In every North Dakota town, there’s an elder with a story
The stories are different, but the themes come through clearly — deprivation, family, patriotism and faith.
Some 617 stories, many from the Great Depression and World War II, were gathered by one man who took 14 years to drive 113,000 miles over North Dakota’s gravel roads and paved highways to every town in the state — from Abercrombie to Zeeland, from the Red River Valley to the western Badlands.
“There was an untapped resource out there,” said Jim Puppe, who grew up on a Pembina County farm. “I was able to capture remarkable stories, tons of wisdom, and appreciate the resiliency. I could not stop.”
While not a writer, he turned his labor of love into a book, “Dakota Attitude,” self-published in December 2019 and in its fourth printing as of last month. Each story, with a photo taken by Puppe, fits on one page.
The germ for his audacious project came from his childhood.
“Living in North Dakota all my life, I heard of my parents’ generations going through tough times,” he said. “I wanted to hear how they survived the Dirty ’30s, Depression, blizzards and other hardships. I wanted to hear not only from those in the larger cities, but from every community on the map. I was curious.”
So, when he retired from the VA in 2004, the Fargo resident started his journey in his 20-year-old van packed with a recorder, camera, sleeping bag, thermos of coffee, loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and homemade strawberryrhubarb jam. His goal was to talk to someone from
every town shown on the North Dakota road map.
His modus operandi: After arriving in a town, he approached anyone he thought might be local and introduced himself as a native North Dakotan. He asked that person to identify someone in town who portrayed “human spirit, optimism, good morals, values and integrity.”
“It did not take long before I realized I was hearing great personal stories that were priceless,” said Puppe.
In Loma, along the Canadian border, Mary Mann had stark Depression memories of her father going into town with his team of horses. “He’d buy sugar and coffee,” she said in the book. “That’s about all the money you had. My mother sewed most all our clothes ’cause there was nine of us kids.”
Rueben Bjokne, who lived his entire life on the same Bottineau County farm where he was born in 1926, shared his Depression-era memories with Puppe. “Well, I can tell you this much, we had absolutely nothing. It was just grasshoppers as big as birds. I’d shoot grasshoppers with my BB gun. Oh, yeah, I was particular. I only shot the big ones. I couldn’t waste my BBs.”
And Jim Hanson, who was born in 1931 and grew up on a Cass County farm near Hickson in the Red River Valley, had one overriding heartbreak. “I can remember waking up on Christmas morning and my mother crying because she couldn’t afford to buy us presents.”
Puppe interviewed North Dakotans of Norwegian, Swedish, German and Irish heritage, among others, some of whom couldn’t speak English when they went off to one-room schoolhouses. Carl Skarphol, who grew up a quarter-mile from Canada in Bottineau County on the farm his immigrant father homesteaded, was one. “When I started school, I talked Norwegian. I had to learn English. My mother never really spoke English.”
Puppe talked to others who lost their language, like Eugene Hale, a Native American who was born in 1949 and grew up on the Spirit Lake Dakota Reservation in the northeastern part of the state. “When I was going to school at St. Michael’s, if I spoke one single word of the Dakota language, I would get punished for it. ... They took the language away.”
Though Puppe gathered many heartbreaking stories, it only fed his desire to visit every town.
“Actually, the more I traveled and the more visits conducted, my passion to complete the interviews only intensified,” Puppe said. “People were so friendly and willing to share. I was treated like a long-lost relative or as a neighbor. I felt like one of them.”