The Pow Wow, the Phone Call and other Reading Room Stories

So before I catch up to the present I must start with the weekend of September of 11th which was weekend I went to the Pow Wow in Bismarck. It is one of the larger ones in the US I am told. I didn't want to go alone and since Greta (a friend from college who is now living in Fargo) was willing to go with me, she came out to see me. She took me out to lunch at Fiesta Villa too! Then I drove us out to the pow wow and we watched the dancing, walked around the stands and walked around the buildings. The pow wow is held at the United Tribes College which used to be Fort Lincoln and which also served as an Internment camp during WWII. I did two stories awhile back about the Internment so it was neat to be on the location. We sat in the grass and reminisced about our college days (which now seem so far away).

As it started heading into evening, I got an Indian taco for dinner and we found a spot in the stands. The regalia was amazing and it was fun to watch people dance and listen to the drums and singing. There was one group from the East Coast that came (I believe Mohawk and Seneca and some other groups) and they wanted to share their dances with everyone there- they invited everyone to come out. And they told some of the stories behind the dances too- apparently the Charleston originated out of one of their dances!

The next morning we headed to the Heritage center and I toured the museum (for the first time) as a visitor. Then I made Greta take some touristy photos with me near the buffalo statue outside. There always seem to be people on the capital grounds taking pictures next to the statues and the State Library (which has a Lincoln Memorial feeling to it), so I wanted to take part.

Then she headed home and the next day I headed back to work. The exciting thing that week was that when I answered the phone (for the first time too- I am the last line of defense when it comes to phone answering) the woman who answered was the daughter of one of the men I wrote a story about. When she said her name - I said oh the Pohlig collection. She was surprised that I knew and I told her about my story. She called back later to say that she enjoyed it and was sending it onto her family. (I frantically looked back at my story- overall I liked it, but maybe it was a tad too patriotic for me), but I was very happy to know that someone from the public appreciated it!

In the meanwhile there have been some other interesting happenings in the Reading Room. We had one man who was a relative of Andrew Ireland and he was looking up photos. He found several and one of them was of three lynched men hanging limply and another photo showed Andrew Ireland's burial- his mother standing off in the background. Apparently there was a murder of a white family and Andrew Ireland found a ring and brought it in- they blamed him (along with 4 other people). There were court cases, but a mob did the dirty work. Maybe there's more to the story, but it was very interesting to hear a relative talk about it. And he told me some other stories of grandmother and mother- his grandmother I believe survived the battle (or massacre) or white stone hill and of a time when he was in Germany and some blond haired blue eyed men greeted him and spoke with him in Dakota.

So those were two interesting people who came to the Reading Room. For the most part we get people doing family research, people who want to donate things, government people looking up minutes, researchers for universities and occasionally some foreigners (we had a guy in from Germany to look up Sitting Bull stuff and some people in from Norway doing family history). They are generally affable, sometimes excited to find things, sometimes disappointed we don't have more, but one woman was just complaining about everything and she couldn't understand why we didn't have marriage records before 1925. There weren't that many people in the state before 1870 and even then it wasn't necessarily required by the government- it was more of a church thing (if I remember correctly), but she just couldn't get over it. It was very frustrating.

And on a more pleasant note I should also say that my Liberal Arts education was worth it. Today or a few days ago my boss talked about how they chose the interns and one of the nice things about my application was that I had a variety of coursework. Also I actually used the Russian I took in college! A woman came in with a military document and didn't know what it was. It was from the early 1900s so there were some strange letters and I couldn't translate all that much, but I could tell her what the names and dates were on the document and that it was a military record. Very nifty.