(light music) - Hello and welcome to "Prairie Pulse".

Coming up a little bit later in the show, we'll tour the Prospect House and Civil War Museum in Battle Lake, Minnesota.

But first joining me now is, Aaron Barth, the Executive Director of the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation out of Bismarck.

Aaron, thanks for joining us today.

- Thank you so much, John, and thank you to Prairie Public for having me.

- Well, we're excited to have you, and as we always ask all our guests, tell the folks a little bit about yourself, maybe in your background.

- Yeah, so I am originally from Bismarck.

I'm somehow found myself as the executive director of the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation, which is the local coordinating entity for the Northern Plains National Heritage Area.

And I guess other background, it's sort of like we ask ourselves sometimes, how did I get where I am today?

And it seems like it's through incremental processes.

Where suddenly you look in the mirror and you're like, "Here I am".

And my background is really training as a professional historian.

So, I hold degrees from regional colleges here, University of Minnesota, University of North Dakota, and I'm just finishing up my final degree.

I'm not gonna go back to school after this at North Dakota State University.

- Okay, well you're hitting them all, it sounds like.

- Yeah.

- Well, start us off with what is the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation?

- Yes.

The Northern Plains Heritage Foundation is the, it's described in the legislation as such.

It's the local coordinating entity for the Northern Plains National Heritage Area.

So the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation is the 501C3 non-profit entity that helps coordinate with partners, It helps coordinate with city governments, county governments, state government, other federal sites that are in the Northern Plains National Heritage area.

And let me get right to that.

The Northern Plains National Heritage Area is centered along the Missouri River in Central North Dakota.

And it is composed, we operate within the five county region of Burley, McClean, Mercer, Morton, and Oliver Counties.

I said those alphabetically not to play favorites though.

- Well, okay.

- Yeah.

- So what's the mission really for the foundation?

- Right.

And we have our concise mission statement within our bylaws.

And it is really the expression of, all of our ancestors have really worked and put in the heavy lifting to arrive where we all are here today on the Northern Plains and ancestors meaning from first peoples to immigrants, to settler colonizers, to know immigrants today as well.

And so they put in all the heavy lifting.

And here we've inherited, and I mean, we, the royal we at the royal humanity, we, we've inherited all these different cultural traditions.

Sometimes we scratch our heads a little bit and wonder like, why are we, why did I go to that Lutefisk and Swedish meatball feed, right?

Where, what are the origins?

Why are we here?

And so really the what we do is, get together and partner and figure out how to make living expressions of that history.

And history really is the living- or heritage really is the living expression of history and so abstractly, that is what we do.

We have specific projects, of course, but that is the overarching theme.

- Well, I understand you've called the Missouri River, North Dakota's original Main Street.

- Yes, it is.

- Can you discuss the role of the Missouri River has played in the development of the Dakota Territory and then the role it still plays today?

- Yeah, and even prior to that too, the Missouri River is really the, since the last glacial epic of the Missouri River is the interior original highway of North America.

And we just so happen to be living in the middle of North America here in North Dakota.

And the Northern Plains National heritage Area is centered in the middle of the middle of North Dakota and North America.

So we're really, I mean, we, here's what we got.

We have the Missouri River, the longest river on the continent, and as the original Main street, we of course, with the various glacial glaciation and the, the glacial action, we'll call it that, that had deposited all the rich fertile soils along these river lands that we have in North Dakota.

And that rich soil allows cultures, has allowed cultures to intersect with that and grow crops, grow gardens.

You get to the point where you are get good enough at gardening and growing stuff that you get a surplus.

And of course, if we have a surplus, then we have a little walking around money, right?

So then you can start developing a more of a sedentary, I'm speaking kind of archeologist, right?

You have a more sedentary society where you have cities and villages and towns and that sort of thing.

So, that really antedates Dakota territory.

And of course, the 19th century, the long 19th century of Dakota territory, the Missouri River is the fulcrum of eastern and western Dakota territory.

Today's present, North and South Dakota.

It is where battles played out between the US government and the Echete Chacoan.

It is the river where Lewis and Clark stumbled across the Mandan and Hidatsa as well.

The Mandan-Hidatsa saving Lewis and Clark from the first long, excruciating winter.

The Missouri River is... Today we see the Missouri River in the summertime, and it's, there's jet skis and there's pontoons and there's fishing boats.

And one of our partners is the Lewis and Clark Riverboat in Central North Dakota.

And that is a faux, kind of a mock pseudo steamboat, right?

But it, it's, again, it's a nod to that period.

So, we are all still living in the shadow of Dakota territory.

What Lincoln started with the 1862 Homestead Act and the great migration that was into Dakota territory as well.

- Hmm.

Well, I understand the US Congress designated other National Heritage Areas.

You mentioned about heritage areas earlier.

Where are they and what states are they in?

- Yes.

Yeah, there are total of 55 National Heritage Areas in the United States today.

They are Secretary of the Interior program.

So it falls underneath the National Park Service as far as administering them.

The first National Heritage Area was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on August 24th, 1984.

And it was the Illinois, Michigan National Heritage Canal, that's what it's called today.

And all the way up to the present here in 2022, there are a total of 55 National Heritage Areas.

They go from coast to coast.

There is one Heritage Area in Alaska as well.

And really, they are lived in landscapes.

They are places where, like I was saying prior, people come together to consider and contemplate, how did we arrive here?

What are we doing here today?

So, it's really a positioning of to within these various distinct heritage areas around the country, folks are wondering and expressing what they are doing today, and that they are, it requires a designation from the United States Congress too.

So literally it takes an act of Congress to establish a National Heritage Area.

And that can be a 15 year process.

It can be, it can be longer as well.

- Okay.

So there's a National Heritage Area and a National Park, how do they differ?

- Right.

A National Park Unit is exactly what, what it is.

It's this very delineated defined boundary.

And within that boundary, that's where the National Park Unit is.

That's where the National Park Superintendent and their staff, they maintain and they preserve and conserve nature and Theodore Roosevelt's sort of mission, right?

Preserving it for America's best idea.

National Heritage Areas on the other hand are Reagan, I'm not getting this verbatim, but he described 'em as kind of the new idea for national parks, where it's not, it's a place where everybody lives.

So.

there are just opportunities to think about these various landscapes, in our case, the Missouri River.

And it doesn't require a proper National Park Unit or anything, but it's just, it's the Missouri River.

And we, there's an economy that's has been created by that Missouri River, whether it's cattle for watering cattle, whether it's using it for irrigation, whether it's recreation as well.

And so that is the real deferring distinction between, one is a lived in landscape, the other one is a National Park Unit.

- Tell us about your various partners and projects, maybe you wanna highlight within your organization.

- Yeah, there are, boy, I had to write down the list too, of projects as well.

You know, without partnerships with any National Heritage Area, we, there's no way we could accomplish anything.

So, it's all about partnerships, partnerships, partnerships.

And those partnerships can be with other non-profits.

They can be with city, county, state governments.

They can be with the private sector as well.

Oftentimes the best projects that we have, they intersect with all of those.

One of those, for example here, now I'll get to my example.

One of those projects is the Missouri River Heritage Mural.

And this was a project that from the grassroots to the grass tops, we had varying degrees of input of necessary, the fancy word memorandums of understanding.

So the Missouri River Heritage Mural will be installed in 2023.

It'll be installed on the Interstate 94 bridge on a concrete pier.

It's the namesake of the Grant Marsh Bridge.

So Captain Grant Marsh, who captained the Far West Riverboat.

But the River Heritage Mural is a public art piece that's designed, or was designed by and for the various groups that are living on the Northern plains.

So input from folks from the First Nations, from Mandan, Hidatsa, Ochete Chacoan as well.

There is input from, we had the local sons in Norway chapter giving, providing input.

We had Germans from Russia Heritage Society that was providing input as well.

And it coalesced around these community input, sort of the idea storming parties.

And that segued into the actual painting of these pieces.

So this mural is, it's massive.

It'll be, gosh, I think 30 feet tall, 55 feet wide.

But the process of it is put together by a place called Good Space Murals.

And they have figured out this process that is an outgrowth of, you know, this is the sharing of knowledge, right?

An outgrowth of a mural process that was developed in Philadelphia.

And what it is, is you take five foot by five foot, or yeah, five foot by five foot sheets of, it's kind of like a Tyvek or they call it parachute cloth.

And the mural is drawn out on that.

And it's painted in to degree in detail on these five foot by five foot sections.

And the public in the community, they're also invited to paint the very general areas on this mural.

So, all these pieces get rolled out.

Eventually they get taken back to the studio and more refined painting happens.

And the fun amazing part about this is that when the mural actually gets installed, it gets installed within two or three days.

So it eliminates the need for massive scaffolding, outdoor work, weather, the inclement weather, that sort of thing.

But that is, that is one of the, the real interesting big projects.

And while we're doing this along the Missouri River in Bismarck, we have every intention and will be connecting with more of our rural communities to figure out ways where we might push this out into the rural.

Maybe there's a grain elevator or maybe there's somewhere with a, everywhere we look now once you've been a part of this process, you see a canvas.

Anywhere.

And so pushing this out into the rural is our next initiative.

- Yeah.

Well let's move on to some other things.

Can you talk about the Knife River Indian Village?

- Yes.

That is our National Park Unit within our Northern Plains National Heritage Area.

And Superintendent Alicia Deegan is, that's her shop up at Knife River and Knife River Indian Village's National Historic site.

If you have not been there, you need to get there.

It is just outside of Stanton or just north of Stanton, North Dakota.

And they have a fully reconstructed Earth Lodge, a former Earth Lodge that would be circa 1830s or 1840s.

Additionally, there is a nature walk and such, and there is a full museum and interpretive center too that was designed by the late architect, Denby Deegan.

And Denby was also a First Nations member, citizen tribal member as well.

And so it's a full immersion experience, whether you're in the visitors center or whether you're in the 1830s Earth Lodge or whether you're walking around as well at Knife River, it's one of the connecting villages of Knife River.

The is called Sacagawea's Village.

And so that is a village, but I don't think we need to go into Sacagawea, but one of America's most important women.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- But also you brought something, you have heard about National Park passports.

What'd you bring us today to talk about?

- Yeah, so the National Park Service, I found out about these several years ago, and they're called "Passport to your National Park Books" and what we have these National Park service books.

So, they're filled already with information about each region of the National Park Service and the Northern Plains National Heritage Area has their own official National Park Service cancellation stamp.

And I dated this one here, John, I'll leave this with Prairie Public as a gift from the Northern Plains.

- Thank you.

- Yeah.

But I dated it October 18th, 2022, the date of our conversation here.

And so what it does is it inspires, I'd say inspires, but it's also there's vacation fanatics who will, they have their passport books and they will fly, they will travel, they will email, they will phone call, they'll make sure you have your passport stamped because they need this cancellation stamp so they can fill up their book.

So we have that here.

There's also a cancellation stamp at Knife River Indian Village National Historic Site.

And it's, I've seen other iterations of this rolled out to the North Dakota State Historical Society.

Now you can go to the state historical sites and you can do a cancellation pass cancellation rubbing as well.

- Yeah.

Do things slow down a little bit in the winter for y'all?

- We always imagine in the summer that it's gonna slow down in the winter, but it never happens because 'cause all we're thinking about, you know, the winter of 2022, we're thinking about summer of 2023 and what are we gonna do and where are we gonna go next?

So.

- So what are some interesting things on the horizon that you're involved in?

- Yeah, there are, in addition to the big public mural, real immediate future events that are happening, there'll be a, we're doing, call it Diaspora, Swedish culture on the Northern Plains, and it's FIKA, F I K A, and that's the traditional name for Swedish Coffee.

So if you're gonna have, if you're just outside of Stockholm and you see or hear somebody say, "let's have a fika", that means you're about ready to have coffee and tasty treats, right?

I mean, who can't get behind that, right?

And so we have a professor from Dr. Lindeman, she'll be arriving to the Northern Plains National Heritage Area and the, it's "Fika for all".

She'll be talking about the heritage and history of coffee and Swedish coffee drinking, I guess.

And we've been able to partner with the Three Crowns Swedish Club on the Northern Plains.

Humanities North Dakota is also a partner in that as well.

And so that's an example, right?

It's from the big public murals to the sitting down on a Saturday afternoon and having coffee and thinking about it as well.

- Well, we don't have a lot of time left, but in your 32nd elevator speech, what's the best part of your job?

- The best part of my job is having conversations like this, John.

The best part of my job is listening and letting folks know that we have resources that we can leverage to help amplify and accelerate a heritage idea that's connected to the Missouri River in Central North Dakota.

That's what it is.

I think listening is really one of the best parts of my job.

- Preserving heritage is important.

We're out of time, but if people want more information, where can they go?

Who can they contact?

- Right.

Yeah.

And it's a little bit of a mouthful.

So it's, the website is northernplainsheritage.org and I'll repeat it one more time.

It's northernplainsheritage.org.

That's our official local website, and they can find more information there.

They're more than welcome to email myself, aaron@northernplainsheritage.org as well.

I will get your email.

We will figure out what we need to do.

- Well, Aaron, you got a lot of information.

I think people need to check it out, so thanks so much for joining us today.

- Thank you so very much for having me.

- All right.

Stay tuned for more.

(light music) The Prospect House and Civil War Museum in Battle Lake, Minnesota recounts the history of proprietor and tour guide Jay Johnson's family.

He has curated a time capsule of artifacts from the time when the massive house was a hotel, along with his great-grandfather's Civil War belongings, which are remarkable to behold.

(drums beating) ♪ When Johnny comes marching home again ♪ ♪ Hurrah, Hurrah ♪ ♪ We'll give him a hearty welcome then ♪ ♪ Hurrah, Hurrah ♪ ♪ The men will cheer, the boys will shout, ♪ ♪ The ladies, they will all turn out, ♪ - People have asked me what I would save if the place is going to get destroyed in a fire, what would be the most important thing to me, and I thought it would be the letter with my great grandfather's blood on it.

How does it get any more personal than that?

♪ To welcome home my darling boy ♪ ♪ Hurrah Hurrah ♪ My great grandfather, Captain James "Cap" Colehour started this place in 1882 when he built the first house in Battle Lake, and then he added this building here to it in 1886.

It used to be the first resort in the area, it was a resort hotel.

That's what they had before they had cabins.

Then in 1929 when my grandfather Ernest Wilkins inherited some money, he'd married the Civil War veteran's daughter, and he completely remodeled this place inside and out in 1929.

So this is the way it looked like in 1929.

("Yankee Doodle" tune playing) And my mother left me this property when she died 14 years ago, and she'd spent most of her life trying to preserve her family home that she was born and died in.

And I was the last of the family.

So it was up to me to sort out 200 years of family stuff and figure out what to do with it.

And I just felt after going through all of these things that it really needed to be a museum.

The yard work alone is a lot.

That's probably four or five times as big as anybody's yard in town.

We've got 10 times as many trees, and the flower beds all take work.

It's a large collection.

Originally I found a chest with nearly 200 Civil War letters in it on the third floor.

Then I started to find things all over the house.

One of the first things I found was the sling to his infield rifle, and I didn't know what that was.

Then after a while, I, we got his rifle.

Spencer repeater, his sleeves to his uniform with bullet holes in each one, there's 200 Civil War letters.

There's at least 14 original Civil War documents that were from the State of Illinois during the war.

And his diaries, his notes and books.

He made sure that his story of his Civil War experience is well documented.

And if it wasn't for me, it probably would've been all lost.

Cap was born January 28th, 1842.

His father was born in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and I think he already had a strong sense of patriotism and history interest right from the start.

When the war started in 1861, he was in Philadelphia working in his brother's grocery store, and that's when he decided he wanted to join up.

He was certainly a true patriot.

That's why he enlisted.

He wrote Union Forever.

He wanted to preserve the Union.

That was his whole idea, and he and his brother enlisted together in the summer of 1862.

("Yankee Doodle" tune playing") Turns out he was part of one of the three most famous brigades in the Civil War, Wilder's Lightning Brigade of Mounted Infantry.

I wanted to plot out his footsteps in the Civil War.

So I got out this 1862 map of Civil War United States, the summer of 1862.

That's when Cap and his brother David enlisted together right here in Mount Carroll, Illinois, just down the river from St. Paul, and right next to Galena, General Grant's hometown.

Cap and David went to Chicago and got on the train and headed east, got off the train and marched south on foot, got on the riverboat and rode down the Ohio River on a boat.

Went by Fort Donaldson, where General Grant had just had his first major victory.

They both made it to Nashville, Tennessee, where David died of typhoid fever and Cap nearly died.

He was in the hospital for three months.

Made it the Chattanooga and the Battle of Chickamauga, River of death, where he was shot through the right shoulder.

Chickamauga is the bloodiest two day battle of the Civil War with 35,000 casualties in two days.

When he recovered from being shot through the right shoulder, he was shot through the left shoulder at Mussel Shoals, Alabama, then back on the horse, fighting all the way, made it to Savannah, Georgia by Christmas of 1864.

Had his last battle at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, got on the train and headed home.

Got back home almost exactly three years to the day from when he volunteered to fight in the Civil War.

Some vacation.

♪ Father and I went down to camp ♪ ♪ along with Captain Gooding ♪ Some people absolutely love the museum, and we get about 1500 people here through the summer on the average.

And then we get another 500 or more on group tours and stragglers and tour buses and whatnot.

And we try and do a lot of school tours for the schools.

We've had 27 different school groups come through the museum so far, and I'd like every school in the area to send their kids here.

This is a great learning experience.

♪ I guess there was a million.

♪ This is his diary and the song that they were singing in it there is "Who Will Care For Mother Now".

If you survived the Civil War, it was because you were lucky.

My great grandfather was Mayor of Battle Lake and Justice of the Peace.

He was a public servant.

He started the First Baptist Church in town and started the cemetery.

Probably was dog catcher and took care of everything else you can think of too.

It definitely is the history of my family, but I feel that it's representative of your family and other families in the area.

This is our history.

It's not my history.

("Yankee Doodle" tune playing) - Well, that's all we have on Prairie Pule for this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(light music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.