1909 Annie Malone Dr.
St. Louis, Missouri

By Marc Blanc

Peter H. Clark lived in St. Louis when it felt like its brightest days were still ahead. Relocating from Cincinnati to the north St. Louis neighborhood called the Ville in 1888, the teacher and political orator found a river town on the brink of becoming a national metropolis. Starting in the 1880s, St. Louis would add 100,000 residents to its population every ten years for the next half-century, arguably reaching the peak of its cultural power in 1904 when it hosted both the World’s Fair and the Summer Olympics. Part of this growth was driven by Black migrants from the unreconstructed South, many of whom began to settle in the Ville shortly before Clark’s arrival.

Clark’s neighborhood was also home to St. Louis’s significant German and Irish populations, and the social mixing between the European emigres and Black migrants was often tense; by the 1920s, most whites had left the Ville. However, some residents labored to build relationships across the color line. Clark, a Black socialist who had been collaborating with German radicals in Cincinnati since the days of abolitionism, was well prepared for the task.

Known just as much for his work on behalf of racial equality as he was for his activism in the German-dominated socialist movement, Clark was in the rare position of having the ear of both Black and white Midwesterners. He used his platform to mend ethnic divisions sewn by racial capitalism, reminding workers that the boss was not their friend even if they shared the same skin tone. “Go into the South and see the capitalists banded together over the poor whites,” he implored an overflow crowd at Cincinnati’s Robinson Opera House in March 1877. Invited to the opera house to give a stump speech for the Workingmen’s Party ticket ahead of local midterm elections, Clark seized the opportunity to address what he saw as intersecting national crises: monopoly capitalism in the North and the re-entrenchment of a racist caste system in the South.

In the same speech, Clark showed how the postbellum marriage of southern plantation power to northern financial capital weighed particularly heavily on Black sharecroppers, who in 1877 were more vulnerable to virtual re-enslavement than at any point since the Civil War. For Clark, the same wealthy landowners and financiers who lorded over poor whites “carefully calculate[d] how much, and no more, it will require to feed and clothe the black laborer to keep him alive from one year to another. That much they will give him for his hard labor, on which the aristocracy live, and not a cent more . . . Not a foot of land will they sell to the oppressed race who are trying to crowd out the degradation into which capital has plunged them.”

Clark’s orations reveal a man who was aware that people experience economic exploitation and political domination differently depending on their race and region. At the same time, his speeches attempt to make these different experiences of oppression legible across the diverse groups that he addressed. We know that Clark was thinking about Cincinnati’s and St. Louis’s sizable communities of German revolutionaries in his March 1877 speech because he pointed out that “capital,” the same force that German socialists knew to be dominating industrial laborers in the North, was also weighing heavily on Black farmers in the South.

Clark thereby legitimized Black agricultural labor in the context of the early Marxist movement, which too often considered the factory and its generally white proletariat as the sole sources of revolution. Similarly, his description of Southern planters as an “aristocracy” appealed to the Midwest’s Irish immigrants, starved and subjugated by the English monarchy. While Clark seems to have been the only Black member of the Workingmen’s Party, he never separated anticapitalism from antiracism. With varying degrees of subtlety, all of the speeches that he delivered on behalf of the Party encouraged Europeans and white Americans to understand and ally with his race in the struggle for freedom.

Clark exhibited a striking hope that his efforts to build an interracial coalition of political radicals would pay off sooner rather than later. On July 21, 1877, when the United States was in the throes of a national railway labor strike, Clark delivered his most famous oration, “Socialism: The Remedy for the Evils of Society.” He predicted that “twenty years from today there will not be a railroad belonging to a private corporation; all will be owned by the government and worked in the interests of the people.”

This, of course, did not happen. The railroad monopolies coordinated with the federal government to violently crush the strikes, and today a handful of behemoth corporations continue to dominate the country’s major freightways. Knowing that Clark believed the U.S. would nationalize its railroads by 1900, it is difficult to stomach our twenty-first-century economy’s acceleration of privatization and deindustrialization.

Today, as I drive north from my inner ring suburb to the Ville, I survey a city that has been hollowed out. Clark’s house, like many structures from St. Louis’s boom years, has crumbled and disintegrated. However, traces of it remain. The foundations of a brick facade guard the edge of what was once Clark’s property, with two concrete steps ascending into a now clover-covered lot. If his house resembled the few that still flank the empty lot, then it would have been a modest shotgun-style abode, perhaps with a small front porch for Clark and his wife, Frances, to talk and watch their neighbors stroll by on languid summer evenings. The home kept Clark within walking distance of the school where he taught, the stately Charles Sumner High, which looks as magnificent today as it did during Clark’s tenure.

Shortly after Clark’s death in 1925, his neighborhood began to prosper. In the mid-twentieth century, the Ville was a crucible of Black wealth and talent. For such a small square of urban land, the number of famous figures whom the neighborhood raised is astounding. Josephine Baker (b. 1906), Chuck Berry (b. 1926), and Rep. Maxine Waters (b. 1938) are just the beginning of a roster stacked with cultural, political, and athletic luminaries; I could pull three different names as recognizable as these from the neighborhood’s historical census. Partially in recognition of the Ville’s sterling legacy, Clark’s street, Goode Ave., was renamed in 1986 after Annie Turnbo Malone, a twentieth-century entrepreneur and philanthropist who was one of the first Black women millionaires in American history. With names as prominent as these, it’s not surprising that Clark does not often turn up in lists of the Ville’s famous residents.

However, with national trends of economic precarity amplified in Black Midwestern neighborhoods like the Ville, the words of America’s first Black socialist may once again command people’s attention. To read Clark in present-day St. Louis is to experience temporal vertigo. Although the speeches that he delivered a century and a half ago anticipate an egalitarian future, his critiques of inequality remain as applicable to the 2020s as they did to the Gilded Age. But what if the 1877 labor strikes had resulted in a victory for the workers? Would Clark’s speeches from that fiery July have been recorded in history books? Would Clark’s house have remained standing, preserved to honor its visionary resident?

That is not the present we’re living in — Clark’s political and oratorical contributions belong to the American people’s dissident counterhistory, not the dominant, institutionalized historical narrative. This is not necessarily a reason to despair. The inequality and unrest of Clark’s time did not prevent him from believing that he would live to see peace and prosperity prevail in every region of the United States. In his nearly 100 years of life, Clark witnessed slavery and its abolition, Reconstruction and its betrayal, racist massacres and cross-racial labor solidarity. Through it all, he maintained faith in the possibility for a social order that was not simply better than what presently existed, but even ideal. What reasons for political hope might I glimpse in a sleepy postindustrial city, or an empty lot? It will take some searching, but I am confident that signs of the cooperative spirit and human perseverance that led Clark to believe in a better world are still visible in St. Louis, like the brick foundations of a house waiting to be rebuilt. 

Marc Blanc is a Ph.D. candidate in American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Growing up in the shadow of factory smokestacks in northeast Ohio fostered his passion for working-class literature of the industrial Midwest, which is the subject of his dissertation. His other writings on the region’s radical literary history have appeared or are forthcoming in Belt Magazine, African American Policy Forum, and College Literature. You can connect with him on Twitter, @marcablanc.

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1724 S. Trenton Ave.
Tulsa, Oklahoma

By Michael Helsem

“Everything, including dreams, is meteorological.” – R. A. Lafferty, ”Narrow Valley”

A couple of years ago, my wife and I were visiting my young niece and her husband in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they had moved — a place I had never been. At first all I could think of was that immense, windswept plain, many times traversed by me, with speeding wheels, with wings, never stopping, the very incarnation of a blur. Then it dawned on me that the science fiction author R. A. Lafferty, whom I had idolized in the ‘70s), had spent almost his entire life in Tulsa. In the same house.

I had no luck finding any of his books in a bookstore there to show them, but at one point we were out on a walk, and I had summoned up from the Internet a not-quite-exact location of the house he had lived in. According to Natasha Ball on “Lafferty Lost and Found,” the house is “a shaded brick bungalow where Trenton comes to a T.” We went looking and found what seemed to be it, the corner house at 1724 S. Trenton Ave. I didn’t have a camera along, but it was satisfying to have seen it, anyway. It was a quiet, slightly gentrified neighborhood of older houses near a small lake, with good-sized trees on every block, which reminded me of the place in Oak Cliff I myself had grown up in — a good place to be a kid running wild on bicycles, where it seemed nothing bad could ever happen.

“Their brains differed from ours, their concepts must have been different, and therefore they lived in a different world.” – The Devil is Dead

Who is R. A. Lafferty, you may ask? He has fallen into obscurity but seems to be making a little bit of a comeback these days, praised by the likes of Neil Gaiman. To know him better, first run out and grab a copy of Nine Hundred Grandmothers. That’s a good start. Lafferty is best known for his inimitable short stories, which are only incidentally concerned with the tropes and themes of regular science fiction, and told in a jocular but slightly jarring voice that is a little like a tall tale and a little like a homegrown surrealist who has some really important things to say that he absolutely will not divulge, except in hints and sideways jokes. If you read enough of him, you start to dimly discern the vast, convoluted architecture of Lafferty’s universe—not an easy task, since so many of his books are out of print and not a few of them were published by small presses that never printed a large run in the first place.

To my understanding, there is a highly esoteric Thomist-Catholic aspect to it.  He apparently also believes we inhabit a multiverse in which time and space are sometimes illusory and sometimes not; survivals from the distant past (such as Neanderthals) or visitors from the future are not unheard of—and they’re not often used for the science-fictional story, they’re just THERE. He often makes reference to obviously bogus works, yet he’s also curiously erudite in real ones. There’s a wild Zen side, too, but you never can be quite sure when he’s being serious & when he’s pulling your leg.

“I was always for the underdog, and, doggy, you’re way way under.” – Fourth Mansions

It’s been said that aspects of the surrounding town are always seeping into his works, and not only the more ostensibly realist ones. But by and large, Tulsa is not present in any immediately named way — any more than the environs of the great mystical poets—unless you count the almost complete absence of that most-20c. experience: riding in a car (Lafferty didn’t drive). But two things I know. One is that Lafferty always identified with the underdog, the misfit, the underclass, and the socially disfavored; he has some striking stories and one historical novel (possibly his masterpiece, Okla Hannali) about Native Americans, whom he invariably credits with greater perception of reality.

In his many worlds, there is a pervasive, bone-deep precarity: the irruption of personal and/or apocalyptic violence is never out of the question, at any moment. I have to think the terrible 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which happened about three miles from his house (although he was only seven at the time) must have been something he couldn’t not have known about and reflected on.

“We are living in the narrow interval between the lightning and the thunder.” – Arrive at Easterwine

And then there are the tornados — 98 since 1950, according to the National Weather Service. Idyllic the place might be, but hardly peaceful. On that particular, mild, sunny afternoon, we drove past two blocks of torn-up buildings that hadn’t yet been rebuilt, havoc from the last big one. It looked like a bomb had gone off, levelling everything; the car fell silent. You see such scenes in newsreel footage, latterly Ukraine maybe: never in these States, not like this. All the other cars kept right on rolling, on to their intended destinations, untroubled and I daresay sound of sleep. They raise their families, go to their neighborhood churches, my niece and her new husband among them. This is where they choose to live.

“We could always make another world,” said Welkin reasonably.
“Certainly, but this one is our testing.” – “Sky”

M. H. was born in Dallas in 1958. Shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky.

Photo by Abby Boehning.

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Harmonia Cemetery

Battle Creek, Michigan

By Jeffrey Insko

In the heart of downtown Battle Creek, Michigan, near the bank of the Kalamazoo River, stands a memorial statue of the abolitionist activist and orator Sojourner Truth. Twelve feet tall, bespectacled and beshawled, Truth towers over an oversized lectern, presumably addressing an enrapt audience, her right hand resting on a Bible. Dedicated in 1999, the monument commemorates the 27 years — the last 27 years of her life — Truth spent in Battle Creek, much of it just across the river from the memorial site in the home on College Street she bought in 1867.

But if you were to travel six miles downriver to Bedford Township, you might find, not far from the river’s southern bank and perched upon a hill at the edge of what is now an industrial park, Harmonia Cemetery, the last remaining vestige of the short-lived utopian community Truth joined when she first moved to Michigan in 1857. A year earlier, Truth had visited Battle Creek from her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, for the annual meeting of the Progressive Friends in Michigan, a group of dissident Quakers devoted to abolition, women’s rights, and Spiritualism. Truth had been introduced to Spiritualism — the belief that the living could communicate with the dead — through her friends the radical reformers Isaac and Emily Post. During the first half of the 1850s, Truth attended other yearly meetings of Progressive Friends (sometimes called the Friends of Universal Human Progress) in New York and Pennsylvania, as well as seances and various antislavery gatherings with many of the period’s leading reformers and social and religious dissenters.

The precise circumstances that caused Truth to decide to join permanently the Progressive Friends in Michigan remain unknown. Well before the move, she had already earned renown and respect among abolitionists for her powerful speeches, sharp wit, and fierce activism, so it’s easy to see why her Western friends would have been eager to have her join them. What’s more, her time with the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a mixed-race communitarian experiment she had joined in 1843, had accustomed her to living among like-minded radicals and troublemakers. Whatever her reasons, she sold her Northampton property and paid $400 for a lot and house in the fledgling new village situated just south of the river, where the Hicksite Quaker Reynolds Cornell had purchased some 230 acres of land in 1850. Later, in 1855, he platted and parceled 140 of those acres into one acre lots and incorporated the Village of Harmonia. Its name derived from the 1850 Swedenborgian philosophical tract The Great Harmonia, dictated, or so the story goes, by the prominent Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis while entranced.

By 1855, the Battle Creek area was already a progressive haven, a welcoming home for the religiously and politically unorthodox, and a central hub for Western abolitionism. Cornell was active in the state’s antislavery society. The city’s first antislavery newspaper The Signal of Liberty launched in 1841, followed by the even more boisterously abolitionist paper The Michigan Liberty Press, which ran from 1848-49 until it was destroyed by fire. Battle Creek was also a “station” on the Underground Railroad, where so-called stationmasters like Erastus and Sarah Hussey, and Truth herself, assisted freedom seekers on their journey from enslavement. It was home, too, to a small but thriving free Black community.

As for Harmonia, too little is recorded of its history, although we know the community was biracial, socially lively (it was rumored to be a bastion of free love!), and included, along with a store and a blacksmith shop, a seminary called the Bedford Institute, probably conducted according to Spiritualist tenets and run by Cornell’s son Hiram. Census records indicate that Truth’s grandson Samuel Banks attended the school for at least one year in 1859. Vibrant though it may have been, the community remained small; as late as 1873, it appears that relatively few of the original lots were occupied with houses. Even worse, a tornado swept through the village in 1862, destroying much of it and shearing the top two floors off of the four-story school. The next year, the Cornells moved away from Michigan and Truth appears to have moved from Harmonia about the same time, though she left the house to her daughter Sophia, where she and her family lived for another 30 years. In 1867, Truth purchased and moved into the house on College Street.

Other than a handful of headstones, almost all visible traces of Harmonia have long since been erased, overwhelmed by the twin forces of empire and industrialization. During the first world war, the land of utopian dreams was converted into a military training ground named, unfortunately, for the Michigan native and disgraced Army general George Armstrong Custer; the schoolhouse itself was converted, literally, into a gun school. Today, Fort Custer remains a National Guard Training Center. The rest of the area hosts an industrial park populated mainly by facilities that produce automotive parts. Earlier this year, when a local historian set out to pinpoint the precise location of Truth’s Harmonia residence, plat maps revealed that the site is now the recycling center at a thermal manufacturing plant.

As for the Kalamazoo River at the bottom of the hill, for centuries the life-giving artery of the region for indigenous peoples, settlers, and utopians alike, it has suffered from decades of industrial pollution, not least the million gallons of diluted bitumen that gushed into the river after an oil pipeline burst just upriver from Battle Creek in 2010. Four years and a billion dollars worth of cleanup after the spill improved the condition of the river considerably, but a significant amount of unrecoverable oil still remains. West of Battle Creek, areas of the river long ago contaminated with PCBs remain as well. Ongoing mitigation efforts at those sites have been severely hampered recently by a botched dam drawdown in 2021 that released hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sludge and sediment, smothering fish spawning habitats and creating massive mudflats. The river suffers still.

How many times, one wonders, must Truth and her comrades have crossed that river unspoiled, planning for justice? Even more terribly, perhaps, the route taken by that same pipeline as it traverses the state on its way to petrochemical refineries in Ontario uncannily follows the pathway to freedom taken by hundreds of the formerly enslaved, seeking refuge, not toxins, on the other side of the border. Underground transport today portends ecocide and planetary destruction rather than freedom. Which is to say that now, as much as then, we need Sojourner Truth’s expansive vision of justice. We also need more of the courage she displayed in pursuit of it.

Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English at Oakland University in Michigan, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century US literary history and culture and the Environmental Humanities. He is the author of History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford, 2018) and the editor of the Norton Library edition of Moby-Dick (2023). He is currently writing a book about the Kalamazoo River oil spill.

Photo by Tom Deater.

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Mixed Coniferous Forest
Osceola County, Michigan

By Camden Burd

“What we think of our hometown is our first substantial map of the world,” Jim Harrison wrote in his 2002 memoir, Off to the Side. A hometown takes the mishappen clay of a person and molds them, stands them up, and positions them in some vague direction. For Harrison (1937-2016), that was Reed City, Michigan — a rural town in Osceola County, situated in the northern portion of the State’s lower peninsula — where his family lived for much of his childhood. It was there, in a region defined by poor soil, long winters, and geographic isolation, where Harrison would cultivate the literary perspective that informed his essays, poetry, and novels.

There was nothing romantic about rural life in mid-twentieth-century Michigan. It was rural, not wild, definitely not idyllic. Hardship abounded. Harrison remembered ever-present poverty, in his family and others. “Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly,” he wrote. “Symmetry, balance, ultimate fairness seem to be abstractions remote to our occasionally naked sense of reality, as startling as walking out of a crisp and idealized civics class at a country school and into a lavish party of congressman and lobbyists.” He recalled eating at friends’ homes — minimal meals that included catsup sandwiches or a plate of beans. It is no wonder that his boyhood heroes included Eugene V. Debs and Walter Reuther.

But Harrison did not conflate sympathy with sentimentalism. He never waxed nostalgically about the inherent values of his neighbors. Poor residents of rural Michigan — like their wealthy counterparts — could steal, lust, and lie too. Reed City also exposed a young Harrison to the tragic throughline of humanity. After a childhood accident involving a feuding neighbor and a glass bottle, he lost vision in his left eye. The accident, and a subsequent failed surgery, left him in a severe state of depression which would come and go throughout his life. Years later, his father and sister were killed in a car accident while driving on a Michigan highway. For Harrison, the human experience was defined by hardship — which was not shared equally.

The environments of northern Michigan provided temporary respite from his own depression and the realities of rural life. Amid the scattered forests and fields surrounding Reed City, Harrison found a landscape that absorbed him.  “The natural world would always be there to save me from suffocating in my human problems.” He believed that wandering the woods, studying birds, fishing, and a general curiosity for the natural world could “lift you out of your self-sunken mudbath, the violent mixture of hormones, injuries, melancholy, and dreams of a future you not only couldn’t touch but could scarcely see.” It is important to note that Harrison rarely framed such excursions as an antidote to the modern world. His conception of nature did not fit the simplistic framework of “civilization vs. wilderness” — a dichotomy he believed mostly spoke to upper- and middle-class men who invented the concept to bolster their own ideas of masculinity. “There is nothing quite so fatuous as a man self-consciously trying to act manly,” he writes in Off to the Side. Harrison did these things for one simple reason: “Because that’s how I grew up.”

After several fits and starts Harrison received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Michigan State University. He worked in publishing for a short time in Boston and later received an offer to teach at SUNY Stony Brook. But he couldn’t shake the landscapes of his youth and, after two years of teaching, moved back to Michigan, first to Kingsley and then to a farm in Leelanau County. He took regular visits to a small, remote cabin near Grand Marais. In Off to the Side, he notes that these places “would appear nondescript and scrubby to those who favor the cordillera of the Rockies but to me it was homeground, similar to the terrain around Reed City where I had grown up.” Grand mountain ranges seemed almost vain to the writer, who preferred a bedraggled forest on sandy soil. The excursion into the natural world was not about summits or vistas. It was about losing oneself in the commonplace environments he knew near Reed City.

Settled in northern Michigan and connected to the landscapes of his youth, Harrison found literary momentum. He wrote his first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir, in 1971 and quickly followed with A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), and Warlock (1981). The author preferred to focus on characters of unassuming backgrounds: bad farmers, lazy detectives, floundering professionals — nearly all of them who suffered from a life crisis or deep depression. All his characters were flawed. Most were unlikeable.

Harrison’s protagonists were poor, and those who weren’t carried traits that signaled to readers the politics he carried since childhood. The protagonist in True North (2004), David, spends his life rebuking his family’s legacy — lumber barons who clear-cut the forest of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the region’s mining boom. He despises his inherited wealth, disowns his father (a sexual predator), and commits his entire life to researching his family’s environmental destruction. It is mostly a solo project, a type of penance for inheriting the family name. Over the course of several decades, David stews, guilty and ashamed. He only finds temporary relief by staying in an austere cabin in the dense northern woods where he can take regular walks and escape his own “self-sunken mudbath.” In True North, like many of his other works, these woods are the landscapes where Harrison’s characters find brief sanctum. 

The author’s own relationship to Michigan’s rural landscapes can be seen through his characters. In short, they wander in the woods to cope with their own traumas. The forests and fields, like those near Harrison’s boyhood home, helped to lift the cognitive baggage of life. As he noted in Off to the Side, the landscape could “draw away your poisons to the point that your curiosity takes over and ‘you,’ the accumulation of wounds and concomitant despair, no longer exist.”

The place consumes you so that your mind can’t. Exploring Harrison’s boyhood landscapes, I couldn’t help but feel the scenic humility. Osceola County’s forests and prairies never stuck me as particularly iconic or overwhelmingly picturesque. However, while meandering through the brush, tall grasses, and stilted pine I found that time had been distorted, my consciousness muted. And in my own navigation of these landscapes, I also came to understand how they had been foundational in shaping Harrison’s “map of the world.”

Camden Burd is an Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Illinois University, where he researches and writes on topics related to the environmental history of the Midwest. His work has appeared in The Michigan Historical Review, IA: The Journal for the Society of Industrial Archaeology, and several edited collections. He is also co-host of Heartland History, the podcast of the Midwestern History Association.

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World’s Largest Buffalo
Jamestown, North Dakota

By Sheila Liming

The most famous writer to ever come out of North Dakota never wrote anything that takes place there. Louis L’Amour often talked about revisiting his home state, which he left at the age of fifteen. But he didn’t succeed in doing that until he was well into his seventies, when his induction into the state’s hall of fame lured him back at last.

Jamestown, North Dakota, is a curious place, and one that delights in making much of its status as L’Amour’s hometown, despite his reluctance about ever seeing it again. Its skyline, so to speak, is dominated by a buffalo — the world’s largest buffalo, to be exact. The twenty-six foot-tall figure, which was commissioned in the 1950s as a ploy to ensnare motorists on I-94, presides over hills that rise so gently, they barely merit use of the word. Further off the highway, and just visible through the buffalo’s anatomically incorrect undercarriage, is the town itself (pop: 15,750). Its squat, brick buildings are intermixed with houses built in the American foursquare, or “cornbelt cube,” style, their hipped roofs designed to keep off the snow. Some of the brick buildings would have been there before L’Amour was, but the cornbelt cubes likely date from right around the time of his birth in 1902.

North Dakota is where the West meets the Midwest. The state is huge and thus big enough to contain the multitudes indicated by both geographical designations. L’Amour, though, was drawn to only one of them in particular — the rugged West of his fantasies, not the Midwest of his experiences. Jamestown sits about an hour west of Fargo, on the eastern side of the state and so has more in common with its neighbor Minnesota, topographically speaking, than with the scorched and mountainous Western landscape that plays such an important role in his fiction. In drawing inspiration for his books and stories, L’Amour set his gaze westward, summoning visions of bloody battles that took place against a backdrop of desert buttes and mesas, land which he termed “Indian country.” He was, as historical photos indicate, compulsively clad in a cowboy hat and oversized silver belt buckle, even after he moved to Los Angeles and settled into a career in Hollywood.

I first visited L’Amour’s hometown in 2014, though not exactly by choice. Rather, I was traveling the state as part of a bus tour for new University of North Dakota faculty. The bus dropped us off at the buffalo; we were given bottles of sarsaparilla and a few hours to poke around the attached tourist facility known as Frontier Village.

Much like Louis L’Amour once did, Frontier Village combines Western identity with Midwestern geography. You can ride a horse-drawn stagecoach there; you can gaze upon a disturbing collection of hollow-eyed stares in its doll museum; and you can wander amongst buildings that have been plucked from their original prairie environs and deposited there for the sake of posterity. Among them is Louis L’Amour’s so-called “Writer’s Shack,” though he never wrote or published anything while living in North Dakota. It’s a one-room, wooden house — structure? cabin? nay, shack is the only word that works here — containing paperback copies of all of his “117 published novels” (the real number is, apparently, 86 though after his death, L’Amour’s son Beau continued to write and publish books under his father’s name, extending his oeuvre considerably). They’re arranged in a plexiglass display case on the far wall, alongside a few of his typewriters and a placard offering a dubiously fact-checked version of his biography.  

I had heard of L’Amour before I visited his Frontier Village “Writer’s Shack,” of course; my grandparents’ spare bedroom, located in the basement of their ranch-style home in Snohomish, Washington, was lined with his books. But I can’t say that I was much of a fan, or that visiting his Writer’s Shack in Jamestown succeeded in turning me into one. There is an intriguing bleakness to be found at the site of this makeshift memorial to him in Jamestown, though. Much like the rest of its Frontier Village surroundings, the Writer’s Shack strives to commemorate an authentic vision of Western history via a familiar if rather problematic species of Midwestern fantasy. The Midwest, after all, is not the West; if you take I-94 out of Fargo, away from Minnesota and towards the Montana border, you’ll see what I mean. The flat, level plains of the cornbelt give way to arid grasslands that are only good for grazing, just as the trucker caps of beet truck drivers on the eastern side of the state give way to Stetsons in the west.

L’Amour’s career, it could be argued, was a direct product of the confrontation between the romanticized West he barely knew and the Midwestern prairies he knew all too well. In the same way that the world’s largest buffalo was born as a means of coaxing tourists out of their cars, so might his literary legacy be seen as an attempt to coax the “west” out of the “Midwest” and thus renovate the conditions of culture and geography that he was born into.

Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College and the author of three books: What a Library Means to a Woman (2020), Office (2020), and most recently, Hanging Out (2023). Her writing has appeared in venues like The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Globe and Mail. She lives, works, and plays the accordion (and bagpipes) in Burlington, Vermont.

World’s Largest Buffalo sculpture by Elmer Petersen (1959). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Ichabod.

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