One day while I was working at the State Archives, a patron approached the reference desk and asked me why Little Egypt Park, located in Williams County, was called Little Egypt? The person was interested in finding out why and how the park ended up with that name. I was intrigued myself, as I couldn’t think of any historical or geographical reasoning behind the name and set to work searching through various resources at the State Archives. This is what I found.

Little Egypt Park, located 30 miles south of Ray on Lake Sakakawea, features picnic areas, camping, and direct access to the lake so visitors can boat, fish, and swim at the park as well. In the late 1980s, plans were made to improve the park by creating a swimming area and bathhouse as well as upgraded picnic shelters and camping areas. And that’s all I was able to find. I looked through the State Archives resources I knew of, including “The Wonders of Williams: A History of Williams County, North Dakota,” local newspapers, and collections relating to parks and the creation of the parks, with no luck. This was odd, since it is common to find information about a park’s origins or name significance in our collections. Feeling stumped and not sure where else to search, I asked other State Archives staff members if they had any ideas, perhaps they had researched Little Egypt Park in the past. Shane Molander, the state archivist, reached out to State Historical Board member Richard Stenberg, an associate professor in the Arts and Human Sciences Department at Williston State College, with my question and provided me with the first lead I had so far: The old-timers in Williams County would say that the land had good soil or dirt. But what was the connection?

The sprawling Little Egypt Park on the shores of Lake Sakakawea. Courtesy Williams County

This research got me thinking about how and why place names were chosen during European immigration and settlement in the Midwest and Western states. The capital city of Bismarck is famously named in honor of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. A settlement in Traill County was given the name Little Chicago, and later in Dunseith, Little Chicago of the West was formed in the hopes that it would soon rival the city in Illinois. Towns across the Midwest were named Little Norway or Little Sweden by Norwegian or Swedish immigrants. So what inspired the people of Williams County to choose Little Egypt as their new park’s name? Continuing my search, I started looking for places named Little Egypt outside of North Dakota to see if any other information could be gathered about this interesting place name.

I came across this advertisement during my search for Little Egypt place names. The Devils Lake World, October 4, 1922, p. 15

Southern Illinois is nicknamed “Little Egypt,” with several towns in the southern half of the state named after Egyptian cities. This nickname was inspired by comparisons of the geographic features of the Mississippi River and flood plains of southern Illinois to the fertile Nile Valley in Egypt. Poor harvests in the northern regions of the state also contributed to this nickname, as the land in southern Illinois provided food relief to the struggling north during the winter of 1830-31.

Suddenly the dots began to connect. The “good dirt” that the old timers in Williams County thought the name came from could have been an allusion to the fertile soil found in that region of the county or to the fertile soil they hoped the region would have. The name also evokes the feeling of a prosperous community, like the settlers in Little Chicago would have wanted. Or perhaps people from southern Illinois settled in Williams County and chose to name the park after their home in Illinois. One single answer may not exist with multiple inspirations possible. But as it doesn’t appear the reason for the name was recorded, my quest continues.

The State Historical Society of North Dakota has over 14 million artifacts in its museum, archives, and archaeology collections. That’s a lot! To showcase more of these, we’ve started a new video series called “Our Heritage.” Each month’s video features artifacts related to a prominent North Dakotan, historical topic, or related theme and are presented by a member of our staff who’s an expert on or has a passion for the subject.

Our first video, which premiered in January, focused on Fannie Dunn Quain, North Dakota’s first licensed female physician. Sarah Walker, head of reference services in the State Archives, pulled the Fannie Dunn Quain papers from the collections to discuss and show who this trailblazer was.

Next up was a two-part video with Security Supervisor David Schlecht highlighting some of the firearms in the museum gun vault. This represented just a small sampling of the more than 500 firearms in our gun vault. We feel very lucky to have a Smith & Wesson Model 320 Revolving Rifle with a 20-inch barrel since only about 244 of these were ever made.

April’s video was very timely and my personal favorite so far as I had no idea at least three passengers on the RMS Titanic had ties to North Dakota. Here, Head of Reference Services Sarah Walker tells the stories of Ole Ableseth, Herbert and Carrie Chaffee, and Johannes Nysveen. An audio clip from Ole Ableseth talking about his experience on the Titanic will be sure to pull at your heartstrings.

Our newest video, scheduled to be published May 21, features Captain Joseph Enright, the officer credited with sinking the largest warship by a U.S. submarine. Learn more about Enright from State Historical Society Director Bill Peterson and see some of the pins he received for his service in the U.S. Navy.

We really enjoy making these videos and hope you enjoy watching them and learning more about our collections. See the videos at youtube.com/user/SHSND. We won’t tell you what videos are planned for the next few months, but we will say one will be with multiple people from different departments within the agency discussing artifacts related to the chosen topic. It will be a great collaboration!

Screenshot of OCLC WorldShare, which is one way a library can submit a request received from a researcher for microfilm holdings at the State Archives.

Spring has descended on the Bismarck area after a relatively calm winter for us, and with summer’s approach our busy research season is about to come to the State Archives. While we have patrons throughout the year, we tend to get more visitation in the summer months with folks coming to tackle their family history projects or researchers working on that next book or article on a given topic. While most of our collections are only accessible in person in the reading room, interlibrary loans do provide access to many microfilm resources from afar.

Some may be familiar with these services from their local libraries, whether public or affiliated with a college or university. Such loans allow staff to request material the library does not have in its collection from another library, which then loans it to the requesting library to allow the patron access to it for a specified period. With lending libraries, whose materials typically are meant to circulate, such loans are a routine service. At the State Archives, our material is usually not meant to circulate, but some of our researchers are not able to easily come to Bismarck to research in person. If they need access to North Dakota newspaper resources beyond a search for a specific obituary or other article, this is where interlibrary loans come in.

Our microfilmed newspapers are a popular resource for researchers on a variety of topics and projects. While our digital offerings of newspapers are expanding as resources allow on sites such as Chronicling America and Advantage Archives, many newspapers are not yet digitized, so microfilm is the way to access these.

How does one submit an interlibrary loan request? Contact the appropriate staff at your nearest local library (public, college, or university) that has a microfilm reader available and is willing to facilitate the loan. They submit the request to us, and we either fulfill it by sending the microfilm in the mail or let them know we are unable to fill it at this time. The loan period is 30 days and can be renewed for an additional 30 days unless there is a need for the film to be returned, in which case we would notify the library. We do charge a fee of $4 per roll to libraries in the United States to cover postage and other costs associated with the service. Library staff can submit requests via OCLC WorldShare, which is an online portal many libraries use to submit ILL requests, or they can email us the request directly to archives@nd.gov. We also loan to Canadian libraries, though this incurs an $8 charge per roll because of the increased costs involved.

Some restrictions to this service exist. We loan a maximum of five rolls at a time to a patron. The rolls must stay within the requesting library facility. Also, not all our microfilm rolls can be loaned, but we do let researchers know when they reach out to us regarding a particular resource. And we are unable to loan outside the United States and Canada.

All interlibrary loan requests we receive at the State Archives are logged into Re:discovery as well.

So if you can’t make it to Bismarck, consider giving interlibrary loan a try. We have sent dozens of rolls to libraries across the country and to Canada, averaging 75 loan requests per year. We are happy to help libraries and work with them in providing this service to access one of our more widely used resources. Newspapers are a great window into our past, and you can access most of ours via your local library if needed. Give it a try!
 

When fresh, pemmican has a waxy, gritty texture and a fatty, beefy flavor. While pemmican can store indefinitely if kept dry, its flavor does not improve with age.

Pemmican is a food made of a mix of dried meat and fat. As George Colpitts notes in his book, Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780-1882, the name came from the Cree word pemigan and means “he makes grease.” The grease came from bone marrow and was mixed with harder fats by Native Americans to produce traditional pemmican, sometimes referred to as sweet pemmican.

Two types of pemmican were commonly made foods. Sweet pemmican consisted of a mixture of more palatable fats, including bone marrow grease and unsaturated fats, which made it softer and more palatable than its more prolific counterpart, trade pemmican. It was prepared with care using the best meat and fat. Dried fruit was sometimes mixed into it. For instance, in the Red River Valley, the highbush cranberry, also known as the Pembina berry, would have been added.

Trade pemmican, by contrast, was a hurriedly mass-produced food made by Euro-American and Métis fur traders from whatever was most accessible. It contained more saturated fats and was thus much harder. It often contained other ingredients such as fur, bits of bone, or even bark, which inadvertently found their way into the mix during processing. Despite its rough and unappealing taste and texture, the calories packed into every pound of pemmican helped to drive the fur trade.

Fur traders first came to Pembina in the 1790s to hunt beavers. By 1804, they switched to hunting bison for meat and making pemmican to feed fur traders who operated in the far north of Canada. The Métis quickly took over the pemmican industry, dominating in the middle 19th century with their annual bison hunts at Pembina and Walhalla, then called St. Joseph. Pemmican was so important to feeding people working and living in the Red River Valley that in 1814 the Pemmican War broke out between competing fur trade companies and their allies when the governor of the British territory of Assinaboia (modern southern Manitoba and the Red River Valley) tried to forbid its export. The pemmican trade, like much of the industrial fur trade, ended when bison herds were hunted to near extinction in the late 19th century, a problem exacerbated in part by intensive bison hunts of the Métis pemmican trade.

Despite reading about pemmican in the accounts of many writers who described it in varying degrees of admiration or derision, I still didn’t know what it tasted or looked like. So I embarked on some experimental archaeology to find out. Having no easy access to bison bones, I made a version of trade pemmican, though I left out the fur and bark. I used beef fat since the butchers near me did not carry bison fat. Though bison was historically the most common meat base, pemmican can be made with the meat and fat of any animal, even wild game or fish.

I started with dried bison, which to me tasted almost flavorless but slightly gamey. Adding some beef fat, the dish tasted like fatty ground beef with only a hint of the bison, but the texture is that of a wax candle mixed with gravel. That may not sound appealing, but at almost 4,000 calories per pound, pemmican couldn’t be beat as a source of shelf-stable nutrition in the 19th century.

Two pounds of raw meat and a ½ pound of suet. The meat will reduce to a quarter of its weight when dried, leaving ½ pound of dried meat and ½ pound of suet for 1 pound of pemmican.

If you are up for an adventure and want to make your own pemmican, you’ll need only two or three ingredients:

• 2 pounds of raw meat (bison or beef), as lean as can be found
• ½ pound of suet or fat (bison or beef)
• 1 cup of finely chopped dried fruit (optional)

Begin by cutting the meat into strips as thin as possible. Cut against the grain to make the meat dry faster and easier to pulverize later. Lay the cuts of meat on a wire rack. Place the rack on a baking sheet to catch any errant fat drips.

Cut against the grain to dry the meat faster and make it easier to grind.

Set your oven to the lowest possible temperature—for me that was 175 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake the tray of meat in the oven for 10 to 12 hours. The historical method of drying meat was to hang it outside in the sun for one or two days. The hot sun and prairie winds would desiccate the meat and dry it into jerky. Smoke and fire were sometimes employed to aid the drying process. A more hygienic option is to use an oven or dehydrator.

The dried meat should be brittle and tear apart easily. Place the dried meat in a food processor or blender and use the pulse setting until the meat is mostly ground into a stringy powder; a few remaining small chunks are fine. The longer you process the meat, the finer it will become, which will improve the texture of the final product. If you are including dried fruit, now is the time to mix it thoroughly into your ground meat.

Grind as fine as you wish. Sweet pemmican would have been made with meat pounded into a literal powder. Trade pemmican would have been rougher, which is what I ended up making here.

Next render the fat in a saucepan over medium-low heat. With a metal strainer or spoon, remove any chunks that do not melt so only liquid fat is left. Pour the fat mixture over your ground meat and begin mixing it together with a spoon. Once cool enough to touch without burning your hand, begin mixing by hand to cover everything thoroughly in fat. It is best to wear gloves while mixing. After mixing, but before the fat has set, you may choose to pour your pemmican into a muffin tin or other shaped dish. Let the mixture rest until it has fully hardened.

Pemmican when kept dry has a shelf life measured not in months or years but in decades, though added fruit will shorten it. Historically, pemmican was stored in bags made of bison hide with the seams sewn with rawhide and coated in tallow to keep air and moisture out. A freezer bag or plastic container will suffice to store your pemmican. You may choose to refrigerate your pemmican, but it is not necessary. I made a bag from rabbit fur purchased at the Pembina State Museum store, and my pemmican has kept without refrigeration for over a year. The pemmican is still gritty and a bit unpleasant to my taste buds but completely edible and should remain so for many years.

For added flare, I bought a rabbit fur and sewed it into a pocket to more authentically store my pemmican. You may prefer a plastic freezer bag.

I cannot count all the ways people can send an electronic message to one another these days. Email, text, Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Teams, Zoom, Twitter, direct message—the list seems endless. Even the once exalted method of the telephone has receded into a dim, distant place behind these other forms of messaging. People now regularly text me to see if I am able or willing to take a call. While most days I don’t feel particularly old, I fondly remember dial phones and the excitement of coming home to a blinking answering machine light! That all seems like ancient technology to me now.

On a personal level, I rarely see regular mail these days. I get forms and reports for review at the office, but personal mail is mostly just bills and junk punctuated a couple times a year with holiday or birthday cards. Truth is, I have received very few handwritten letters in the mail lately. But when I do get them, I treasure them. Before I came to the State Historical Society, I found that writing to other people the old-fashioned way—with paper, pen, and in cursive—brought me great joy. It turns out that it brought much happiness to the recipients of those letters as well. A couple of my friends confided that the letters meant more to them than I could have imagined.

My letter-writing habit got me thinking about stationery. I often used blank note cards or plain paper. But I wondered if something slightly more personalized might also fit the bill when it came to designing my director’s letterhead. I believe that answers to most of our issues in life can be found by looking back at our history. Most people think of archives as simply a way to source the past, but our State Archives contain thousands of examples of the very best historical graphic design as well. To this end, I asked Sarah Walker, head of reference services, for examples of stationery in our collections. Walker and Lindsay Meidinger, head of archival collections and information management, then served as sounding boards as I sifted through many samples. Just as I had suspected, I was richly rewarded with a plethora of beautiful, artistic, elegant, and professional examples of stationery that made me long for the days past when we communicated with each other by setting pen to paper and writing. TBH, BTW, NGL, those were the days—the days before we communicated primarily in emojis and acronyms! SMH.

A couple of the best examples I found included the stationery of the Lesmeister & Son Automobile Garage in Selz, North Dakota. I loved the graphics in this one with the old cars and the color. It just hollers “adventure.” I also liked the work on the Dakota Territory Centennial Commission stationery and other examples of company stationery that highlighted the organization’s officers. The Bismarck Diamond Jubilee graphic used the original streetscape of historic Bismarck to cleverly cast a shadow of the future Bismarck. What brilliant graphic design and use of color in that one! The steamboat and subtle other nuances in that letterhead caused my gaze to linger. Many businesses’ letterheads contained renderings of their buildings, indicating a great source of pride by the sender in the places they worked.

Lesmeister & Son Automobile Garage stationery, circa 1918. SHSND MSS 11354

Stationery made for Bismarck’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1947. SHSND MSS 11354

Dakota Territory Centennial Commission stationery, 1961. SHSND MSS 11354

After looking at a few of these, Dannie Dzialo, a talented graphic artist who also works in the State Archives, and I sat down to discuss things we liked or didn’t like about the archived stationery. Reference staff also weighed in on what was attractive to them. And then we thought about a few things that are important to me. After some back and forth, Dzialo submitted the finished letterhead, which includes images of the state Capitol and ND Heritage Center & State Museum as well as the names of the agency’s departmental directors, people with whom I am honored and proud to be associated. These elements are mixed with a few others that have deep meaning to me, including, of course, my faithful Labrador retrievers and a steamboat, an expression of my early love of maritime and North Dakota history. 

My new director’s stationery reflects my love of North Dakota history as well as other elements from my past with deep meaning to me.

In past blog posts, I gave a sneak peek at the initial processing lab and the main archaeology lab. Today, let’s take a tour of the big archaeological collections storage room.

Comparisons have been made to the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”—but don’t worry, we have much better finding aids. We want people to be able to find the artifacts in the big archaeological collections storage room and use them for research, exhibits, and educational events.

This room was designed to hold at least 20 years of future incoming collections and related materials, with moveable shelving adding extra storage space. This gives us room to store large, oversized objects not currently on display, like this earthlodge model.

This large model of an unfinished rectangular earthlodge shows how it was constructed.

In this room we keep educational, federal, and state collections as well as accession paperwork and storage supplies.

The archaeological educational collection is one of my favorite collections to show people. You don’t just get to peer at items in this collection from afar—you can touch, hold, and look closely at them.

Some objects in the educational collection are replicas, objects that were made recently but from the same materials people used in the past. Because things like wood, hide, and sinew usually do not last long in North Dakota’s environment, replicas are often the only way to show objects made from these materials. For instance, the wooden paddles that were used to shape pottery.

Replica wooden pottery paddles and pottery sherds from the educational collection.

Sometimes replicas are used for experimental archaeology. Experimental archaeology involves using the same kinds of tools used in the past to learn more about how something was done, such as making stone tools. Replicas are often used so the original artifacts are not damaged or destroyed in the process.

A replica flintknapping kit for making stone tools. From left: a leather pad, a stone abrader, a deer antler tine flaker, a hammerstone, and an elk antler billet.

Other objects in the educational collection are cast replicas. Casts are made from a mold or 3D scan of a real artifact. This is useful for artifacts that are too fragile or rare to handle, or for artifacts that come from places outside of North Dakota. Only North Dakota collections are currently accepted into the archaeology collections. But sometimes it is useful for researchers to have access to comparisons from other places. This projectile point is a synthetic cast of a real Paleoindian projectile point from the Mill Iron site in Montana.

A realistic cast replica of a Goshen Paleoindian projectile point from the Mill Iron site in Montana.

The real artifacts in the educational collection have little or no provenience (i.e., we do not know exactly where they are from or what was found around them). While this means they are not very useful for scientific study, they are still useful for learning about objects and material types. Many of these artifacts are donated.

Examples of real artifacts with low provenience. Even though such artifacts might not be scientifically studied, they are very useful for training volunteers and staff to identify different kinds of materials in collections.

Collections from federal lands in North Dakota are kept in this room. We help curate North Dakota’s federal collections for the U.S.  Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

This is just part of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s North Dakota collections!

Artifacts from projects on state, county, or municipal lands are also stored here, in addition to donations from private landowners.

These boxes hold artifacts from Fort Abraham Lincoln (32MO141) and are part of North Dakota’s state collections.

Filing cabinets and storage supplies might not be too exciting to look at, but they are important. These are the accession files. Accession files tell us who donated a collection or what federal agency owns the collection and where the artifacts came from.

These accession files might not look exciting, but they hold treasures of information, such as where collections come from and who donated them.

Storage space for supplies means we can continue moving North Dakota’s collections out of old acidic boxes and into better materials to preserve the artifacts for the future.

Archival boxes ready and waiting to be put to good use.

If you would like to schedule an in-person tour of the archaeology collections, please contact us.