In the Chinese calendar, this is the Year of the Monkey. If Paleontology had a calendar, it would be the Year of the Plesiosaur! Northeastern North Dakota is well known for its underwater fauna. Mosasaurs (giant marine reptiles) swam alongside Archelon (giant sea turtles), Hesperornis (flightless birds), as well as plenty of fish and squid. Another type of marine reptile lived here that many people identify with the Loch Ness Monster (Nessie) – a plesiosaur.

Right: Sculpture of the Loch Ness Monster

Brief science lesson: plesiosaurs are a group of marine reptiles that contain a number of divisions. One group, the Pliosauroidea, had large heads and short necks. The other group, Plesiosauroidea, in general had small heads and long necks. Prior to their descriptions in 1824, they were grouped together with other marine reptiles, and sometimes even fish. Since then many shapes and sizes have been found – but few from North Dakota.

As of 2015, the State Fossil Collection had two elasmosaurid (reaaaallly long neck) vertebrae. One is on display in the Adaptation Gallery: Geologic Time of the North Dakota Heritage Center, and the other is on display in Icelandic State Park. During the National Fossil Day event last October, a private citizen turned in another vertebra found south of Bismarck. In spring 2016, paleontologists Clint Boyd and Jeff Person made a road trip down to the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum in Bowman. Behold – more! Not just one vertebra, but 15 articulated neck bones, plus bits of a partial skeleton! Then, icing on the cake – During our Pembina Gorge dig, a local brought in some bones to have them identified – yet another plesiosaur vertebra, this time from the body. The creatures were coming out of the woodwork from all across the state – it was amazing.

Vertebrae from the articulated neck of a plesiosaur. Fifteen were collected; one neck had around 70 vertebrae.

The next steps will be to fully prepare the material found, and then identify who it belongs to. Saying “plesiosaur” is like saying “dog.” It’s a general term that gets a basic body shape in mind (notice the lower-case letter and non-italics). What we want to know are the specifics. Saying “Elasmosaurus” or “Styxosaurus” would be like saying German Shepherd and Scottish Terrier – a narrower description (also uppercase first letter and italics).

It is important to note – plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs. They are marine reptiles. For example, if we take a dog (land mammal), and a dolphin (water mammal) – both are mammals, both can coexist, but they are not closely related. It is the same with a plesiosaur (water reptile), and a dinosaur (land reptile).

I would guess that research sounds like a pretty dull job to most people. Nose down in book, hand scribbling notes, eyes growing bleary, back bone slowly coiling into a permanent loop around the desktop. I won’t deny that all of that happens. But the process is also one of discovery. There is always something new, something cool to add the body of knowledge we share with those who read our curricula and newsletters.

When we decided to write about the geology of the Red River Valley for the North Dakota Studies newsletter, I entered the research cautiously. I am a historian. I love documents; I can understand anything old on paper. Layers of dirt are important, but I have always considered rocks and dirt to be someone else’s joy-filled research project. Reading through the documents, I slowly absorbed the geological history of the great glacial Lake Agassiz that formed the Red River Valley thousands of years ago.

This map of glacial Lake Agassiz was drawn by Warren Upham in 1895. He based it on available knowledge of Lake Agassiz’s shorelines. W. Upham, The Glacial Lake Agassiz

And those numbers! I can easily grasp the historical flow of a couple of centuries, but 11,000 years is almost beyond comprehension. When I read that Lake Agassiz “briefly” overflowed into present day Minnesota for a period of only 300 years, I wondered how many generations of people might have thought of that temporary shoreline as a permanent part of the landscape. You could almost hear their discouraging words as the shoreline where they had always fished receded to the west.

Nevertheless, I learned some very interesting things about Lake Agassiz. The lake did not fill all of the space that is today considered the ancient lake bed. The lake rose and receded, overflowing here and there over several thousand years. Changing water levels left ripples of shorelines that are easily visible in the southern Red River Valley. In forests to the north, the shorelines are more difficult to locate, but new information surfaces from time to time.

Another interesting thing I learned is that the ancient lake is today the focus of research on how global warming might affect North America and the Atlantic Ocean. As the huge lake, the largest in North America, drained through Hudson Bay into the Atlantic Ocean, it changed the chemistry of the ocean and cooled the air temperature of northern hemisphere. At least, that is the current working hypothesis. Climate scientists are still working on the problem, but it appears that the geologic history of Lake Agassiz may help us understand global warming today.

Lake Agassiz’s peculiar geology created the Red River Valley, one of the greatest agricultural regions in the world.

The lakebed of Lake Agassiz formed the large, flat valley of the Red River. In the 1870s, the Red River Valley attracted settlers who found the rich soil was perfect for wheat farming. SHSND C0868

Today, we talk about the land that our grandfathers farmed and about our attachment to this place. I wonder how many more generations will call it home before geological change takes place once again and leaves us wondering where it all went.

As a volunteer for the State Historical Society for the last 10 years and a former president of the North Dakota Archaeological Association, I have had many opportunities to write articles about the history and archaeology of Dakota Territory and North Dakota. One new project examines an attempted cross-country emigration of settlers and merchants from Minnesota to the gold fields of Montana and Idaho. A combination of bad timing, headstrong leaders, and disgruntled Native Americans would lead to its failure.

The year of 1864 was an unsettled time in Dakota Territory and the rest of the nation.

The American Civil War was still raging in the East.

Homesteaders were slowly and reluctantly returning to Minnesota and Dakota Territory after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

President Abraham Lincoln was shuffling military troops in an attempt to bolster Union fighting forces and address unrest in the Midwest.

Demands were being made to assure safe passage to gold fields of Montana and Idaho. Westward expansion was being encouraged, and with it, hopefully, the nation’s gold reserves would be replenished.

Sign at the entrance to Fort Dilts

Major General John Pope at “Headquarters, Department of the Northwest” in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had issued orders to build four forts in Dakota Territory to address Native American unrest and establish a safe route to western gold fields. General Alfred Sully was the “boots on the ground” guy tasked with both objectives. On July 7, 1864, he established the location of Fort Rice eight miles above the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers. It would eventually be manned by former Confederate prisoners-of-war.

After detailing troops to build the fort, Sully and his command continued north to what would eventually be called the Battle of Killdeer Mountain and the Battle of the Badlands. One  “success” of the campaign was destruction of the winter food supply of Native Americans at Killdeer Mountain.

It was a bad time to attempt a cross-country road trip. Yet, that is exactly what James L. Fisk proposed to do. A former private in the Third Minnesota Volunteer Infantry, he had earned the reputation of being “undisciplined” and now was going to attempt a more direct, uncharted route across Dakota Territory to shave several hundred miles off the more established trail to the gold fields. Fisk had been successful in his 1862 and 1863 expeditions from Minnesota to Montana following the established route. His luck would not hold in 1864.

Fisk and 97 covered wagons and 200 men, women, and children traveled from Fort Ridgely, Minnesota, to newly established Fort Rice. His plans were to join General Sully and his troops for protection. Unfortunately, Sully had already left for his battles to the north. Undeterred, Fisk left Fort Rice on August 24, 1864, under an escort of convalescent soldiers and worn out horses.

On September 2, the wagon train was attacked by Hunkpapas under the leadership of Sitting Bull. The band was headed south to their traditional hunting grounds in hopes of replenishing their food supplies destroyed at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain. A wagon train loaded with supplies seemed to be one answer to their hunger problems.

A running skirmish ensued until the Fisk expedition circled their wagons on September 4, built a six-foot-tall earthen wall around the wagons, and hunkered down until Sully’s troops came to their rescue on September 20.

Corporal Jefferson Dilts, signal scout for the expedition, was killed during the siege. Their earthen cantonment and home for 16 long days was named Fort Dilts in honor of Corporal Dilts who was buried on the perimeter of the enclosure.

James Fisk detailed his side of the story in an official report to U.S. Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomason January 13, 1865. His handwritten, 100-page explanation of events did not, in all cases, agree with the daily diary kept by William L. Larned, expedition member and later resident of Fort Rice.

My next blog will explore Fort Dilts through the eyes of those who experienced it firsthand in September 1864.

You can visit the Fort Dilts State Historic Site eight miles northwest of Rhame. (GPS 46.279121, -103.776424). A four-mile drive north of Highway 12 west of Rhame will transport you to a site that looks much as it did 152 years ago.

We will review those sixteen days through the written words and stories of the participants in my next blog.

Landscape at Fort Dilts

One of my major projects as a Museum Division intern has been to go through objects found in our collection, or “FIC.” FIC objects are ones that have no record, were recorded as missing, misplaced, or were never part of the Museum Division collection in the first place and somehow, over time, ended up in collections storage.

Every week, I select several objects to bring to the Museum Collections Committee (MCC). At these meetings it is decided whether to accept these objects into the permanent collection. So far, I have submitted about one hundred FIC items to the MCC. There have been finds that have ranged from interesting to confusing.

One of the most interesting finds has been a bearskin jumpsuit. This suit is heavy and big. It was probably made for a person over six feet, since the jumpsuit spread across an entire work table when I took a picture of it. Inside the suit the pockets are made of denim, indicating that whoever made this cut the pockets out of a pair of jeans and sewed them to this bearskin jumpsuit. We have no records of this piece and have no idea how it ended up in museum collections storage. We do know, however, that whoever wore this stayed very warm. Because this item is so unique, the MCC decided it should be accepted into the Museum Division’s collection.

Bearskin jumpsuit found folded with no information on a shelf in storage.

I also found a small binder in the collection. At first glance, this was relatively unexciting and looked like some kind of small science textbook. After taking it to the Museum Collections Committee, we found that it was actually a guide to a rock collection that we have in our possession. Now, we can properly identify these rocks from the collector himself. At some point this guide book was separated from where it belongs, and now these two items are being stored together.

The binder had photos and newspaper clippings about the donor and collector as well as a guide to the collection.

Not everything I find stays with the Museum Division. Some of these finds go to the Instructional Collection maintained by SHSND’s Communication and Education Division. Staff uses this collection for educational programs, allowing the public to touch the items. For example, I recently found a box of nails and some silverware. For the Museum Division, these items are not a good fit for the permanent collection. We do not have a history of where they came from, and we already have similar items in the collection. By putting them in the Instructional Collection, the public will be able to get a closer look and learn about them.

These are just a few examples of found-in-collections objects that have gone to the education collection.

Some items we decide we don’t want. In these cases, I offer them to institutions around North Dakota. Many times they are taken by other educational institutions, museums, and historical societies. Recently, another institution took a military patch representing the 47^th Infantry Division of the Minnesota National Guard. We already had four of these patches in the museum collection, but we were able to transfer this patch to a county historical society that had none. This is a way that we can avoid redundancies in our collection and allow other institutions across the state to tell stories using objects they currently do not have.

This patch from the 47^th Infantry Division of the Minnesota National Guard is now helping a different institution interpret their history.

Museum professionals don’t like to discuss the uncataloged “found” items in a collection. However, this is a reality everywhere. When only a few people are responsible for thousands of objects, things are bound to be misplaced or mislabeled due to human error or just plain circumstance. Record keeping did not use to be as stringent as it is now. Museum database software also makes it easier to keep all information in one place. Being able to help find permanent homes for lost objects has been extremely rewarding. Institutions across the state can use these items, and we can finally put all the pieces of other objects back together again.

This summer, as collections interns, we had two major projects. The first was discussed in the last post by my fellow intern, Meg Glazier-Anderson (http://blog.statemuseum.nd.gov/blog/teeth-cleaning). The second was the Recent Acquisitions Case.

The purpose of collections care and maintenance—and museums themselves—is to preserve heritage and history for future generations as best we can. Collections care goes beyond maintaining an updated catalog, periodic inventory, and correct storage practices. It revolves around sharing and exploring history with the public. Telling the stories we have collected, preserved, and maintained helps connect future generations with their past and keep true to the ideals of what a museum is and should be.

We interns tried to keep that in mind as we developed the Recent Acquisitions Case. The case is located in the Corridor of History, near the Adaptation Gallery: Geologic Time. Every year new interns search out artifacts and stories they would like to include in the case. When a list is finalized, our next steps are creating a layout for placement of the artifacts, writing labels, researching related materials, and making dozens of small adjustments as things change and stories become more cohesive. At the end of our collective time, with only about six weeks to design the case, interns de-installed last year’s exhibit and installed the new.

Layout experiments. We found it useful to adjust our layouts on the full scale.

There are very few requirements or criteria for the case, but artifacts must have been acquired by the museum within the last year. Though most of our artifacts came from the Museum Division general collection, we worked with the Archaeology and Historic Preservation Division and the North Dakota Geological Survey’s paleontologists to discuss some of their recent finds as well. We had an abundance of choices. Since there is no timeline we had to stick to, nor just one story to tell, we took advantage of the wildly varying objects within the museum’s collections. Each intern chose a few pieces she liked for the interesting story, unique construction, or nostalgia, and together we put the disparate objects into related sections and stories.

A bottle of “St. Jakob’s Oel” from Fort Rice, one of the pieces from the Archaeology and Historic Preservation Division’s collections.  (Photo by David Nix).

For those who have not seen the case, it spans prehistoric time to the early 2000s; from a Subhyracodon occidentalis skull—an ancient rhino—to an iMac computer. There are Barbies, a bowling dress, 19^th century medicine bottles, and musical instruments, among other things. The case proved a real chance for us not only to show off our exhibit design skills (and gain a few more) but to show off the breadth of the collection. It’s not a large case, all things considered--12 feet x 8 feet x 3 feet, and yet it contains so many stories, objects, and ideas.

The process of putting the case together, from artifact selection to installation, was an adventure in group work, constant readjustment, and often asking advice from the people who do this every day and with whom we worked closely. We wanted to share the stories we get to work with every day and show our visitors how much a museum can discover and share.

The three museum division interns—Meg, Maria, and Elenore—in front of the installed case. (photo by Genia Hesser)

Left: Expansion phase pictured here is of the Treehouse children’s exhibit, now fully finished and ready to go. Each phase seemed like a new gift to unwrap. (Photo by Brian Austin)

Right: This photo is of my supervisor and me at the Legislative Reception, where we were allowed into the construction areas. I had to wear a hard hat and a vest. Other staff here (Becky Barnes) decorated my hard hat so I could feel more myself.

When the State Historical Society’s expansion occurred, a lot of planning went into the exhibits that would populate the new and existing spaces. While I was uninvolved with that process in my role here, I really was eager to see what would be used. Staff who were not part of the installation process were not given ready access to the areas (understandably, or they may have had a few of us—okay, me—underfoot). So whenever we were given permission to sneak over and watch construction going on, or see a hint of what was going to be installed, it was exciting.

But I admit, as excited as I was for everything else, I really was looking to see what audio resources might be used from the State Archives.

I’ve talked about audio and video resources several times before; I wrote about conducting oral history interviews in my second blog post, and discussed the idea of transcripts of these interviews (or lack thereof), in my third blog post. I often group audio and video resources together, because there are some similarities between the two, and because they do go together in many ways. However, I primarily work with the audio files of these types of collections.While both are very important, the audio files are a little more dear to my heart.

We have various types of audio formats housed at the State Historical Society. Reel-to-reel, audio cassettes, microcassettes, records, and CDs are typical items in our collections. We also have some files that are formed or created as digital files. Just as is the case with any other collection, all of these must be stored specifically and properly in cooler conditions, and monitored for breakdown of materials.

Unlike some other items, however, the intrinsic historic value of the item has little to do with the structure of the format (which does admittedly still provide us with history and a timeline, showing the technology at the time). The value comes from accessing what is on the cassette, or record, or CD. Which means, we really need to find ways to preserve it so we can continue to use it.

When I was a very little girl, cassettes were all the rage. (It was the 1980s and 1990s, after all.) I loved listening to all sorts of things, including music, and books on tape. I had one book on tape (A Sesame Street Christmas) that I listened to so many times, I wore the tape out. My mother actually purchased several more copies for me, because I kept wearing them out. I had other cassettes that I listened to so frequently that the tape pulled off of the reels, or wrinkled, or just jammed up in the tape player.

Obviously, the act of playing something so you can listen to it can cause wear or damage. But historic interviews and moments captured in time—those can’t be repurchased or reproduced. People want to interact with their past, and as archivists, we also want people to interact with their past. If we have an item here, we want to keep it here for the future—but we also want you to be able to hear the voice of your great-grandmother who settled in Minto in 1900.

Since around 2009, I have been increasingly working with these various audio components, transferring them to digital audio files. We did these only on request before I began working with these collections, and we did not store the files, or even have procedures set to name the files. In the years since, I have learned a ton about how to work with these formats.

Today, I have a set-up that allows me to plug different types of audio equipment into my computers and run the content through the software we use, the free program Audacity, transferring old audio to the very new digital formats. I save each file as an MP3, which is more compressed and easily accessed, as well as WAV, which is a more standardized, uncompressed file.

Fast forward to the opening of the exhibits of the State Historical Society’s expanded museum.

Our museum space is a treasure trove of items from all across the agency. I am pleased to say that both video and audio files from the Archives did appear in the exhibits, along with maps, photos, and other documents. But nothing quite made me feel the same as when I found one of the hubs that had on it, among other things, oral interviews of a few veterans that I had both interviewed and digitized.

Occasionally, I hear other bits of interviews that I have digitized, or recognize names from interviews I have worked with. Some of them are from interviews I have done myself, but many more are ones that I simply worked with years after the fact. For me, it has become a point of personal pride. You start to become protective of these files. You want to make them their best and help them find their way into the world. You have made these items ready for the future. It’s the coolest thing.