Growing Up with the Town: Family and Community on the Great Plains

233 Pages·2002·2.313 MB·English

by  Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder

uGROWING UP WITH THE TOWN
uGROW ING UP
WITH THE TOWN
Family & Community
on the Great Plains
DOROTHY HUBBARD SCHWIEDE|
University of Iowa Press Iowa City
University of Iowa Press, Library of Congress
Iowa City 52242 Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Copyright © 2002 by the Schwieder, Dorothy, 1933–
University of Iowa Press Growing up with the town: family
All rights reserved and community on the Great Plains / by
Printed in the Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder.
United States of America p. cm.
Design by Richard Hendel Includes bibliographical references
http://www.uiowa.edu/~uipress and index.
isbn
No part of this book may be 0-87745-804-9
reproduced or used in any form or 1. Presho (S.D.)—History—20th
by any means without permission century. 2. Presho (S.D.)—Social life
in writing from the publisher. All and customs—20th century. 3. Presho
reasonable steps have been taken to (S.D.)—Biography. 4. Schwieder,
contact copyright holders of material Dorothy, 1933– —Childhood and
used in this book. The publisher youth. 5. Hubbard family. 6. Great
would be pleased to make suitable Plains—History—20th century.
arrangements with any whom it has 7. Great Plains—Social life and
not been possible to reach. customs—2oth century. I. Title.
f p s
659. 74 39 2002
(cid:1)
The publication of this book was 978.358—dc21 2001054840
generously supported by the
University of Iowa Foundation. Portions of this book were first published
as the following articles: “A Tale of
Printed on acid-free paper Two Grandmothers: Immigration and
Family on the Great Plains,” South Dakota
c
02 03 04 05 06 5 4 3 2 1 History31 (Spring 2001): 26–52, and
“Town-Building and Persistence on the
Great Plains: The Case of Presho, South
Dakota,” South Dakota History30
(Summer 2000): 200–22.
Except where noted in the captions,
all photographs are from the author’s
collection.
For my siblings—
Donald, Ralph, Herold, and George Hubbard;
Gladys Hawley; Louise Miller;
and the late Ruth Iverson and John Hubbard.
Thank you for wonderful, warm memories;
without all of you, this book could not have been written.

u CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments, ix
Descendants Chart, xvii
Prologue, 1
part i.
The Early Years
1. The First Generation, 7
2. A Town Called Presho, 33
3. Times of Trial, 53
part ii.
A Personal Perspective
4. In My Father’s House, 81
5. The Wonderful World of Work, 103
6. A Community on the Plains, 119
7. The Business on Main Street, 145
8. Coming of Age and Leaving Home, 160
Epilogue, 173
Notes, 177
Index, 191

uPREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T
his book has been a long time in the making. The seed was
planted some five decades ago when I first began to realize
that the area where I grew up, the northern Great Plains,
had distinctive qualities and differed in significant ways
from other parts of the country. That sense of difference was nurtured
throughout my years in graduate school, when I studied the history of
the American West and came to understand intellectually how the region
developed, its unusual characteristics, and the part it played in the na-
tion’s history. But something seemed lacking in this academic experi-
ence. Historians and other scholars, such as Walter Prescott Webb,
Gilbert Fite, James Malin, and, more recently, Paula M. Nelson and John
C. Hudson, have done insightful, impressive, and certainly appropriate
studies of the region, but somehow they seemed incomplete. For me—
and, I believe, for many others who grew up there—the Great Plains ex-
perience was an intensely emotional and personal one, and this essence
has eluded most scholarly studies of the region.
Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again,” but still, people try.
Authors especially. Their journeys are often circuitous; writers often
write about other places—other towns, other regions, even other coun-
tries—before they return to their own special place in the world. My
path has been similar. As an American historian I have spent my profes-
sional career in Iowa, where I have specialized in Iowa history. Through-
out these years, however, a recurring mental counterpoint was, How did
my home state differ from my adopted state? In this roundabout way,
studying Iowa history has sharpened my perception of South Dakota.
Iowa enjoys abundant rainfall, and this rain falls onto some of the best
soil in the world; tall trees grace the river valleys, and the land is usually
green from early spring to late fall. White settlers who began arriving
here in the 1830s knew even then that this place held special promise;
these settlers had soon left their mark on the land by plowing up the tall
prairie grass and carving out farmsteads. By 1870, most of the state was