Growing Up in North Dakota ed. by Patrick D. Morrow (review)

Reviews 241 Growing Up in North Dakota. Edited by Patrick D. Morrow. (Washing­ ton, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979. 83 pages, $1.85.) In his introduction to this book Professor Patrick Morrow of Auburn University tells the reader that these “anecdotes, memories, and tales” are the “recollections” of his father; this elder Pat Morrow was born in Cavalier (northeastern North Dakota) and grew up in Kenmare, northwest of Minot. The Irish Catholic Morrows share bleak Kenmare with an assort­ ment of railroad people, merchants, coal miners, farmers, and assorted human beings who struggle to survive through the first quarter of the twen­ tieth century. Survival was precarious indeed, for there were ten straight years of crop failure. The Morrows survived after father John absconded, because mother Lizzie cooked at the Irvin Hotel, and in 1917 they were able to buy a new Ford Model T. Their neighbors, the Kelleys, survived, with most of their fourteen children (four sets of twins) because Pa Kelley worked six or seven days a week in the lignite mines. There were also more substantial and sober citizens of Kenmare, like Bodmer, the hardware and furniture merchant who maintained the Pest House on the edge of town. Here relatives could bring family members who had small pox or other contagious diseases (“and there were a lot of them”), and the relatives would assume responsibility for both care and quarantine. There were other special institutions in Kenmare (population 1500 in 1910), like Charlie Blood’s public laundry and the horse-drawn water tank with a big tap on the back, from which water was dispensed at a rate of five or ten cents for a pair of filled buckets. The solid rock three or four feet below the surface made well-drilling an expensive ven­ ture, and the water tower furnished water only “to people on the other side of the coulee and downtown.” Kenmare was stratified and class-conscious, as all such towns were. “The ‘in’ people of Kenmare were the Methodists, not the Lutherans and certainly not the Catholics. . . . The merchants, the railway engineers, the mayor, and the professionals were Methodists. Some of the poor people were allowed in so they would have help keeping the church and parson­ age clean.” And the Catholics repaid the prejudice against them both with blows and prejudice: “The Methodist preacher was the Boy Scout leader . . . consequently it was a mortal sin for a Catholic boy to join the scouts. . . . ” We learn much about this forbidding near frontier of North Dakota from Morrow’s reminiscences, about the badgers, the French and Sioux mixed “Breeds,” and the way the homesteaders endured a climate that ranged from forty below z£ro in winter to a hundred and five degrees in summer. But despite some concessions to the familiar elements that estab­ lish Kenmare as a recognizable tum-of-the-century prairie town, there is much more that is unique about the Morrow recollections. 242 Western American Literature Chapter four’s “Characters” are as bizarre a cast of characters as any town could ever assemble, including (besides an astonishing collection of Flynns and Gormans) two non-irishmen with fantastic histories. There is Buster Copeland, son of the local milliner, who returns from the Orient to insert an exotic blade between his father’s fifth and sixth ribs — and won acquittal for the act. And Norwegian Henry Kolbo, who was the local movie projectionist while a Kenmare high school student, went on to amass several million dollars before he died in a 707 crash on Mt. Fuji in 1967. The Morrow book is anything but a sober-sided account of life on the North Dakota frontier. There is not a drab scene or a dull passage in the book. The actual texture of the prose is more surrealistic than realistic, as the adventures and anecdotes of these “poor, bigotted, and quarrelsome” Irish are revealed to us. The book is packed with characters and episodes that come at us with bewildering speed and variety. But it is the Irish who give the book its distinctive flavor. CLARENCE A. GLASRUD, Moorhead State University The Dime Novel Western. By Daryl Jones. (Bowling Green, Ohio...