Dakota Circle by Tom Isern
Price: $19.95 * Order Form * Back to Publications
Dakota Circle by Tom Isern
Price: $19.95 * Order Form *
Back to Publications
Dakota Circle is a wry, sometimes humorous, always insightful description of the people and things that make up the Great Plains. From the odd something in Absaraka, North Dakota to Montana Caviar, plum butter recipes and the large sculptures that dot its level landscapes, Tom Isern lays before the reader enough significant slices of Plains life to make a whole pie.
This book is a collection of essays and articles based on Isern's research and travels on the northern plains over the past two decades. Material in the work derives also from his weekly newspaper column, Plains Folk, which is distributed by NDSU Extension and appears weekly and widely across the region;
Dakota Circle concludes with the now-notorious "You
Must be from North Dakota" list of regional virtues and ideosyncrasies.
An Excerpt from Dakota
Circle
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There stands still another monument to the dairy boomlet of the northern plains--Salem Sue, the World's Largest Holstein. Fifty feet long, 38 feet tall, fiberglass, she stands on School Hill, near the town of New Salem, ND. The Salem Sue story goes back to 1906, when pioneer dairyman Dave Young got disgusted with the poor grade of cows in the New Salem vicinity and decided to do something about it. He took orders from his neighbors, went over the Wisconsin, and brought back two cars full of registered Holsteins. The farmers of New Salem, organized as the New Salem Holstein Circuit, became the darlings of the dairy scientists over at Fargo. The New Salem folks soon won renown for fine registered Holsteins, showed them frequently, and sold breeding stock to every other county in the state. The schools of New Salem adopted the Holstein as their symbol and designated black-and-white their school colors. It was in about 1970 that someone at the bank had the idea for a Holstein monument. The bank made the first donation toward the project, which was organized by the local Lions Club. . . . The Lions said they wanted to honor dairymen, promote tourism, and simply have the biggest cow in the world. |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Isern,
Professor of History at North Dakota State University, has lived all his life
on the Great Plains of North America. Because his mid-life crisis began at about
age nineteen, he has spent a long time thinking about what it means to live
and work on the plains. He has written or co-authored five previous books about
life on the plains and since 1983 has co-authored the weekly newspaper column,
"Plains Folk." In the year of publication of Dakota Circle, he was
named NDSU's Fargo Chamber of Commerce Distinguished Professor.
