(woman) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by-- the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008; the North Dakota Council on the Arts; and by the members of Prairie Public.

Welcome to "Prairie Mosaic," a patchwork of stories about the art, culture, and history in our region.

Hi, I'm Barb Gravel.

And I'm Matt Olien On this edition of "Prairie Mosaic," we'll meet the first female park superintendent, look at the history of migrant field workers through a camera lens, and hear the powerful sound of Reina del Cid.

♪ To the people I never loved ♪ The history of growing sugar beets in the Red River Valley dates back to the early 1900s.

Back then, much of the work was done by hand.

Farmers relied heavily on Hispanic, migrant laborers who traveled North from Texas and Mexico to work in the fields.

[acoustic guitar plays softly] (Allan Dragseth) In 1918 a guy from Michigan moved here, and he'd raised sugar beets in Michigan.

He brought some seed along and he planted it in a garden up on the north edge of Crookston.

From there it's gone to hundreds of thousands of acres in the Red River Valley.

In the first few years they got German-Russian immigrants that were down in southern Minnesota, I understand that came up here and did the work.

Then eventually the company had a recruitment agency down in Texas, and they recruited workers to come up here.

The farmers paid a fee to the company to get the workers.

Earliest I remember, somebody would have a truck, and they built a wooden box on it, and covered it with a canvas top and have benches along each side.

Imagine riding on a wooden bench all the way from Texas to Minnesota.

There was thousands of them that came up to the Red River Valley.

(Ken Mendez) My parents didn't tell me a lot about the fields.

This makes me wonder how hard they did work.

The older brothers and sisters would always take care of us younger ones on the side of the fields.

That's the length that these families went through.

You didn't drop them off at the babysitter, you didn't call in sick because you had a cold.

There was no excuses; you were in the fields.

My father spoke about seeing posters advertising for workers.

He responded.

They came for what they thought would be a better life, a more secure life.

In 1927, that was the first year the plant in East Grand Forks was being built and in operation.

So it's kind of amazing to know that my father was one of the first of the families that came up here.

Grapes of wrath took you west, and the sugar beets brought you north.

We had farm labor come up in the early '70s.

We had two different families that would come.

We would house them up in Northcote, just a mile and a half away from here.

The family included moms, dads, kids, the whole gamut.

They would come up to do weeding and thinning for us, In the advance of technology and devices thinning came along, they were primarily used for weeding then.

We would run them through our fields 2, 3 times a year to control the weeds in the sugar beets.

They would put in 8 hours or so.

2:00 in the afternoon, the peak heating time of the day, they would quit and go home, but they'd be right back out again the following day.

If it was going to be hot, they would be out there at the crack of dawn; tremendous work ethic.

(Allan Dragseth) The original seed was multigerm seed, which meant multiple plants would come up from a single seed.

They'd have to crawl along on their hands and knees and then thin them out.

Grab one plant, then with the other hand dig the extra beets away, then crawl ahead a little ways and leave another plant-- it was hard work.

They used the machete knives like this to pick the beets up off the ground, grab them with their left hand, cut the tops off.

Then they'd throw them into that area where the furrows had been, then the farmer would come with his beet fork, fork them up into a wagon, then they'd haul them to the receiving site and have to fork them off the wagon again.

They were handled 4 or 5 times by hand.

The biggest thing that took out the migrant working people is the onslaught of Roundup.

That certainly killed the whole system is the Roundup industry that came in the late '80s, early '90s.

It's amazing what has happened from when my father came up here when he was 17 to the individual stories now generations later to my own kids.

I have a daughter that has an agronomy major, I have a son that is an IT major because of the hard work of my mom and my father.

If my dad had any ounce of, I don't want to say fear, but in Mexico, when he saw that poster, if he would've said no, we wouldn't be here today.

[acoustic guitar plays softly] In 1903, Mary Gibbs became the first female park superintendent in Minnesota.

Thanks to Mary's bravery, we're able to enjoy the beautiful pine forests of Itasca State Park that once were on the brink of destruction.

[acoustic guitar brightly finger-picking] (Connie Cox) Where we were developing the new center at the Headwaters, there was no question who we were going to name it after.

We were going to name it after Mary Gibbs because of the role that she had played.

Even though it was a short moment, only 3 months in history, it was one that drew attention to the park.

When the park was established in 1891, we just say it was a park on paper.

We did not own any of the land; we had to acquire it.

Now, some of that land was already in private ownership, different timber investors in the area.

The park, being a new park, being that our state was just getting into the business of operating a state park, that they wanted to negotiate and work with the lumber companies.

They were given permission to load logs on Lake Itasca in the winter, and the first log drive went down the Mississippi River out of Lake Itasca in 1901.

Our 4th commissioner was Jonathan Gibbs and Jonathan Gibbs came to this area, he brought his wife, his youngest daughter, Mary Gibbs.

His job was to continue to acquire land that was in private land holdings, but also to start managing what land we had.

Little did he know, he was going to pass away in February of 1903 and his daughter, Mary, was appointed as acting park commissioner.

She had done a lot of secretarial work for her father so she was familiar with the operations of the park.

And when Mary Gibbs was taking her office, she took her responsibilities and her roles seriously.

She strongly believed in the development of this park.

She was 24 at the time, when she got the appointment.

You have to think of the era; in the country at that time, women didn't really have the right to vote, so for her to act in a role appointed by a governor was very unusual, and with that came some challenges.

She was having to work with the lumber companies as they were getting ready to float their logs down.

As she was trying to enforce the policy of not letting the water rise too high behind the dam, that they were building this head of water up to float logs, every time she went to the site to ask them to open the dam, they would say yup, sure, and they'd open up the dam, let some water out, by the time she'd get to her office, they'd close it, and it would keep building up.

And she kept writing the attorney general saying do I have authority to do this?

And she was getting very frustrated.

It blew up at the dam, so to speak, the waterhead was getting too high, it was 3 feet above flood stage, it was flooding the forest land behind and Mary Gibbs was told that she had authority to go up there, the state had condemned that land back in December, that we owned the site where the dam was, she could go forward and tell them they needed to let the water out to lower that water level.

She walked up to that site with Martin Heinzelmann, who was a constable in the area, they're going to tell them, open these gates, you're breaking the contract.

And the foreman, Wolfe, he looks at them, points his gun at them and says, if anybody puts their hand on that lever, I'm gonna shoot it off.

Martin Heinzelmann, fearing for his life and Mary's life, returns the papers to Mary and said, "I can't serve these."

Well, Mary Gibbs walked up to that lever holding those papers, she put her hand on the lever and she said, "I will too put my hand on this lever and you'll not shoot it off either!"

When Mary Gibbs was interviewed in the 1950s, she said, "Now in hindsight I realize that was rather foolish, I could have been shot."

The very next day Mary Gibbs was served with papers.

She was forbidden to be in the area because in those court documents it was said that she and Martin Heinzelmann, were the ones who were shooting off their guns and threatening the lives of the men at the site.

She wrote a letter to the attorney general and said no such thing happened.

Heinzelmann attested to it, other homesteaders in the area, who were nearby attested that she didn't have a gun, that she did not do this, but by the time that St. Paul and the attorney general could send any help her way, by the time they arrived at Itasca, all the logs were gone.

The water had gone down, and there wasn't an issue.

So poor Mary, in her frustration, because she felt she wasn't getting support, she turned down the appointment.

Her family didn't know that part of her history.

She was a woman who believed the past is the past, and you just move on.

And when our building, the Mary Gibbs Center, was dedicated, it's the first time any of the Gibbs family came back to Itasca, and so they were very honored when they came and saw their grandmother's name on that building, and for them to actually walk up and see the Mississippi River and see the vast pine forest that she had helped to protect and set aside, that they were very touched to know that their grandmother in 1903 helped play a part in establishing and helping to preserve the pine forests of Itasca.

In the 1930s, and '40s, photographer Russell Lee was tasked with documenting the plight of rural communities.

This included the Hispanic, migrant workers who traveled north from Texas and Mexico to the Red River Valley to work in the sugar beet fields.

Ken Mendez with the University of Minnesota, Crookston, curated the photos into an exhibit that reveals struggle, hope, and family bonding.

[acoustic guitar plays rhythmic flamenco music] (Ken Mendez) I never knew what working in the fields was like.

The best example that I have of what I know is from these pictures from 1938 through Russell Lee that I was able to just haphazardly stumble upon.

Then it was like, oh my goodness, it was a gold mine.

Ken is one of those individuals who gives back to the community all the time.

He came to me and said, I have come across Library of Congress photographs that were taken during the sugar beet harvest back in the '30s and '40s.

He said I think we can get them from the Library of Congress.

I've already been in contact with them.

I said okay, let's check and see.

(Ken Mendez) The Chancellor bought into it.

(Dr. Mary Holz Clause) He worked with another, one of our students.

They came up with an amazing idea to have a gallery to have people come and see the story of the sugar beet harvest and the importance of the migration of people who came to help out our local farmers.

Ken obviously had an interest in this because that also is a reflection of his own heritage.

So fast forward, Ken figured out how to get access to the prints, had them all blown up, and he came one day and said can I bring a few over, I want to show them to you?

He put them down, and I was like, oh my gosh!

These really tell through the stories of faces.

One of them has a backdrop of a family sitting around the table.

It really communicated the migrant story.

These pictures are amazing clarity.

It's astounding.

And so we brought them to life.

(Dr. Mary Holz Clause) The part that always hits me when I looked at the photos is just the hard work.

We have come to the situation now where things are done mechanical.

The bending over, the cutting of the sugar beets, the tremendous impact that that had on bodies, and that was true throughout all of agriculture during the '30s and '40s.

It wasn't just a job.

People brought their lives with them, their children.

The migration story is one of the Latino population.

When we look at the demographics of our K through 6th grade right now in the Crookston public schools, approximately 40% of our students have a Latino origin.

So not only did people come to help and begin in the harvest, but they've stayed and they've created wonderful families and contributed so much to the community.

Helping people understand what it was like and sharing the family story is a very important outcome that came from this.

(Ken Mendez) These pictures are, like the Chancellor said, the toils on these bodies is amazing.

The physicality I have not seen repeated.

Somehow they survived, and somehow they did this.

Fargo native Reina Del Cid, has toured the world with her band.

The folk-rock producing engine has received some much deserved national recognition due in part to their intelligent and sophisticated sound.

Enjoy this performance from our series, "Prairie Musicians."

[playing in bright country/folk rhythm] ♪ ♪ I took a fall I took a bad bad fall ♪ ♪ I fell so hard I shook the ground ♪ ♪ Felt the rumbling of oceans ♪ ♪ I stopped the world from spinning round ♪ ♪ Truth is I fall again every morning ♪ ♪ When I when I see you now ♪ ♪ ♪ I have no use for lots of money ♪ ♪ Don't need no mansion in the hills ♪ ♪ Just so the river ain't too muddy ♪ ♪ We can drink and get our fill ♪ ♪ I just want you and me and sweet simplicity ♪ ♪ Making love whenever we feel ♪ ♪ ♪ Singing la la ah ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ♪ ♪ ♪ Now I would walk across Wisconsin ♪ ♪ With just the compass in the sky ♪ ♪ To be the one who makes you coffee ♪ ♪ In the morning when you rise ♪ ♪ And if you are sleeping late well then I'll try to wait ♪ ♪ Till you open you eyes ♪ ♪ To kiss you ♪ ♪ ♪ Singing la la ah ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ♪ ♪ ♪ And since these days of mine are numbered ♪ ♪ I like to spend them here with you ♪ ♪ Find a tree to lie down under ♪ ♪ While the sun sinks out of view ♪ ♪ Won't ever wanna go but if I hold you close ♪ ♪ Against the coming night it seems to feel alright ♪ ♪ And oh I hope you know I ♪ ♪ Will be falling for the rest of my life ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Singing la la ah ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ♪ ♪ Singing la la ah ah-ah-ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah-ah ah ♪ [guitar solo] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Love you're a punk you're a jerk and a drunk ♪ ♪ Though you stamp and you spit and you swear my best friend ♪ ♪ Oh but what did I say ♪ ♪ What did I say about coming 'round here again ♪ ♪ Now did we ever ask for you to jump inside ♪ ♪ No we never asked for you to wreck our lives ♪ ♪ But here you are ♪ ♪ Stay away from me love ♪ ♪ ♪ Love you're diseased and I'm sick 'cause I see ♪ ♪ I could search my whole life but there's no medicine ♪ ♪ 'Cause what kind of pill oh what kind of shot ♪ ♪ Could get the poison out of my skin ♪ ♪ Now every time I think that I've recovered and I'm fine ♪ ♪ A handsome boy let's out a cough and a smile ♪ ♪ And you're back again ♪ ♪ Stay away from me love ♪ ♪ Oh am I too cautious ♪ ♪ Sometimes I think it's all in my head ♪ ♪ But I get nauseous ♪ ♪ When you come around here and you're acting coy ♪ ♪ And you put your ugly hands on a handsome boy ♪ ♪ Oh oh ♪ [guitar solo] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Love you're a bum you show up with your mug ♪ ♪ And you beg and you beg for anything I've got ♪ ♪ But where can I go and how will I know ♪ ♪ If I will ever be free of you ♪ ♪ 'Cause love you've got the scent you've got the scent of my blood ♪ ♪ And you'll never give up when you know that you should ♪ ♪ So you will find me again ♪ ♪ You stay away from me love ♪ ♪ Oh it's so obnoxious ♪ ♪ Sometimes I think I'm just paranoid ♪ ♪ But I get nervous ♪ ♪ When I've got a pretty face in a pretty bed ♪ ♪ And I look into his eyes and see yours instead ♪ ♪ Oh oh ♪ ♪ Now love when you come ♪ ♪ You will say you're a victim ♪ ♪ You'll cry you'll yell you'll say I've done you wrong ♪ ♪ You'll show your broken wing and say your broken things ♪ ♪ And I will feel myself swept along ♪ ♪ But all I ever wanted was some peace of mind ♪ ♪ And all you ever offer is the comfort of a lie ♪ ♪ So I still hate you ♪ ♪ Stay away from me love ♪ ♪ Yes I still hate you ♪ ♪ Stay away from me love ♪ ♪ Oh my god I hate you ♪ ♪ You stay away from me love ♪ [playing in bright bluegrass rhythm] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I caught Winter talking to Spring today ♪ ♪ He begged her to remember his face ♪ ♪ And how the sun couldn't touch him where the ice used to lay ♪ ♪ With her warm eyes Spring looked away ♪ ♪ Now miles away from the buildings and lights ♪ ♪ I lie by your side in the dark ♪ ♪ While the wheat and the rye tell us how we used to be ♪ ♪ Before the trees put their leaves in my heart ♪ ♪ Now this isn't me I say to the street ♪ ♪ To the people I never loved ♪ ♪ And this isn't mine this beautiful line ♪ ♪ That's crashing through my medium ♪ Toni!

[guitar solo] ♪ ♪ ♪ I used to stare at an orchard at dawn ♪ ♪ Wondering what my eyes should see ♪ ♪ But the earth promised seasons and brought them in time ♪ ♪ To the girl who used to be me ♪ ♪ Now this isn't me I say to the street ♪ ♪ And to the people I never loved ♪ ♪ And this isn't mine this beautiful line ♪ ♪ That's crashing through my medium ♪ ♪ It's hard sometimes to see the difference ♪ ♪ Between what's lost and what you've changed ♪ ♪ But the colors are brighter now ♪ ♪ And the moonlight's softer on my range ♪ ♪ Yea-a range ♪ [guitar solo] ♪ ♪ ♪ Now this isn't me I say to the street ♪ ♪ And to the people I never loved ♪ ♪ And this isn't mine this beautiful line ♪ ♪ That's crashing through my medium ♪ ♪ It's always crashing through my medi... ♪ ♪ Ee-ee ee-ee ee-ee ...ium ♪ ♪ If you know of an artist, topic or organization in our region that you think might make for an interesting segment, please contact us at... (Barb) You can watch this and other episodes of "Prairie Mosaic" on Prairie Public's YouTube channel, and please, follow Prairie Public on social media as well.

I'm Barb Gravel.

And I'm Matt Olien.

Thanks for joining us for another edition of "Prairie Mosaic."

[guitar, bass, & drums play in bright country rhythm] (woman) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by-- the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008; the North Dakota Council on the Arts; and by the members of Prairie Public.