Day 59, Friday April 26, 2024: Bismarck, North Dakota to Deadwood, South Dakota

Carnegie libraries visited: Deadwood, South Dakota

North and South Dakota are two of the least populated states, but they hold their own in Carnegie libraries. North Dakota had eight Carnegies and South Dakota had 25. At the same time, North Carolina had 10 and South Carolina 14. As I used to tell my students, raw numbers are important, but they do not tell the full story. What often matters are rates and percentages. One of my students created a data visualization showing the numbers of library books checked out in each state. Not surprisingly, California, New York, and Florida had the most. These states will have the most of virtually everything (murders, Starbucks, wigs, etc.) More interesting, I suggested to her, would be the number of books checked out per resident; that would give us a better idea of how bookish (or supportive of public libraries!) each state is. In 1910 – around the time that the Carnegies were built – North Dakota had 584 thousand residents, South Dakota 577 thousand, North Carolina 2.207 million, and South Carolina 1.515 million. If we do a bit of math we’ll find that North Dakota had three times as many libraries per resident and South Dakota 4.7 times as many as their friends in the Carolinas. Another way of putting this is that the residents of the Dakotas had way more libraries than the residents

of the Carolinas.

Those are the facts. Let’s go further and ask the question “Why did the Dakotas build far more Carnegie libraries, relative to their populations, than the Carolinas?” There are lots of possibilities. One is historical. Maybe the Carolinas already had a lot of libraries, so fewer towns needed them there than in the Dakotas. I don’t think this is likely, as rather few towns in the US had public libraries prior to the Carnegie movement. Another reason is cultural. Perhaps the residents of the Carolinas already had their own private libraries and so didn’t need/want them, while those living on the Dakota frontier lacked private collections and so needed public ones. Perhaps. 

I think that two reasons are more likely, and these reasons involve race and gender. The Carolinas had substantial populations of African Americans (I can’t seem to track down the numbers) and the Dakotas didn’t. African Americans were excluded from public libraries (and other public facilities) in the South, so the difference in the number of libraries per white residents is almost certainly less than the numbers I showed above. 

Yet racial factors can’t explain the entire difference. As women played key roles in establishing libraries across the US, I’m guessing (an educated guess, I hope) that the role that women played in the South was generally different from these roles in the Great Plains states. In the South, women were perhaps more tied to their families and churches, and less engaged in the broader community. In the Plains states the communities were newer and so women, to the extent that community members relied on mutual aid organizations, might have been more engaged in community building activities, libraries being one form this can take. Further research is needed. By me. Others probably have already done it.

The plaque on the wall of the “Keep It Simple” meeting I attended today read: In honor of those who died sober. About a dozen names adorned that plaque.

Sign marking the site from which the Black Hills were first seen by white settlers

You would be forgiven if, driving between Bismarck and Deadwood, you thought the Rapture had occurred. The 290 miles of highway I traveled had almost no cars, and only a very few houses scattered here and there. Much of the route cut through the Cheyenne River Reservation. Native Americans had lived for thousands of years in the region, but gradually and forcibly they were put into the Great Sioux Reservation, which covered parts of six states. Subsequent treaties broke this reservation into several smaller reservations. The legendary Chief Sitting Bull lived just north of the reservation, before he and his son were killed by Union soldiers who had come to arrest him. Sitting Bull’s brother, Spotted Elk, subsequently led about 350 of their tribe off the reservation. On December 29, 1890, some 500 US Army soldiers, having captured them, slaughtered most of them – including many women and children – in the Wounded Knee Massacre. Today, the land is quiet other than the wind, and otherworldly beautiful.

I’ve been sleeping in my car for six nights and I was definitely feeling it for a real bed, so I checked into the Fairfield Inn in Spearfish, South Dakota. Bobbie Joe, the front desk clerk, said that if I was hungry for a steak (and I was) I should go to the Steerfish Restaurant. She helpfully explained to me that Steerfish was a play on Spearfish (duh), the town I was staying in. Game on. The restaurant was crowded, so I sat at the bar. I hadn’t sat at a bar in more than a year. “What?” you say. You sat at a bar? Yes, this alcoholic did. I was not tempted to get a drink (thank you, AA, Naltrexone, and antabuse!) The AA message on going to bars is clear. Don’t do it, if it’s just a bar. As their saying goes, “If you go to a barber often enough, you’re going to end up getting a haircut.” On the other hand, AA does not demand that its members give up all activities at which alcohol is present; it does not require us to live in a convent. If you need to sit at a bar to get the dinner you want, go for it.

Just don’t do it too often. BTW, the steak was delicious.