Beyond Fargo / In the West

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North Dakota farmers waiting for their grants in Resettlement Administration Office, North Dakota: photo by Arthur Rothstein, July 1936

What is there, out here on the edge, that makes our experience different from that of the city poet? First there is the land itself. It has been disciplined by machines, but it is still not dominated. The plow that broke the plains is long gone and the giant tractor and the combine are here, but the process of making a living is still a struggle and a gamble -- it is not a matter of putting raw materials in one end of a factory and taking finished products out of the other. Weather, which is only a nuisance in the city, takes on the power of the gods here, and vast cycles of climate, which will one day make all the area a dust bowl again and finally return it to grass, make all man's successes momentary and ambiguous. Here man can never think of himself, as he can in the city, as the master of nature. Like it or not he is subject to the ancient power of seasonal change: he cannot avoid being in nature; he has an heroic adversary that is no abstraction. At a level below immediate consciousness we respond to this, are less alien to our bodies, to human and natural time.

The East is much older than these farther states, has more history. But I believe that that history no longer functions, has been forgotten, has been "paved over." In the East man begins every day for himself. Here, the past is still alive and close at hand -- the arrowheads we turn up may have been shot at our grandfathers. I am not thinking of any romantic frontier. The past out here was bloody, and full of injustice, though hopeful and heroic. It is very close here -- my father took shelter with his family at Fort Ransom during an Indian scare when he was a boy. Later he heard of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Most of us are haunted by the closeness of that past, and by the fact that we are only a step from the Indian, whose sense of life so many of the younger people are trying to learn.

Thomas McGrath (1916-1990), b. Sheldon, North Dakota: On the West (excerpt), from The North Dakota Quarterly, Fall 1982

Farmer in Willliston, North Dakota, Saturday afternoon: photo by Russell Lee, October 1937



Farmers in Willliston, North Dakota, Saturday afternoon: photo by Russell Lee, October 1937

Farmers in Willliston, North Dakota, Saturday afternoon: photo by Russell Lee, October 1937



Street scene, Ray, North Dakota: photo by Russell Lee, October 1937



Drugstore, Ray, North Dakota: photo by Russell Lee, October 1937

Children of Floyd Peaches, near Willliston, North Dakota: photo by Russell Lee, October 1937



Grain elevator and flour mill, Fargo, North Dakota: photo by Arthur Rothstein, Summer 1939



Locomotive engineer, Fargo, North Dakota: photo by Arthur Rothstein, Summer 1939



Combine, East Grand Forks, Minnesota: photo by Russell Lee, October 1937



Flour mill in Grand Forks, North Dakota: photo by Marion Post Walcott, August 1941



Grand Forks, North Dakota: photo by John Vachon, October 1940



Grand Forks, North Dakota: photo by John Vachon, October 1940

Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress