WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

When the Federal Writers’ Project of North Dakota set its workers loose across the prairie in 1935, no single book had ever tried to take the measure of the whole state. The guide they produced three years later was, the preface announces, “something new in this part of the country” — the first concise yet comprehensive survey of North Dakota, written for the touring motorist and the “fireside traveller” alike. Governor William Langer, in his foreword, frames the achievement plainly: this was the first comprehensive guidebook ever written for the state, compiled by North Dakota writers and made possible by federal and state funds.

The volume’s ambition runs deeper than tourism. Langer hoped the book would do more than direct outsiders toward picturesque scenery and places of historical significance; he wanted it to awaken in North Dakotans themselves a consciousness of the historical, sociological, and cultural heritage that was theirs. The preface echoes the thought, calling the guide “a pioneer enterprise” in a state where the records of the past and the varied life of the present had never before been assembled between two covers. Hundreds of North Dakotans — county by county, town by town — supplied the local knowledge that the project’s editors and writers shaped into a single coordinated portrait.

That portrait is arranged for use. A long opening section, “Survey of the State,” moves from contemporary North Dakota through its natural setting, its Indians and their predecessors, four centuries of history, agriculture and farm life, industry and labor, the racial groups and folkways of a state settled by many peoples, and chapters on schools, churches, transportation, the press and radio, architecture, and recreation. “City Neighbors” then profiles Bismarck, Fargo, Grand Forks, and Minot, while “Playgrounds” turns to Fort Abraham Lincoln and the Roosevelt regional parks in the Badlands.

The heart of the book is its touring section, “Highways and Trails” — ten numbered automobile tours with their many lettered branches, threading the state from the Canadian line to the South Dakota border and from the Red River Valley to the Montana badlands. Sponsored by the State Historical Society of North Dakota and printed in 1938 by the Knight Printing Company of Fargo, the guide carries the marks of its New Deal origins on its copyright page: Harry Hopkins, Ellen Woodward, and Henry Alsberg of the national project, and Ethel Schlasinger, the state director who signed the preface. Read today, it is at once a practical road book and a snapshot of a young prairie commonwealth taking stock of itself — counting its resources, recounting its past, and inviting reader and traveler alike to find, on the northern plains, a heart’s desire.