the Studies and holder of the National Endowment for the had come in 1945, when he was finishing his Humanities Chair in Regional Heritage at Augustana third novel, This Is the Year, and he had said to College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. His publications himself, include The Selected Letters of Frederick Manfred, 1932-1954 (University of Nebraska Press, 1989). "Why don't I just drop all that state stuff and give the name for that [GPQ 21 (Fa1l200l): 309-19) drainage basin?" So I went through a bunch

309 310 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2001

of different things like "Big Sioux River that when they're reduced to book page Country" and so on, but I finally settled on size the little tails and so will vanish.s Sioux land. And I drew up a map, which is in the end pages of the book This Is the Year. The maps that were intended to add fur­ I drew that up in '46, when I was finishing ther reality were indeed used in the end pages typing the book, and in '47, in April, when of the first edition of This Is the Year in 1947, it came out, it was in the end pages. And and they are clearly those that Manfred had within two months, all the advertising guys provided to Doubleday in the summer of 1946. in Sioux City and Sioux Falls glommed onto They are labeled as "Maps redrawn from origi­ it because it saved them from having to nals by Feike Feikema," and there are two of mention all these states .... So unlike them, the first labeled "Siouxland" and the Yoknapatawpha, which has never been second "Pier's Farm and Neighborhood."6 picked up by anybody else except Faulkner, Manfred considered them essential to the nar­ mine was taken by these people. Then I rative, and he referred to the Siouxland map became aware of Wessex and Hardy ... and throughout his career as the best directory to John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley and so on. the region that was his home territory, his But I did it for a practical reason. I got sick "magical place." In a 1990 essay, "The of typing those states over and over again.2 Siouxlander," written about the same time as the Agassiz Review interview, Manfred elabo­ Manfred knew well the land that he wrote rated on the popularity of the term Siouxland about in This Is the Year. He had been a farmer throughout the region. The advertising people, there most of his life, and, as he wrote to col­ he pointed out, could now substitute the all­ lege friend John Huizenga on 10 November purpose "Sioux land" in place of the names of 1945,3 he had traveled all across that Big Sioux the four adjacent states that comprised his drainage basin in preparing for the writing of home territory. Hence, said Manfred, there is the novel and had even gathered flowers, the Siouxland Conference in sports, Sioux­ weeds, tree leaves, and bits of mud and stone land Insurance, the Siouxland Heritage Mu­ to be identified later by experts. He had stud­ seums (operated jointly by Sioux Falls and ied the weather reports for the region as well Minnehaha County), and so on.7 And even in order to make certain that he had every today, we should note, the big AM voice of detail right. To literary critic Van Wyck Brooks WNAX radio in Yankton announces "Sioux­ he wrote (6 May 1946) about Siouxland: "Al­ land weather" and "Siouxland highs and lows" ready I've peopled it with many towns, mostly and so on periodically throughout the day and fictions (though real) and people, situations, throughout the year. The Sioux Falls stations, and tragedies,"4 and to George Shively of on the other hand, tend to use for their broad­ Doubleday, he wrote on 17 August 1946, cast the term "Sioux Empire," a desig­ nation that Manfred despised. About the maps. Could they be used? I feel The two maps from This Is the Year are far that it's important for the reader to get a less expansive than the ambitious big signal good visual outline of the country, of the from WNAX, which stretches out from farm and its environs, and of Sioux land (my Yankton in a great circle that-according to literary territory). If these aren't good the station-reaches most of South Dakota enough for reproduction, then we'd better and Nebraska and large areas of southwest have new ones made. (Maps in Doughty's Minnesota and northwest Iowa and can be Travels in Arabia Deserta were of great aid.) heard even in southern and (Also, I think the maps will pass as an northern . The map of Sioux land ac­ author's scratching. As a professional map­ cording to Manfred, however, barely includes maker, they wouldn't, of course.) I think the town of Yankton, which sits along the FROM FEIKEMA TO MANFRED 311

FIG. 1. Frederick Manfred. Photograph by Larry Risser. Courtesy of Frederick Manfred Estate.

Missouri River on the far left margin. And In the selection of those names, Manfred the state of Nebraska, which looms large in indulged to the full his fondness for coined WNAX's outreach, has no interest for him, names and odd and unusual names, and he for there are no names of towns or cities often placed real towns some distance from written in, contrary to southeastern South Da­ their true locations, for no apparent reason. kota, southwestern Minnesota, and north­ In the southeastern corner of South Dakota, western Iowa, all of which Manfred has lavishly for example, it is farther from Vermillion to endowed with names of villages and towns. Richland in the east than it is from Vermillion 312 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2001

to Beresford to the north-northeast. In real­ Sioux Falls in 1985.10 It is in part a reminis­ ity, Beresford is 30 percent farther away-some cence of his childhood and youth in north­ six miles farther. The endpaper map has a west Iowa and in part an encomium to the town "Haywire" located about halfway be­ virtues of Siouxland folk. Manfred remembers tween Vermillion and Beresford, but no such the daily routine of running the seven-and-a­ town exists where Manfred has placed it, west half miles to high school and back home and ofInterstate 29 at about the location of Union the unforgettable pleasure of being given an County State Park. He places the fictitious ecstatic greeting on his return by the Feikema village "Welcome" at the location of Hudson, dog, Rover. In his first months away from South Dakota, and the equally fictitious "Last home, he learned how poignantly he could Chance" across the Sioux River on the Iowa miss his brothers and his father-and his dog­ side. There really is a Newton Hills wooded and he came to realize in his Calvin College area south of Canton, but no "Grub," South English courses how thoroughly his own Dakota, to the west-southwest of the Hills. Siouxland language was unlike formal English. Near Sioux Falls there are towns and villages Later, while working in New Jersey, his home­ named Tea and Pumpkin Center but no "Phi­ sickness for Siouxland returned so often that losophy," "Two-Bits," "Sometimes," or "Dell he retreated there for a while, to games Valley" (a modification of the real Dell Rap­ and cob fights and made-up games with his ids). On the Iowa side of the Big Sioux River brothers. Manfred has made wholesale substitutions for As to the virtues he had discovered in the names of real towns. Now we find Siouxland after a lifetime there, Manfred says, "Whitebone" (Luverne), "Hazard," "Starum," "There are other reasons, too, why home was "Rock Falls," "Yellow Smoke," "Heaven," so magical. I had heroes at home. My father "Blow Out," "Amen," "Hello," "Chokecherry was one." And he proceeds to tell stories about Corner," "Passage," "Last Chance," "Jerusa­ his father's quick-witted responses in difficult lem," "Million Dollar Corner," "Anxious," and situations on the farm, and about two of his "Resolute." One of the fictitious names, at hero uncles, Henry and Herm, also quick­ least, has significance. Starum is named in witted and with a teasing sense of humor. honor of Ald Starum, the "legendary capital Manfred said of them, "I loved the way they of ancient Frisia," Manfred's ancestral land.8 did life."ll The rest of the fictitious towns and villages Siouxland took on a new significance for seem to have been chosen to lend color to an Manfred when he discovered that besides otherwise unremarkable landscape and to serve these heroes there were great creative minds as Manfred's claim to the territory as his own percolating there. Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the and as a truly fictional region, even while the Earth was his first surprise, a book he read one names are like the ones Siouxland folks do in summer when he was out of college and back fact use. We recall the characterization of on the farm north of Doon, Iowa, sitting on Siouxland that Manfred offered to Van Wyck the front porch. He was startled to realize that Brooks: "I've peopled it with many towns, Per Hansa and Beret could have crossed the mostly fictitious (though real) ...."9 very land beneath his feet during their trek to . "My country was cel­ CULTURAL REGIONALISM ebrated!" he exclaimed. "It was sacred! Just as sacred as the English land was for the English In two essays about his territory Manfred people with their Beowulfs, Spensers, Shake­ presents in a series of vignettes the qualities speares, Doughtys, and Conrads."12 Later on he has found there. The earlier of the two he learned about Ruth Suckow and Herbert pieces was a talk to scholars who attended the Quick and Hiram Chittenden, all from the Humanities Seminar at Augustana College in Iowa side of Sioux land, and about the artist FROM FEIKEMA TO MANFRED 313 and illustrator Harvey Dunn, who lived over in part the lingering momentum of Anglo­ in South Dakota. Saxon imprinting given us in grade school is And then there were those mysterious always at work in us." It is because of this clear people who had held the land in trust before accent that so many Siouxlanders have been Rolvaag's pioneers entered. As a boy, Manfred chosen as radio and TV announcers, he says, had been fascinated by them. He had seen and he offers as examples Eric Sevareid, Tom caravans of Sioux Indian people traveling Brokaw, Harry Reasoner, and Jack Van south down Highway 75 from Flandreau, South Valkenburg, president of CBS.n Dakota, through Pipestone, Minnesota, to Then, in four notable paragraphs, Manfred Sioux City, Iowa, and thence to visit their outlines the four qualities that distinguish the relatives at Santee, Nebraska. He wondered Siouxlander: First, "a special kind of morality, about them and about the Blood Run mounds having to do with honesty, a sense of fair play, along the Sioux River not far from his farm, spirited competition without too much greed, where there were signs of an elaborate settle­ of allowing every citizen to live his own kind ment of early Plains Indian peoples. Later, of life, so long as it does not intrude too much Manfred became deeply interested in Native on a neighbor's well-being." Second, says Americans, found traces of them throughout Manfred, "We've worked out our own kind of Siouxland, and wrote three novels about them. justice ... filled with much compassion." As On top of Blue Mounds north of Luverne, an example, he points to the many lawyers in moreover, where he and his family had come Siouxland "who try to practice in the manner to live in 1960, Manfred found a row of mas­ of a Solon," a percentage higher than that sive rocks piled up to mark the spring and fall among lawyers from urban areas. Third, "we equinox, perhaps built by relatives of the in­ applaud financial success," says Manfred, but habitants of the great Indian settlement at "we accommodate and help the poor or the Cahokia on the River near St. momentarily bankrupt." For example, "When Louis. By the time he had moved to Luverne, disaster strikes a farm family ... the neighbors that deep interest from childhood on in Ameri­ band together and help." Finally, the Sioux­ can Indians had already led him to a far larger lander "admires those who are proud of their field of interest, beyond the narrow corner of accomplishments, but who do not brag, who the Sioux Valley that he had named Siouxland have what we call a permissible kind of arro­ and embracing the broad expanse of grasslands gance which helps them 'handle' smart alecks that comprise the northern plains. coming in from other quarters of our coun­ The elements that constitute the mystique try."14 of Sioux land were further developed in the Manfred concludes his sketch of the previously named essay that Manfred wrote in Siouxlander with a catalog of the older gen­ 1990. "The Siouxlander" offers his analysis of eration of famous authors of the region, add­ the principal characteristics and virtues of the ing to the names of Rolvaag, Suckow, Quick, people who live there. They are, Manfred says, a~d Dunn those of Herbert Krause, John R. "all pretty much alike." Most are Protestants, Milton, L. Frank Baum, Hamlin Garland, he observes; the ancestors of most are from painter Oscar Howe, and others. He ends with northern Europe and Great Britain: Germans, the new creative minds of the later twentieth Norwegians, Frisians, Dutch, and English. In­ century, among them novelists Pete Dexter, termarriage over the generations has produced the University of South Dakota alumnus who what Manfred describes as a "purebred people won the National Book Award in 1989, Vir­ with what I'd like to call Siouxland blood in ginia Driving Hawk Sneve, who was awarded us." The language of the people, too, is dis­ a National Humanities Medal by President Bill tinctive: "broad, full-toned, and very clear. .. Clinton in December 2000, poets Freya . In part the weather demands it, hot or cold; Manfred, Linda Hasselstrom, David Allan 314 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2001

Evans, and Bill Holm, and playwrights Wayne clude that he had now created a series of fic­ Knutson, Ronald Robinson, and Craig Volk. tional accounts, each of which dealt with a They are evidence that "our creations are as different important era in the history of good as any other creations anywhere." "In America-Conquering Horse (1959) for pre­ fact," Manfred concludes, "because of the rela­ white days, Lord Grizzly (1954) for mountain tive freedom from the patronizing airs of the man times, Riders of Judgment (1957) about east-coaster or the west-coaster, our works the range wars in the West, and now the new show wonderful independence, originality, and novel-Scarlet Plume-about the Sioux Indian warm understanding, with little cynicism and uprising during the Civil War. It would con­ less despair." We who live among these cre­ stitute a group of historically accurate works, ative people have twice as much to enjoy as, all of them important to nineteenth-century say, the folk in the East, he observes. We read America. The essay explains the genesis for their magazines and listen to their broadcasts, Manfred's move west: but we also have a rich cultural life here. "And," says Manfred, "we have this in relative I t was the first of the Buckskin Man Tales, quiet and peace, with clear air always over­ Lord Grizzly, that taught Manfred how to head, and sunny skies."15 handle the historical research that so en­ riches Scarlet Plume and the other books in MANFRED'S GREATER SIOUXLAND the group. Until late 1944 he had drawn primarily on his own wide-ranging experi­ The larger field of interest that began to ences as the basis for his writing, but in that draw Manfred's attention away from Siouxland year he came upon the story of mountain was the part of the West that is the northern man Hugh Glass and his terrible wrestle plains, from Minnesota and Iowa west, through with a grizzly bear along the Grand River in the Dakotas and Nebraska and into South Dakota. In a copy of the WPA Guide and -from the .Mississippi to the to South Dakota he discovered a woodcut Rockies and from Kansas to Canada. In the and the account of Glass's terrible wound­ foreword to Conversations with Frederick ing, followed by his crawl across half of Manfred (1974), Wallace Stegner speaks of western South Dakota, and by his unusual the move of novelist Manfred from realistic revenge. stories about Sioux land to epic stories about The sheer magnitude of Glass's ordeal the Wild West that came to be called the Buck­ appealed to Manfred, but, even more, he skin Man Tales. Stegner believes that Manfred was drawn to learn more about frontier days "writes best about authentic heroes, not about on the northern plains because in writing the obscure farm boys he grew up among," his first novels, especially The Golden Bowl that his Maurys (in The Golden Bowl) and his and This Is the Year, he had come to the Elofs (in The Chokecherry Tree) "don't let him realization that his knowledge of his own rise up and bestride Siouxland like a colossus farm people was incomplete: he did not fully the way his Indians and Mountain Men and understand the land on which they had cowboys do."16 settled and flourished. Who were the Indi­ How Manfred came to his discovery of the ans and white men, Manfred wondered, who heroic material to be mined in the West of the had lived and traveled here? Something was mountain man and Indian is the subject of a wrong, something was missing. His charac­ foreword to Manfred's thirteenth novel, Scar­ ters up to now had no background; they let Plume (1964), that I wrote eighteen years came from nowhere. Manfred realized that ago for the University of Nebraska Press edi­ he knew nothing beyond his grandparents tionY In that essay I point out that only with and nothing about the land on which their the writing of Scarlet Plume did Manfred con- grandchildren were now living. Further- FROM FEIKEMA TO MANFRED 315

more, while the term "Sioux land" that he name for his first seven novels-to Riders of had coined fit very well the white farmers Judgment, Conquering Horse, Scarlet Plume, King of the region of the Sioux River, it also of Spades, and a late comer, The Manly-Hearted carried the intriguing suggestion of a larger Woman, not included in the Buckskin Man area, the land where the Sioux had once series but clearly related, a slender novel about roamed, from western Minnesota and Iowa Sioux Indian life published in 1976. across the Dakotas and into Wyoming. This group of six novels serves to complete Manfred began to burn with a passion to the grand design that he had first expressed in know the answers to his questions. 1S a 1940 letter to a Macmillan editor, explain­ ing that he had in mind a cycle of from six to The answers are worked out in the entire ten books about the farming Midwest, and he body of Manfred's novels-from The Golden would complete it in ten to twenty years. "That Bowl of 1944, where his first look at the past will be a great monument in American liter­ was far back into "dinosaur times,"19 through ary history .... I just can't be stopped," he the twenty-third novel in 1992, Of Lizards wrote to Lois Dwight Cole (3 February 1940).20 and Angels, a vast work that once more returns By 1954 he could write that his goal was to to Siouxland, whence it sends its characters enable the reader of his work to "get an enor­ outward into the larger West. Six of the mous sweep of Midland (and USA) life, from twenty-three novels are planted solidly in its origins all the way to the last day of my life twentieth-century Siouxland: The Golden Bowl here."21 By the end of his life, Manfred had ( 1944), This Is the Year ( 1947), The Chokecherry reached that goal, a remarkable accomplish­ Tree (1948), The Man Who Looked Like the ment in literary terms, and he was able to write Prince of Wales (1965), Green Earth (1977), to a friend shortly after the twentieth novel and No Fun on Sunday (1990). Another group was published: "I've built a mountain range of eleven novels, also set principally in the out here on the prairie and no amount of freez­ twentieth century, have an essentially ing or momentary neglect will wipe them out. Siouxland connection, with many characters My books may have to wait as long as Melville's who are natives of the region who have left to Moby Dick ... , but they'll eventually be live in the East or the Twin Cities or else­ found."22 where in the Midlands. These include Boy The region where Manfred has set most of Almighty (1945), The Primitive (1949), The his novels, his short stories, and his poetry Brother ( 1950), The Giant ( 1951), Morning Red remains largely unaware, it would seem, that (1956), Wanderlust (1962), Eden Prairie it is in fact a region in the Midlands of America. (1968), Milk of Wolves (1976), Sons of Adam While the "Deep South," "New England," the (1980), Flowers of Desire (1989), and Of Liz­ "Southwest," and the "Rocky Mountain West" ards and Angels (1992). Three more novels are terms widely accepted as identifying la­ also have twentieth-century Siouxland set­ bels, the "Midwest" and "West" lack theirclar­ tings, but they remain unpublished at present. ity; and ''Siouxland,'' "Sioux land and environs," The group of novels that have brought and the "Midlands"-Manfred's terms for his Manfred the greatest degree of fame are his home territory-have little currency except nineteenth-century stories of Western he­ among the merchants and one radio station in roes-Indian and non-Indian-that he named Siouxland.lt was one of Manfred's fellow Min­ the Buckskin Man Tales. Their locale straddles nesotans, Paul Gruchow, who pointed out a the northern plains, from the Mississippi River little more than a decade ago that "the region in the east to the Rocky Mountains. The tales we call Siouxland would, absent Manfred's in­ range from his first, Lord Grizzly- also the vention, be almost definitionless. It is a parcel first novel to carry his new Manfred name as of the vast central grassland of our continent, author in place of Feike Feikema, the pen- roughly the drainage of the Missouri River." 316 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2001

Despite Manfred, it lacks any striking charac­ period. Additionally, the text accompanying teristics, has no great cities, no national he­ the map offered the fact that 270 counties in roes, and no history "that has turned the course America had no gun homicides during the six­ of nations." Nevertheless, says Gruchow, teen-year period but that New Orleans aver­ Manfred has made from these unpromising aged thirty-four gun homicides per year, the materials a body of enduring fiction. 23 highest rate in the nation. In fact, from Vir­ While we applaud Frederick Manfred's ac­ ginia in the South, to California in the West, complishment, we need no longer regret with the lower one-third of America showed on Paul Gruchow that Siouxland is a definition­ Doyle's map as an almost solid deep purple, a less place. Over the past several years a num­ vast region where violent crime, as measured ber of maps have appeared in print that, when at least by gun murders, averaged six or more interpreted, support Manfred's contention, killings per year for each 100,000 people. In first, that there is a region that can be identi­ the northwest corner of America, the picture fied as Siouxland, and with it a closely related was quite mixed, averaging between blue and larger West, and, second, that this region of pale blue, or about three gun murders per the northern plains stands out above all oth­ 100,000 per year. The mild-mannered New ers as a place of many virtues, a society that Englanders, by contrast, and their midwestern reveres law, religion, and education. cousins were colored a universal pale blue, evidence of one to two gun murders per MAPPING CULTURE 100,000 persons per year. What catches the eye, instantly, however, In the year following Manfred's death in is not the violent purple and dark blues that 1994, US News & World Report published the characterized two-thirds of America but rather first in a series of maps that illustrated basic the sweep of almost pure white color that domi­ data about the on a county-by­ nates from North Dakota and South Dakota, county basis. The map I spo.tted first appeared through Nebraska and into Kansas, including on 6 November 1995, a rendering in color of large sections of white in eastern Montana, the rate of murders by gun in America over a western Minnesota, throughout Iowa, and in sixteen-year period from 1979 to 1994. Car­ extreme eastern Colorado and northern Mis­ tographer Rodger Doyle chose four colors, souri. In the center is Manfred's Siouxland. It ranging from deep purple, to dark blue, to pale was clear in this visual rendering of killings by blue, to white, to represent the average num­ gun that there was a region of seven contigu­ ber of homicides by gun per 100,000 people. ous states and parts of two more in north­ Thus, a county with a sixteen-year average as central America where the rate of violent high as six or more homicides per 100,000 crime was only a fraction of that in most of the people was colored purple; at the other ex­ rest of the country. A resident of southwest treme, a county with a sixteen-year average of Minnesota, where Manfred lived in 1994, was zero homicides per 100,000 people was col­ on average thirty-four times safer from the ored white. Nearly all of Florida, for example, threat of gun homicide than the citizen of New was rendered in the dark purple color of six or Orleans, twenty-five times safer than the citi­ more homicides per year, whereas virtually all zen of the Bronx, and twenty-four times safer of northwestern Nebraska was rendered in pure than a dweller in the nation's capital. white, the color of zero homicides per year. There were also exceptions in this peaceful Besides serving as a visual rendering of the northern plains paradise, as manifested in the rate of murders by gun, the Doyle map also Doyle map. Indian reservations in the region suggested the rate of all murders in America stood out in deep purple, a stark contrast to inasmuch as two of every three homicide vic­ the pale counties around them. South Dakota tims were killed by guns in the 1979-1994 offered the most dramatic example, with purple FROM FEIKEMA TO MANFRED 317

Standing Rock, and Cheyenne River, Pine across the Deep South, with a scattering else­ Ridge, and Rosebud occupying nearly one-fifth where in America, notably in counties with of the state's territory. The Doyle map, based Indian reservations. Most of the nation was on FBI records and data from the National portrayed in light red, representing 10 to 20 Center for Health Statistics, was a graphic percent of families headed by women, but once confirmation of much of the front-page news again the northern plains states stood out as a out of Indian country in the 1980s and early separate region, one dominated by a light pink 1990s. color representing 10 percent or fewer fami­ One map does not a region make, however, lies headed by women. The Dakotas, Mon­ and so when more colored maps appeared in tana, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas US News & World Report, it became increas­ shared this distinction; their neighbors did not. ingly clear in this graphic way that the region Whether a high percentage of two-parent called the northern plains was not merely a families proves a high degree of social stability geographic entity-America's northern grass­ in a community is not a matter that needs to lands-nor a governmental convenience. In be decided here. It is the fact that two-parent February 1996 US News & Warld Report families characterize the seven-state region printed two more maps that reinforced the that is significant. Other maps have appeared concept of a northern plains region of con­ in general circulation magazines in the years tiguous states with its own identity. The ear­ since the "gun murders" map of November lier of the two, published in the February 5 1995, all contributing to the concept of a dis­ issue, illustrated in shades of green the per­ tinct northern plains culture: maps in US News centage of people ages sixteen to nineteen who & World Report (18 November 1996) and in were not enrolled in school in 1995 and who Time magazine (8 May 2000) show the north­ were not high school graduates. The darkest ern plains states leading the nation in per­ green areas, representing counties where 15 centages of children and adults with health percent or more were not enrolled and were insurance. Both reports suggest a society that not graduates, were scattered across all of cares deeply about the physical well-being of America, with the thickest clusters in the Deep its families. Other maps illustrate that the South. Counties with the highest percentages northern plains is a region of descendants of of enrolled students and graduates-95 per­ northern Europeans who are consistent cent and better-were represented by the color churchgoers. An early map in Newsweek (29 white, and once again the northern plains November 1993) shows Lutherans as the domi­ states stood out from the rest of America: nant religious group in the Dakotas and Min­ North Dakota was nearly all white, followed nesota (more than one-third of church by Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska. In neigh­ members), and another in US News & World boring , South Dakota, Kansas, and Report (10 June 1996) shows Catholics as eastern Montana and Wyoming, the colors heavily represented in the northern plains and were mixed, but white continued to dominate. it:J. the adjacent states of Wisconsin and Colo­ Clearly, the northern plains states constituted rado. And a 1995 estimate, based on the 1990 the region in America most committed to pro­ census and published in map form in US News viding general education to its citizens. & World Report (4 November 1996), shows In the February 12 issue, US News & World "where Scandinavian roots run deep." In most Report published a colored map illustrating­ of the nation fewer than 5 percent of the popu­ again on a county-by-county basis-the per­ lation claims Scandinavian ancestry; in the centage of families headed by women in 1995, northwest two-thirds of America that popula­ that is, one-parent families. The largest clus­ tion is at least 5 to 15 percent; and in large ter of families headed by women, 20 percent sections of the northern plains states Scandi­ or more and rendered in dark red, was found navian descendants are 15 percent or more of 318 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2001 the population. That latter figure dominates and "Frayed." And the states on the periphery in Minnesota, makes up nearly half of Wis­ of the seven-state northern plains region, consin and Montana, and is prominently found Wisconsin and Missouri, were more than half in eastern South Dakota and northwestern in the "Contented" column. We cannot be Iowa. These latter two areas are, of course, the detained long by examining too closely the center of Manfred's Siouxland. A similar map exceptions, however, for the overwhelming for the descendants of Germans and Germans­ impression that remains when the nine maps from-Russia finds them heavily populating of the United States are laid end-to-end or, as greater Siouxland. The ancestors of the Ger­ transparencies, laid over one another, is that man groups settled densely in central Kansas, these six states of Minnesota, Iowa, the Dako­ eastern Nebraska, central South Dakota and tas, Nebraska, and Kansas, with Montana North Dakota, southern Minnesota, all across closely connected, form a distinct and inte­ Iowa, and throughout adjacent Wisconsin.24 grated cultural region of America, clearly sepa­ Reuben Goertz, author of Princes, Potentates rated in a variety of ways from their neighbors and Plain People (1994), calls the region from and extending, in a general way, from Kansas north into Canada the new home­ to Canada and from the Mississippi to the land of the Germans-from-Russia, and he calls Rocky Mountains. US Highway 81 the Mennonite Holy High­ way, for it cuts north for over 800 miles along SON OF SIOUXLAND the eastern edge of that five-state region, ty­ ing those communities together. 25 My foreword to Scarlet Plume in 1983 ar­ Two years after the US News and World gued that of all the Buckskin Man Tales, it Report series, Newsweek published a map titled was the nearest in locale to the Siouxland of "Where Workers Are Mellow," created by This Is the Year. "Over the years Manfred's Michael J. Weiss and based on surveys by creative imagination has expanded out of the Claritas, Inc., and NFO Research, Inc. The narrow confines of farm life on the northern map was a graphic rendering of America ac­ prairies into the vast and varied landscape of cording to a four-part "contentment scale." the frontier West, the old Dakota Territory, Counties where workers judged themselves in the wide plains that the Sioux Indians roamed early May 1998 to be "Contented Types" were over freely before the coming of the white rendered in dark blue; the "Almost Mellow" man." One could not anticipate at that time were colored light blue, the "Frayed" were in that in a few years there would be available light yellow, and the "Totally Stressed" were maps that delineate clearly the very northern colored a bright orange. The effect is star­ plains region that is Manfred's locale in the tling. From New York City south and all Buckskin Man Tales. through the Southern states and into central On the whole the maps show the Northern Texas, the color was the deep orange of "To­ Plains in a positive light: the inhabitants here tally Stressed." At the other extreme were the are safer, better educated, and in their own states of the northern plains, colored an al­ estimation more content than in any other most solid dark blue and representing the top region of the country. Frederick Manfred's fic­ rung on Weiss's contentment scale. There are tion and other writings lead me to the conclu­ anomalies, of course, in the northern plains sion that he is a son of his region and that his region: the midsection of Minnesota, centered work is essentially optimistic, with many char­ on the Twin Cities of -St. Paul, acters winning out in the end, usually after was "Frayed"; so were Omaha and Kansas City great struggles. And that is the right kind of and environs. Montana was an almost solid ending, after all, that one expects from a nov­ dark blue of contentment; Wyoming was half elist deeply imbued with the tenets of the "Contented" and the rest "Almost Mellow" Christian Reformed Church, who had had all FROM FEIKEMA TO MANFRED 319 of his education in Christian schools and in a 10. "The Mystique of Siouxland," in A Common college of his church, and who-because his Land, A Diverse People, ed. Harry F. Thompson, Arthur R. Huseboe, and Sandra Olsen Looney mother wished it-had read the Bible seven (Sioux Falls, S.D.: Nordland Heritage Foundation, times through "at family worship, morning, 1987), pp. 71-88. noon and night."26 It is no wonder that Hugh 11. Ibid., pp. 77-78. Glass, in Manfred's best-known novel, should 12. Ibid., p. 79. turn the stereotypical pulp Western ending 13. Manfred, Duke's Mixture (note 1 above), p. 222. upside down by showing Christian forgiveness 14. Ibid., p. 223. to those who had trespassed against him. 15. Ibid., pp. 225-27. 16. Wallace Stegner, foreword to Conversations NOTES with Frederick Manfred, moderated by John R. Milton (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1. Reprinted as "A Conversation with Frederick 1974), p. xii. Manfred," in Duke's Mixture, by Frederick Manfred 17. Arthur R. Huseboe, foreword to Scarlet Plume, (Sioux Falls, S.D.: Center for Western Studies, Frederick Manfred (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 1994), pp. 228-51. Press, 1983), pp. v-xiii. 2. Ibid, pp. 240-41. 18. Ibid., p. vi. 3. The Selected Letters of Frederick Manfred, ed. 19. Manfred in Conversations (note 16 above), Arthur R. Huseboe and Nancy Owen Nelson (Lin­ p.49. coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 199. 20. Selected Letters (note 3 above), p. 106. 4. Ibid., p. 219. 21. Frederick Manfred to Maxwell Geismer, 19 5. Ibid., p. 227. July 1954, ibid., pp. 390-96. 6. Endpapers in This Is the Year (Garden City, 22. Frederick Manfred to Steven Axelrod, 20 N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947). September 1981, Frederick Manfred Papers, Cen­ 7. Manfred, Duke's Mixture (note 1 above), pp. ter for Western Studies, Augustana College, Sioux 221-27. In 1990 Manfred and I were contemplat­ Falls, S.D. ing launching a quarterly journal that would ema­ 23. Paul Gruchow, "The Art of the Whole Rose," nate from the Center for Western Studies, an agency Minnesota Monthly, May 1988, 22. that he had supported as a council member for 24. US News & World Report, 1 April 1996, 16. twenty years. 25. Reuben Goertz, Princess, Potentates, and Plain 8. Glossary to This Is the Year (note 6 above), p. People (Sioux Falls, S.D.: Center for Western Stud­ 617. ies, 1994), pp. 213-14. 9. Huseboe and Nelson, Selected Letters (note 3 26. Manfred in Conversations (note 16 above), above), p. 199. p.20.