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http://www.ext.nodak.edu/extnews/newsre ... plains.htm"I may not know who I am," Wallace Stegner once wrote, "but I know where I came from." He knew how important it is to situate yourself. This is what he called "the sense of place."
Unfortunately, many people of the Great Plains are not so clear about the sense of place as was Stegner. Sharon Butala, who lives and writes near Stegner's old home of Eastend, Saskatchewan, told me she wrote an essay to be included in a new book being published in Canada, and she referred to her home country as "the Great Plains." The publisher had the essay reviewed by an academic in Winnipeg who insisted she could not call her own country "the Great Plains"—that the only appropriate term in Canada was "the Prairies."
This was odd, as it was Henry Kelsey, explorer for the Hudson Bay Company, who first called the grassy middle of North America "Great Plains" when he emerged in 1680 from the northern forest in what is now Saskatchewan. I checked the map in the classic travel narrative of the Canadian west, "W.F. Butler's Great Lone Land, 1872," and right there in the middle of the Canadian Prairies it says, "Great Plains."
In the United States it is the term "Midwest" that causes confusion about the Great Plains. People think that "Midwest" is a term referring to something midway east and west, between the East and the West. In fact, as the geographer James Shortridge explains, the term "Middle West" arose to designate something between north and south. In the 19th century there was the Southwest, and there was the Northwest (Montana, the Dakotas and Minnesota), and then there was the Middle West—basically Kansas and Nebraska. In the 20th century, though, the labels "Middle West" and "Midwest" expanded to the east and north.
Midway into this century people in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota coined the term "Upper Midwest" so as to include themselves in this emerging region. Subsequently, people in eastern North Dakota who sent their insurance premiums to Lutheran Brotherhood, rooted for the Vikings, liked to shop in Minneapolis and kept cabins in the Minnesota lake country also adopted the Upper Midwest label.
The problem is that no part of North Dakota is at all Midwestern. North Dakota is the most plains state of all—the most level, the least timbered, the most perfectly semiarid. So some namers of North Dakota began to speak of "the Upper Great Plains," which is to say, they are really mixed up.
Then folks in Montana got into the naming game by commencing to call eastern Montana "the High Plains." Probably they had seen too many Clint Eastwood movies. The High Plains are a distinct province of the plains stretching from West Texas through my old home in western Kansas up to Pine Ridge, S.D.—and nowhere near Montana. Now there is even a magazine published in Fargo, N.D., that calls itself the High Plains Reader. What a joke. I can refer you to plenty of people in Grand Forks who, during the Big Water of 1997, wished that they lived on some high plains!
Situate yourself, Stegner said. Work out a sense of place that is true to where you are.
That's what I tried to do when I lived in Emporia, Kan. I lived on the same street as had the great Progressive (and undoubtedly Midwestern) editor, William Allen White, and within smelling range of the Bunge bean plant. The other side of town smelled of beef—beef from the plains. I concluded that the boundary of the Great Plains ran right up Commercial Street, that Emporia was half Midwest and half Great Plains.
This taught me a lesson so that when I prepared to move to Fargo, N.D., I looked for a house in West Fargo, home of the Packers. No more Midwestern identity crises for me. As for your own sense of place—work it out for yourself.
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