Dakota Land
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-09-05

Day 171 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: "Older nations have had peasant revolts and agrarian movements and parties. The United States has had its Greenback, Populist, Nonpartisan League and Farm Bloc movements, all of them western, and in part representative of strugglers in semi-arid areas where so often "the rain's just gone around." A poet of those strugglers, Edwin Ford Piper, in “Barbed Wire and Wayfarers,” uses their lingo:

Run you old stiff-kneed grasshopper.
You spiral-spited jackrabbit, you!
A-ho, whoopee!
Brown's Hotel we're bound to see,
Swing them girls at the dance party,
One-and-twenty on a moonlight spree
A-ho, whoopee!
Whoa, Zebe, whoa!
Whoa, 'till I hitch you, whoa!

In a piece on "The Drought," he tells how

On the whitening grass,
With bright and helpless eyes, a meadow lark
Sits open-beaked and desperately mute.
The thin, brown wheat that was too short to cut
Stands in the field; the feeble corn, breast high,
Shows yellowed leaf and tassel.

"And from Piper's song collection we have a psalm of a  desolate people, "Dakota Land," with an air somewhat after the gospel hymn, "Beulah Land."

[from the Traditional Ballad Index] Although the "Dakota Land" form seems to be the most common in tradition, local versions have sprouted for much of the West. Thus the Fifes lists texts for "Dakota Land," "Nebraska Land," and "Missouri Land." "Saskatchewan" also follows this form, but it has been adapted enough that I think it qualifies as a separate song.

Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder) quotes a stanza of this on p. 6 of Laura Ingalls WIlder, On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, Harper & Row, 1962; she claims her mother and her aunt Grace sang it in the early 1890s -- but of course she was writing almost seventy years later.