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  • Mapping the Treacherous Path from Past to Present in Nonfiction Narrative
  • Richard Edwards (bio)
Key Words

ethics, family, North Dakota, storytelling

I wrote a short memoir about the town of my youth, Stanley, North Dakota. The book is called Natives of a Dry Place, which I thought sufficient, but the publisher insisted it have a tag line, a subtitle, so they added Stories of Dakota before the Oil Boom. Stanley was a dusty little wheat and railroad town where my grandparents and parents lived most of their lives, and where I lived from my birth in 1944 until I left, at age twelve, in 1956. I hadn't returned to the town, except briefly once or twice, in the following fifty years, until I started writing the book. The book is mostly based on memory, mine and that of a few others I interviewed, such as my ninety-seven-year-old aunt and my two sisters, both now in their nineties.

As a child I assumed, in the way children do, that Stanley was a durable, permanent society, but in fact the Stanley I write about was quite short-lived. It was settled, suddenly, in the great homesteading land-rush of that region during the opening two decades of the twentieth century. A hundred years later the society I knew was fundamentally transformed and made almost unrecognizable by the great Bakken shale-oil boom. So the town and society I knew lasted only about a century.

Stanley has no famous sons or daughters whose names you would know, and no world-historic events ever happened there, at least until fracking came to western North Dakota. The people I write about were ordinary people, and they are probably much like folks in other small towns across the Great Plains. Nonetheless, as I try to show, there was something extraordinary—and worth not forgetting—about the values and way of living developed by Stanley folks and other Great Plains people like them. [End Page 265]

In particular, people admired and tried to develop certain traits or habits—what I call virtues, though I mean that term not in a moralistic or religious sense but rather as the ancient Greeks used the term, as excellence of any kind and bound up with the notion of fulfilling one's purpose or function, of living up to one's full potential. Such virtues are important: a society usually gets what it celebrates, so if it celebrates greed and celebrity and shallowness and glitz, it likely will get those attributes; it may even elect someone with those qualities as president.

On the other hand, a society that celebrates, and tries to live up to, more sober and selfless and communitarian virtues will tend to get those. The virtues I focused on that Old Stanleyites admired were resoluteness, steadfastness, devotion to community, pluck, commitment, dauntless optimism, a spirit of adventure, and modesty. My point was not that Stanley folks in some romanticized past always lived these virtues. Indeed, the stories I tell about them include cases of racism, possible anti-Semitism, marital infidelity, child molestation, hooliganism, promiscuity, and even murder. Nonetheless, when Old Stanleyites acted in accordance with their admired virtues, they felt good about themselves, and when they failed to do so, they knew they had fallen short.

Maps are visual representations of relationships, and in writing this book I found myself constructing various kinds of maps. The first mapped the geography of the town and surrounding area, not as it exists today but rather as it was circa 1920 and 1940.

A second map diagrammed the social class structure of the town. Social class was complicated by the fact that Stanley was a small, rather egalitarian town, and in some sense there was less social class to map. But also, social class lines were often subtle, changing, and overlapping. When I left Stanley as a twelve-year-old, I had little understanding of different families' income and wealth; I certainly didn't know the social clubs, canasta-playing networks, and cemetery-board memberships by which class was defined and enforced.

Susan Naramore Maher says that "what distinguishes the deep map form from other place-based...

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