Jones and Brinker Bonanza Farm

1892 Traill and Steele county North Dakota atlas. Public Domain via Library of Congress

For many years, you could see the ruins of the buildings of the Jones and Brinker Farm (known locally as the Jones Farm) from the highway between Clifford and Blanchard North Dakota. You could drive the unmaintained dirt field road out there when the weather was good. The ruins were impressive; I can only imagine what it was like in its heyday. 

The above photos from 1892 don't do justice to the larger buildings that were built later on. What I never realized at the time was that it was probably the best preserved of the giant bonanza farms that began with the taking of Indian land and colonization of the state in the late 1800s. It might have become an important historic site if preserved since the Bagg Bonanza farm site south of Fargo is a bit of a letdown, looking no different from any standard old farm. At some point, not too long ago, the ruins were pushed over to grow another few acres of corn. 

The little town of Clifford grew up to serve the nearby Bonanza farm with saloons and elevators and was known as a wild town in the late 1800s. But it wouldn't last and the town would sink into a long, slow decline. In my youth, I played in the ruins of vacant brick downtown buildings, collapsing elevators, vacant houses and churches. Decay makes for an adventurous landscape.

As I sit in the center of another boom, it is oil and not land and wheat being extracted. Is it telling that the beginnings of our state lie in rampant land speculation and exploitive industrial agricultural extraction? In a letter to Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang titled The Bonanza Farm, Nobel prize-winning Norwegian author Knut Hamsun writes about the hard conditions and poor pay when he worked on Dalrymple's bonanza farm by Casselton in 1887. "...none of his workers like him. Bad food, a fourteen-to-fifteen hour workday and low wages. Add to that the rich man's arbitrary use of authority." In North Dakota, it was exploitative capitalism from the start. A descendant of Dalrymple served as governor in recent years illustrating the staying power of exploitative capitalism and power over time.

Having lived in almost new, shoddily built apartments in Williston that were already succumbing to the forces of decay I wonder how long it will be before this boom like that of the bonanza farms melts back into the earth? What does a sustainable culture on the prairie look like? Probably something more like that lived by the indigenous people repeatedly pushed aside in the name of "progress". Primarily this would involve changing our stance toward earth as a just a bag of resources and more as a web of relationships of which we are but a small part.

The location of the Jones Farm can be seen on the border of sections 11 and 14. 1892 Traill and Steele County Atlas, public domain, courtesy Library of Congress