Off the Record

Every episode leaves something on the research desk. The details that didn't quite fit. The rabbit holes that led somewhere unexpected. The questions the records wouldn't answer.

Today we're opening the files.

In this episode, we go back to three stories from Season 2, the ones I couldn't stop thinking about long after the microphone was off. A Nebraska son hired to evaluate the Carnegie library program, who told an uncomfortable truth and watched his report disappear. A sacred building in Deadwood's Chinatown that burned under suspicious circumstances, and the case that was never closed. And two researchers documenting the same Indigenous plant knowledge at the same time, through completely different methods, producing completely different records.

Three episodes. Three things I couldn't let go of.

For photos, maps, and glimpses of the past, follow @rootedintheplains on Instagram.

Want to learn more?

• Erickson, David L. "Melvin Randolph Gilmore, Incipient Cultural Ecologist: A Biographic Analysis." Master's thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1971. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/opentheses/60/
• Fosha, Rose Estep, and Christopher Leatherman. "The Chinese Experience in Deadwood, South Dakota." Historical Archaeology 42, no. 3 (2008): 97–110. 
• Latham, Joyce M. "Clergy of the Mind: Alvin S. Johnson, William S. Learned, the Carnegie Corporations, and the American Library Association." The Library Quarterly 80, no. 3 (July 2010): 249–265.
• Pollak, Oliver B. A State of Readers: Nebraska's Carnegie Libraries. Lincoln, NE: J & L Lee Co., 2005, pp. 165–172. 
• Waheenee, Edward Goodbird, and Gilbert Livingstone Wilson. Buffalo Bird Woman’s garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987. 
• Wong, Edith C., Eileen French, and Rose Estep Fosha. "Deadwood's Pioneer Merchant: Wong Fee Lee and His Wing Tsue Bazaar." South Dakota History 39, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 283–335.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Oh hey, welcome to Reader in the Plains. I'm Nicole, your host, resident Great Plains researcher who reads too much about the Asian hundreds. Close the door, come on in. Today we're gonna go through the files I don't usually share, the stories that didn't make the episodes, the questions the records wouldn't answer, and the details I couldn't stop thinking about long after the microphone was off. The first one comes from episode four, Temples of Literature, Nebraska's Carnegie Libraries. I told you about the grassroots efforts of women in the towns that worked hard to get them. But there was one more person in that story. A Nebraska son who evaluated the whole program and told an uncomfortable truth and watched his whole report disappear. When the Carnegie Corporation wanted to know if their library program was actually working, they hired an economist named Alvin S. Johnson, paid$3,000 in 1916. Johnson visited over a hundred libraries across several states, including Aurora, Fairbury, Lincoln, right here in Nebraska. What makes Johnson interesting to me isn't just his report. It's where he came from. He was born in 1874 near Homer, Nebraska, in Dakota County. A farm town of 251 people at the time. He left at 18 to attend the University of Nebraska. His Danish father was progressive, free-thinking, devoted to education in the classics. Johnson understood his stakes immediately. He wrote that a boy or girl who bids farewell to books after finishing school is an example of social waste. He believed that the public library was essential to continuing education, that the better part of learning happens after formal schooling ends. This was an abstract philosophy for him. He lived it. His findings were honest and uncomfortable. Small town libraries running on minimal budgets, the required 10% of their grant proposal, some could barely keep the lights on. After paying for heat, electricity, a librarian, and a janitor, almost nothing remained for actual books. Many libraries were open only two or three hours a day. Johnson said plainly, you cannot run an effective library on that. He recommended the corporation get more involved, field agents, staffing standards, and real oversight. That's where our good friend James Bertram came in. Bertram managed Carnegie's library program for years. He knew every application, every building plan, every community that pushed back on bathroom placement or fought over a location site. My favorite comment of Bertram's is from his correspondence with the architect of the University Place Library in Lincoln, Nebraska. The space is not well used with practically three vestibules in the small building like this. There doesn't seem to be any occasion to waste more space and character between the delivery desk and the entry hall. There is too much corridor in the basement. Bertram fundamentally disagreed with Johnson's vision. Andrew Carnegie had always insisted that communities determine how to use the resources themselves. Centralized control, Bertram argued, contradicted everything the program stood for. The report was finished in 1916. It wasn't printed until 1919. In between, it was quietly suppressed, marked confidential, and only circulated in secret. The original was reportedly destroyed. Johnson later wrote in his autobiography, with barely concealed frustration, that Carnegie had been sewing libraries broadcast without a serious thought about whether they could actually function. He told him that. Carnegie died in 1919, the same year the report finally saw print. Whether Johnson's findings ended the program or simply confirmed what the corporation already decided, the era was over either way. From Nebraska to South Dakota, from a suppressed report to a suspicious fire. In episode 5, What Couldn't Be Erased, Deadwood's Chinatown, we spent time getting to know Phili Wong. But what I didn't get into was that Deadwood was a town that knew fire. It burned in 1879 badly, taking most of downtown and part of Chinatown with it. After that, the Chinese rebuilt in stone and brick. They built fireproof walls three feet thick in sand-filled hoppers designed to smother flames before they could spread. They had learned their lesson. So when I was going through the Sanborne fire insurance maps during research for episode 5, I was already tracking fires. The maps are remarkable documents. They were made specifically to help insurance companies understand what they were covering. Color-coded by construction materials, super detailed. Deadwood was mapped eight times between 1885 and 1948, which means you can watch the neighborhood change, building by building, decade by decade. You can find a post on my Instagram page about the map changes. Somewhere in that process, I noticed the Joss House was gone. The Joss House was the Chinese Masonic Lodge. It had been the spiritual and social center of Deadwood's Chinese community for 30 years. In 1910, two Colorado newspapers reported that a fire destroyed the Joss House, along with a laundry that had started in some adjoining Haymos, and that it appeared to be deliberately set. The papers named the long-running rivalry between Feely Wong and Haiky as the suspected motive. Now I'm going to be careful here, because this is where the record stops. No charges were ever filed. No one was ever named. The Colorado papers are reporting rumors as much as facts. But here's what I kept seeing. The man who underwrote the fire insurance policies on the Chinese-owned properties in Deadwood, including Wing Shui, was a general insurance agent named C.E. Gorder. Gorder also managed Feely Wong's rental properties, kept them rented out, and collected the income. He knew exactly what was insured, what it was worth, and who owned what. And by 1915, just five years after the fire, Feely Wong defaulted on his mortgage. The first national bank acquired the Wing Shui properties for just over$1,000, a fraction of what they had been worth. The maps show what disappeared, the financial records show what followed. And the case, as far as I can tell, was never closed. Two Colorado papers, not the Deadwood Papers, not the local press that had covered the community for 30 years. That's the detail that stuck with me. Why would newspapers in Colorado pick up a story about a fire in a Deadwood alley? I didn't put this in episode 5 because I couldn't take it further than that. And I'm not willing to name people from a historical record without evidence that would hold it up. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. A 30-year-old sacred building, a fire that looked deliberate, and an insurance agent at the center of it all. The record ends there, but I'll let you be the judge of what that means. The last one comes from episode 7, What the Prairie Knew. And honestly, this one isn't about a missing story. It's about having too many stories and having to decide which one feels right. Sometimes I know exactly where I want to take an episode, and sometimes the research takes me somewhere where I'm not really sure I'm ready to go. Melvin R. Gilmore, an ethnobotanist whose 1919 work, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, became one of the foundational documents of Plains ethnobotany. Okay, side note, this might get a little crazy. This is where I kind of geek out. Okay. Gilmore studied under Charles Bessie at the University of Nebraska. Gifford Pinchot was the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. He was friends and rivals with John Muir of the Sierra Club. Bessie and Pinchot, together, they convinced President Teddy Roosevelt to create the Nebraska National Forest in Halsey, Nebraska. And we know from season one, episode four, that Teddy Roosevelt is friends with George Byrd Grinnell, who is the father of American conservation. So basically, six degrees of the Great Plains, Grinnell and Gilmore are connected. Thanks for playing. There's a little bit more to this, and I I drew out a diagram. It's on the Instagram page. It ties more together. It's kind of a crazy thing. You'll see why I kind of geeked out on this. So, Gilmore spent years in the field. He learned languages. He built relationships. He believed he was doing important work. And in many ways he was. But I found something in the research that I just couldn't shake. Gilmore wrote privately that indigenous people spoke to him, and I'm quoting him here, almost like he was another Indian. He meant it as a compliment to himself, as evidence of trust earned. And maybe it was, but it was also a red flag. Because what it tells you is that Gilmore believed his empathy made him neutral, that his care for the people he was documenting somehow lifted him outside of his own position as a white scientist, extracting knowledge, organizing it into Western botanical categories, and publishing it for a white scientific audience. His empathy was real, but he was still taking something that wasn't his to take. And here's where it gets interesting. Working in the same region, at roughly the same time, among some of the same communities, was another researcher named Gilbert Wilson. Wilson's approach was completely different. Instead of bringing plant specimens to the informants and recording their responses on the spot, Wilson centered one woman's voice, known as Buffalo Bird Woman, and he let her describe Hidata Agriculture in her own terms, and at an extended narrative in her own perspective. The result was Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden. And when you put it next to Gilmore's catalog, the accounts sometimes don't match. Not because one of them is wrong, but because they were asking completely different questions through completely different relationships. Gilmore was building a cross-tribal comparative catalog. Buffalo Bird Woman was describing her own embodied knowledge of her own land. Those produce different records. And what gets lost in the gap between them? That's the question I'm sitting with. Who gets to record the knowledge? Whose voice gets filtered? And what disappears in the translation? Three episodes, three things I couldn't let go of. A report that got buried, a fire that was never investigated, and a body of knowledge published in two versions, one through a catalog, and one through a single woman's voice. That's not unique to these three episodes. That's the nature of history. The voices that got filtered, the records that disappeared, and the questions that nobody thought to ask. Thanks for listening to Rooted in the Plains. I hope you learned something new today. For photos, maps, and a little glimpse of Plains life, visit the Instagram page Rooted in the Plains. And if you enjoyed this episode and want to dig a little deeper, check out the show notes for additional reading and a full list of sources I used in this episode. Thanks.