for courting at such parties, or at meetings of junior church
organizations, church camps, and junior choirs. Matchmaking still
exists in isolated Russo-German, German, and Norwegian communities,
however. Except in the larger towns--and sometimes even there--the
newly married pair is usually honored by a charivari, or "chivaree,"
with the bridal couple seated conspicuously on some slowly moving
vehicle and taken through the streets to an accompaniment of blaring
automobile horns and clanging tin pans. The bridegroom is expected to
climax this procedure by buying drinks or cigars for the crowd.
Cigars are much in evidence at the birth of a first child, and also
thereafter at the birth of a son. A child born with a caul is believed
by many to have the gift of second sight, and it is also sometimes
thought that the caul is a powerful fire-fighting weapon.
Superstitions attach to many other phases of life, as well as to
births. Most of these beliefs are not peculiar to North Dakota, but
are rather a part of the folklore of the Nation. A dropped spoon means
company is coming, and so does the cat's washing its face. Snakes do
not die before sundown. A horse-hair put in water will turn into a
snake. The number of stars in the ring around the moon show the number
of days before a coming storm. Plants which bear underground should be
planted in the dark of the moon, and those which bear above ground in
the light of the moon. A window shade rolling up when no one is near it
portends a death in the family.
Many of the myriad superstitions are not believed, but nevertheless
continue to be passed on. There is some belief in ghosts and occult
powers, and scarcely any community is without the story of a strange
death and a haunted house--such as the tale of the doctor who was
mysteriously killed on a farm near Wilton and whose ghostly galloping
team disturbed the farmer so much that he was forced to move. These
stories, however, are often not credited but merely passed on for
effect. As for fortune tellers, the most popular prophets are those
who deal, not with tall dark men and long trips, but with isobars
and isotherms, for the interests of agricultural North Dakotans are
inseparable from the weather, which governs their destinies far more
surely than any other factor in their lives.
SCHOOLS, CHURCHES, AND SOCIAL CURRENTS
For many years education and religion in North Dakota were closely
associated, for the earliest schools were organized by priests. The
Scottish Highlanders of North Dakota's first white settlement--the
Selkirk colony at Pembina--were a highly religious peasant people
who keenly felt the absence of churches and schools in the land to
which they had migrated. Their sponsor, Lord Selkirk, also felt that
a church would add to the harmony and stability of the community, and
offered to contribute 25 acres for a church and 20 square miles for a
school and mission if the Bishop of Quebec would approve a church at
Pembina. The bishop acceded, and in 1818 Father Joseph Dumoulin, Father
Joseph Provencher, and William Edge, a catechist, arrived to establish
churches and schools, and study the "savage languages" in order to
"reduce those languages to regular principles so as to be able to
publish a grammar after some years of residence."
EDUCATION
The first school in North Dakota, at Pembina, had an enrollment
of 60 children, white and half-breed, and courses in English were
supplemented by lessons in planting small grains, both intended for the
enlightenment of the "savage" Chippewa. The school was conducted until
1823, when, after the determination of the international boundary, many
of the Selkirkers moved north to Canada, thus breaking up the colony.
The missionaries were withdrawn, and the school and chapel remained
closed for a quarter century. When Father George Belcourt came to the
region in 1848, he reopened the Pembina Mission and founded another at
St. Joseph in the Pembina Mountains. A school conducted at St. Joseph
by the Sisters of the Propagation of the Faith received financial
aid from the Federal Government, the first Federal support given to
education in this State.
In the early settlements of the State, a mother would often gather the
children of the neighborhood in her home for instruction, and itinerant
teachers occasionally held classes in the tent cities which sprang
up in the wake of the railroad. As the communities grew, residents
cooperated in hiring teachers and building schools. The railroad
companies assisted by shipping lumber free for schools. Between 1853
and the attainment of statehood in 1889, 1,362 schools were opened,
many of them in country communities, taught by men or women who had
come West to homestead. A teacher's report on one such school, sent
to the superintendent of the Griggs County schools in 1886, recorded
that he had taught a 62-day term, with 15 pupils enrolled and daily
average attendance of 7 7/31; that his salary was $35 a month; and that
the school building and grounds were in good condition, the former
containing a "Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, New 8-Inch Terrestrial
Globe, New Forms and Solids for object Teaching and Two Slate black
boards."
By 1883 two institutions of higher education had been founded in the
northern half of Dakota Territory. Jamestown College, the first school
in the State to offer a normal course, had been established by the
Presbyterian Church, and three months later the Territorial assembly
voted to found a University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. Originally
a liberal arts college, this institution extended its curriculum
until, in 1889, it included a law school, a college of mechanical
engineering, and a school of mines. In its first year the university
had an enrollment of 79; during 1936, 2,555 attended classes or took
correspondence work in its six colleges.
Several private colleges were opened prior to 1889, and the Enabling
Act of that year provided for the establishment of an agricultural
college and normal schools. Like the other private institutions,
Jamestown College was forced to close its doors during the financial
panic of 1893. Reopened in 1909, it is now the only endowed liberal
arts college in the State. The effects of the 1893 depression on the
university and normal schools were accentuated by the vetoing of the
appropriations for a two-year period. Weathering this crisis, the State
colleges and university reached an enrollment of 2,000 in 1904, and by
1936 their total registration exceeded 10,000.
Notable in educational history was the affiliation in 1905 of the
university and Wesley College, a Methodist school originally located at
Wahpeton. Similar affiliations were later made among other colleges,
including the North Dakota Agricultural College, where the Wesley
College buildings are now used for an interdenominational school of
religion.
To comply with the provision of the Enabling Act requiring
establishment and maintenance of a public school system open to all
children and free from sectarian control, the first legislature set
up an education department administered by three branches--a State
superintendent, county superintendents, and district boards. It also
created a tuition fund from the proceeds of school lands, supplemented
by poll taxes, school taxes levied by general law, and all fines for
violation of State statutes. The money from these sources was made
available to all schools in which the English language was taught.
The school lands to which the law referred were received by the State
in accordance with the plan of the Federal act of 1785 granting each
new State carved from the Ohio Territory section 16 of each township
for public school support. For North and South Dakota, under the
Enabling Act, this grant was doubled, giving the schools one-eighteenth
of all land surveyed. Town site boomers and speculators in other States
commonly took advantage of school land grants to buy property at prices
far below the actual value; but in the Dakotas they were forestalled
by the alert Territorial superintendent of schools, W. H. H. Beadle,
who incorporated into the constitutions of both States the provision
that school lands might not be sold at less than $10 an acre, and might
be leased as hay or grazing lands but not for cultivation, and that
the title of western coal lands included in the grant must always be
retained by the State. Similarly guarded were 750,000 acres of land
granted to other educational institutions. So successful was Beadle's
plan that it has been adopted by almost every other State admitted to
the Union since 1889.
At the State School of Science at Wahpeton, opened in 1903 as a trade
school and junior college, two methods of industrial education have
been originated, the Babcock plan and the North Dakota plan, both of
which have attracted the attention of educators throughout the United
States. The former provides for the establishment of three departments
within the school--a trade school, a junior college, and a business
school, each of which, by a plan of interaction, is made to serve
the others. The North Dakota plan, evolved to solve the problem of
providing industrial education in an agricultural State, concentrates
all trades education in one school, with the exception of night courses
offered at other points in the State under the supervision of the
school of science.
A second junior college was established in 1925 at the school of
forestry in Bottineau. North Dakota is now one of the 27 States which
have junior colleges.
Twenty parochial schools, most of them maintained by the Roman Catholic
or the Lutheran Church, offer grade and high school work, and are
governed by the State department of public instruction.
Under the supervision of the board of administration, the State
supports a school for the deaf at Devils Lake, a school for the blind
at Bathgate, and an institution for feeble-minded at Grafton. The board
also has jurisdiction over the hospital for the insane at Jamestown,
the training school for delinquents at Mandan, the penitentiary at
Bismarck, and a sanatorium at San Haven. Several semi-public homes and
orphanages are operated by churches and other organizations.
It is compulsory for all children between the ages of 7 and 15 to
attend school, and a student who has not completed the eighth grade
must continue in school until he is 17 years of age. Agriculture is a
compulsory course in public schools. Free textbooks are provided for
rural schools, and uniform texts are prescribed for all public schools.
A school census taken in June 1930 showed North Dakota to have a
school-age population of 222,798, of whom 169,277 were enrolled in
public schools--139,580 in elementary, and 29,697 in high schools.
Indian children are given grade and high school education and
vocational training in special schools at Fort Totten, Fort Yates,
Elbowoods, Belcourt, and Wahpeton. Preservation of tribal arts,
including beadwork and pottery, is encouraged.
The North Dakota educational system is greatly influenced by the
agrarian character of the State. Because children are needed for farm
work, most of the country schools are not opened until October, and
operate for a term of only seven or eight months. A survey made in
the winter of 1923-24 showed a sharp decline in attendance records
in rural schools, and consequently legislation was enacted providing
free transportation for pupils living more than two and one-half miles
from school. The legislation affected two-fifths of the rural school
population, and resulted in improved attendance in elementary schools.
The one-room school is still the most common type of educational
institution in the State, although the number of consolidated schools
is being increased annually. Sixty high schools, including the Benson
and Walsh County Agricultural Schools, receive Federal aid through
the Smith-Hughes Act, which provides funds for vocational training
and courses in agriculture. This act also enables the North Dakota
Agricultural College in Fargo to operate extension service and
experimental stations, and to provide a State-wide educational program
for farmers.
Reading facilities in public schools were improved by the 1911
legislative appropriation of $25 to each school district for a
permanent school library. In many communities these school libraries,
supplemented by the loan services offered by the State educational
institutions and the traveling libraries of the State library
commission, are the only sources of reading material. The first public
library in the State was opened in 1897 in Grafton by a group of
clubwomen, and many other towns have received similar benefit from the
efforts of women's clubs to build up library collections.
RELIGION
Through the influence of three prominent men in the Red River
settlement--Joseph Rolette, Norman Kittson, and Anton Gringas--Father
Belcourt was able to maintain his Pembina Mission, establish another at
St. Joseph, and extend his work west to the Turtle Mountains. He held
services for Indians and hunters alike.
Meanwhile, Protestantism was introduced into the State by James Tanner,
a half-breed interpreter from the Cass Lake (Minnesota) Reservation who
had become a Baptist minister. At his request, Rev. Alonzo Barnard came
from the Presbyterian mission at Cass Lake to Pembina and St. Joseph
late in 1848. Barnard remained only a short time, being succeeded
in 1850 by a young Baptist missionary, Elijah Terry, who was killed
by hostile Sioux as he was cutting logs for a chapel. The following
summer Barnard returned, accompanied by his wife, David Spencer and
his family, and John Smith. Despite severe misfortune, including Mrs.
Barnard's death from pneumonia, and the death of Mrs. Spencer, who was
pierced by an Indian arrow as she stood in the window of her cabin with
her baby in her arms, the mission was kept open until 1858.
Except for occasional visits by priests and ministers from Canada to
the Pembina settlement, there was little further religious activity
in North Dakota until 1871, when the Presbyterians again sent a
minister into the Red River Valley. Oscar H. Elmer, who received the
appointment, drove up and down the valley in a homemade cutter, and
was the first to conduct church services in many of the pioneer towns,
including Fargo and Grand Forks.
When the Episcopal Church decided to send a missionary into the newly
settled territory, the board, guided by the stories it had heard of
Dakota winters, recalled Rev. Robert Wainright from his mission in
Labrador, feeling that his experience there should have qualified
him to serve in Dakota. Mr. Wainright took over the northern half of
Dakota Territory, and raised funds to carry on his work by appearing
in Labrador costume and giving exhibitions of his skill with a 40-foot
whip, with which it is said he could flick water out of a glass.
As settlement increased, other church groups sent missionaries and
ministers. At first, services were held in homes, schools, or tents,
and often a building used during the week as a saloon or gambling hall
would become a place of worship on Sunday. The ministerial duties
frequently included janitor work, and since the remuneration usually
consisted of donations from the parishioners, many of the ministers
supplemented this income by operating small farms. The hardships
of pioneer days led to much resourcefulness on the part of early
churchgoers. Gopher tails were saved and placed on the collection plate
by those who had no cash to give, for the church could then claim the
three-cent bounty on gophers offered by the State. As communities grew,
new church buildings were erected, until now some of the most notable
structures in the State are churches. Religious colonies came to North
Dakota to settle, and Mennonite, Dunkard, Moravian, and Mohammedan
are among the approximately 25 creeds represented in the State. Most
influential are the Lutheran (due to the large number of Scandinavian
settlers) and the Roman Catholic.
The actual number of churches is decreasing as parishes are enlarged,
and in smaller towns and rural sections the consolidation of churches
has been found practical.
SOCIAL CONDITIONS
A movement in 1915 for increased social legislation resulted in the
passage of mothers' pension, juvenile court, and old age pension acts,
and in the abolition of capital punishment except in the case of a
convict already serving a life sentence for murder.
In contrast to the general trend of prison populations throughout
the United States, that of the North Dakota penitentiary has
steadily decreased until in 1935-36 it reached the lowest figure
in 10 years--274. Most of the decline has occurred in the number
of non-residents of the State committed, probably due to the fact
that, with poorer crops, employment of transient farm labor has
been unnecessary, and the annual influx of transients has therefore
decreased.
Impetus was added to the program against juvenile delinquency in
1921 by the publication of the results of a five-year survey which
showed that more than 500 children were brought into court annually.
Laws regarding juvenile delinquency were made more stringent. The
reform school at Mandan was renamed the State Training School, and
a corresponding change was effected in the methods of handling
delinquents sent there. From a juvenile prison the institution became
virtually a boarding school in which boys and girls between the ages of
12 and 21 supplement regular grade and high school work and vocational
training with such extracurricular activities as music, dramatics,
athletics, and club work.
Since the survey revealed that, while only 5 percent of the child
population of the State lived in three cities having a population of
more than 10,000, these cities reported 45 percent of the delinquency,
social service groups in all cities were enlisted to deal with the
problem. New emphasis was placed on character-building organizations
such as Boy and Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, Y. M. C. A., and Y. W.
C. A.; playgrounds were opened, and recreational programs promoted.
The American Legion formed a Junior Baseball League for boys under 17
years of age, which was so successful that in many communities boys who
graduated from the junior teams are now receiving civic support in the
organization of intermediate and senior clubs.
North Dakota's moderate temperature and dry air came in for early
prominence in the advertisements of promoters, who assured prospective
settlers that this was one of the most healthful States in the Union.
It was a fortunate circumstance that they were correct, for lack of
transportation facilities and the limited number of doctors often made
it impossible for settlers to obtain medical aid. Today the number
of doctors is adequate for the population, but their tendency to
concentrate in the larger towns leaves many western rural communities,
and a few in the east, with no medical aid within many miles. Despite
this uneven distribution of doctors, North Dakota has always had a good
health record. Since there are no large cities, contagious diseases do
not spread rapidly and epidemics are comparatively rare. In 1935 the
State had a record of 8.0 deaths per thousand of population, while the
figure for the United States as a whole was 10.7. The highest death
rate is among the Indians, tuberculosis being the most prevalent cause.
Largely through the efforts of Dean H. E. French of the university
school of medicine, a State health department was established in 1923,
and has set up a health program and secured passage of laws providing
for medical inspection in public schools, creation of a board of
examiners for nurses, registration of nurses, and employment of county
nurses.
The work of State agencies for the care of children and aged or
physically handicapped persons is coordinated through the State welfare
board. Under the provisions of revised legislation enacted in 1935, the
board distributed 7,431 old age pensions, and in 1936 inaugurated a
program for the aid of the blind which, within a single year, provided
vocational education and other assistance for 150 people not enrolled
in the State school at Bathgate.
In conjunction with the Children's Bureau, created in 1923, and local
lodge groups throughout the State, the welfare board holds clinics
for physically handicapped children, provides them with medical
care whenever possible, and helps them learn trades. Similar work
with adults is carried on by the State department of vocational
education and rehabilitation organized in 1921. Of the 124 handicapped
individuals who received training through the facilities of the
department in 1935-36, 45 were placed in employment.
Stringent pure food and drug acts were drafted for the State by the
late Dr. Edwin F. Ladd, an outstanding figure in the field of public
health, who as United States Senator from North Dakota drew up some
of the Federal pure food laws. A regulatory department maintains
a laboratory where foodstuffs and other products are tested for
compliance with State laws. The department of public health also has
laboratories throughout the State, and several cities have their own
facilities for testing water supplies.
TRANSPORTATION
When in 1738 the intrepid French-Canadian, Pierre Verendrye, his three
sons, and his nephew set out on foot to trudge weary miles across the
prairies to the Mantannes on the Missouri River, they did not dream
that some day man-made birds would flash their silver wings against
the sky and glide smoothly to rest on the level plains. Less than 200
years were to pass before this miracle of transportation progress would
become so commonplace that a native North Dakotan would think nothing
of a trip from Montreal to Bismarck by plane, but would be astonished
at the thought of anyone's walking that distance.
Verendrye, the first white man known to have touched North Dakota
soil, and other explorers who followed in those early years, came on
foot to visit the Indians. They found the Mandans, who lived beside
the Missouri, in possession of unusual means of water transportation.
The dugout canoe, made of a log, was found on all the rivers of
North Dakota, but only in the Missouri Valley did the Indians use
the bullboat, a circular craft of the coracle type which the Indians
made by stretching a buffalo hide over a willow frame. Before the
introduction of the horse, Indians used the dog train for hauling heavy
loads overland, but when the Sioux migrated into this territory from
the south and east they brought the horse with them. Of all tribes the
Sioux were the most graceful and daring riders. The horse travois, a
rather crude means of hauling baggage devised by the Indians, soon gave
way to the white man's wagon as settlers began to pour in.
The covered wagon served to move the immigrant family to its new home,
and furnished immediate living quarters. In the Red River country
before 1820, the oxcart, made entirely of wood with cross sections of a
round log for wheels, was introduced at Pembina. Long creaking trains
of these carts drawn by oxen made their way slowly across the country
carrying settlers and supplies.
Before the coming of modern means of transportation, the Missouri
River formed the most important avenue of entry into what is now North
Dakota. The ascent of the river by the steamboat _Yellowstone_ to Fort
Union in 1832 was an event of importance, because the Big Muddy had
never before been navigated through this territory.
The Indians who witnessed the coming of this first boat found great
significance in it also. According to George Catlin, the artist,
who was aboard the steamer, some of them shot their dogs and horses
in a sacrifice to appease the Great Spirit, whom they thought to
be offended; some ran frightened to their homes; and some among the
Mandans cautiously approached the ship, "the big medicine canoe with
eyes", which in some mysterious way could see its own way to take the
deep water in the middle of the channel.
The frequently changing channel and swift current of the river proved
a severe test for the hardy and resourceful pilots who followed in the
wake of the _Yellowstone_. As the Sioux City (Iowa) _Register_ stated
in 1868, "Of all the variable things in creation the most uncertain are
the action of a jury, the state of a woman's mind, and the condition of
the Missouri River."
The humorist George Fitch, as quoted in Edna LaMoore Waldo's _Dakota_,
describes the stream in these words: