Bismarck, North Dakota News

" http://terraserver-usa.com/image.aspx?t=1&s=14&x=194&y=1683&z=13&w=1&qs=%7cCorinth%7cNorth+Dakota%7c
Here is an arial photograph of one of Bowden's North Dakota ghost towns. Farms are everywhere in this picture. This is Corinth North Dakota. Either he is really ignorant or he intentionally developed tunnel vision. "

" From what I have read of his book interviews he always seems to be focusing on morbid issues. Or on issues he can put his particular morbid slant on.
In his article Emptied Prairie he does not say it is about a few very small, very remote North Dakota towns. He does not explain why, if there is almost no-one left in a town, why there are constant funerals?
Some of his words about North Dakota:
-the moan of the wind
-long dead coal furnace
-skeleton of abandoned human desire
-a willful amnesia in North Dakota
-Dead Towns
-the earth and the sky mutinied against the settlers
-towns becoming ruins
-the numbing sense that comes from living in a vanishing world.
-with its whisper of suicide
-his great and doomed enterprise
-also lost his shirt,
-you wake up one day and wonder what happened here
-There are constant funerals
-No, Im all funeraled up this week.
-Sometimes a congregation decides to burn the building to end the pain.
-a lot of the entries are about wind.
-There were a lot of suicides, he says.
-in other cases, it was the loneliness.
-dead badger,
-debris of an abandoned life.
-It was economics and drought,
-bedrock America, but here the rock is shattering.
-(of the war) I saw boys in a fetal position. They were afraid to move. And they wet themselves and soiled themselves.
-It is hard to watch. Yet it is impossible to look away.
-The students have long gone. The neighboring baseball field is named Field of Dreams. "

" http://www.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/ndirs/bio&genealogy/ndbioindex.html
Bowden could have used any number of North Dakota History or Biography resources but he chose not to.
Instead he chose to go to places with a few old or broken down structures. He chose to document stories from people who knew little history, or said what he wanted to hear. That way he could make up or arrange it to his own story of people freezing and perhaps suicide by train. A close-up photograph of the face of an old dirty doll was something only a disturbed mind could think of.
His first picture of the large old house I have seen before in another magazine. Except the dead animal still had some fur on it, was carefully placed on a piece of cardboard, and there was a train in the distance, and some snow was on the ground. Obviously someone came back for a second shot. It must be a tough job carrying animal remains or bones around to place for a good picture.
People from North Dakota know that the bones would soon be buried by layers of the grass dying off each year, or moved by the field being cut for hay. There is no place in North Dakota that has bones lying on top of this years grass unless someone put them there.
I can not imagine why National Geographic would buy a story from such a disturbed person. "

" Old pictures of empty or aging houses are not depressing to me. People once lived and raised children in those houses and towns. Children were once educated in old schools no longer used. When an Archaeologist looks at old ruins he does not begin by feeling sorry for the people who once lived there http://cat.he.net/~archaeol/
Most of us in this area have ancestors from the Baltic Sea area. The last Ice Age covered it all and our ancestors were somewhere else. They moved to the new areas as the ice melted. The grass above the snow line fed many grazing animals and had berries like the tundra of Alaska.
Every state and every city are always going through some kind of transition. Right now we are sitting on lots of oil and it has been noticed that we have lots of potential wind energy from here to Texas. Arizona and New Mexico have good Solar Energy potential.
A switch to getting more energy from coal will mean more power plants where water is boiled and steam turbines turn generators.
Only in Bowdens dark imagination did people here suffer more during the wars or during the great depression than people in other places suffered.
During the Great Depression most kids on most farms ate better than city kids because their parents had gardens and at least chickens. City kids sometimes ate from garbage cans.
One branch of my mothers side of the family came west on an 1851 wagon train to Iowa.
Instead of him looking at what he called a dead furnace lurching away from the wall he needed to do this kind of research.
http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodicals/wrv/v2/n8/s66c.html
Bowden does not appreciate the number of people that died trying to cross HIS barren area of Arizona and the California desserts.
His imagination is so dark he must fit right in there in the desert with the cactus and scorpions. "

" The National Geographic to me it is mostly a picture book. Bowden's story is framed around the photographs. What else could he write about to wrap such depressing pictures in. "

" Bowden was ignorant. He used words like dead stove or moaning wind to try to sound dramatic. Surprisingly National Geographic bought his silliness.
Small old towns in his Arizona or in North Dakota failed because the country was in transition. When a newer town grew with sewer pipes, sewage treatment plants, electricity, and public schools, city people went to those cities because they wanted to.
During the Great Depression the price of wheat fell to very low levels and many people did move.
Which towns the railroad was built to or near was a very big deal for selling crops. If you had a navigable river nearby it was a very big deal. All over the Mid West the towns that had a river to turn a water wheel and a grinding stone could have their grain ground for personal use. Newer cities had more modern grinding methods.
Small coal towns with small mines were fine in many states until modern mining methods began being used.
Whether it was the steam shovel or a steam engine to run an elevator coal mines everywhere were modernized. Putting a flue pipe up out of the mines and a coal burning stove in the mines provided ventilation and burned much of the coal dust in the air. The hot air going up the flue pipe would cause fresh air to come down the entrance for breathing and reducing the chance of coal dust explosion.
Typical northern mid west farmers could cut a pipe off at an angle and hammer it in the ground for water. They would screw on more pipe as necessary and eventually fill it with water and screw on a hand pump. After a few days they would begin pumping out the muddy water until it ran clean. Running a pipe to the house meant you could locate your hand pump at the kitchen sink.
In the big city you could have running water and blocks of ice delivered to your icebox. You could have milk delivered to your front door. "

" Does no one realize where this article comes from? Do you see NG putting a nice spin on the Amazon tribes or people of Peru? No, the authors write sensationalized articles in the hopes of being penned as the next Hemmingway. All we did was give an arrogent writer another stage to mouth off. His article was interesting and accurate within the confines of what he and who he was writing for. Nothing more, nothing less. "

" I can't see why the truth bothers so many people. "

" Googled Charles Bowden and found a MN Star-Tribune article with lots of MN comment. Thought you might like this one from a "10-year-old from Arkansas." "Dad gummit! Yalls be noin I caint be a readin! Besides, my momma don't let me looky at no picture book with naked buzzums." "

" I was just happy something, anything, was said nationally about North Dakota. Didn't like the comment about the broken doll though. "Many abandoned houses have dolls with blond hair and blue eyes." We blue-eyed people are not down and out. "

" Mr. Borden has absolutely no apology to make. He writes an honest and relevant narrative accompanied by poignantly stark, yet, beautiful photography. He is an internationally recognized author and photographer. Most of us former North Dakotans viewed his National Geographic magazine article with nostalgic humor. I grant you that for some his approach to a very real and painful topic may be beyond their present intellectual and artistic capacity to appreciate. For others who possess nothing but boastful and foolish pride, his critique obviously hit the "bullseye". Personally, I've always found the best view of North Dakota to be in my rear view mirror....a very quaint place to be from......but no longer want to live there. "

" This is interesting. I attended the presentation Mr. Bowden made on Monday last. It seems to me that there was a level of conspiracy among news organizations in Bismarck with reference to that event. The Tribune, KFYR and KXMB, all three, expected that he would appologize for his writing in the National Geographic Magazine article, published last winter. That is just incredibly arrogant on our part. To be sure there is strong and loud protest among many quarters in North Dakota to what he wrote then. There are many offended by what he wrote. I am a transplant from Iowa, but this is now my home-I've been here for 40 years. I did not find the article all that offensive. However, the way Bowden's visit was treated by the above-mentioned news organizations as an opportunity to redeem himself and appologizing, thereby to get himself back in the good graces of North Dakota. But, he didn't. He stood by what he had written and expressed surprise at the reaction. The man is crusty to be sure, but some of his invective may have been directed at the fact that very little was reported about what he was here for, the North Dakota organization of teachers of geography and what he said in his presentation, which made telling and throughtful comparisons between his adoptive state and its policies with respect to natural resources and like kinds of concerns in North Dakota. The conspiracy I mentioned above-I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch of the imagination: I use the term somewhat tongue-in-cheek-was about a preconceived notion about what the "story" was about and not what happened last Monday. I wrote KFYR an email about this very issue of missing the story. "

" Hello Friends and Fellow North Dakotan
Let's look at reality, Charles Borden is nothing more then and arrogant writer who happened to get paid by National Geographic for his poorly written story about such a great place. Borden made a buck on North Dakota once with National Geographic and now from Bismarck State College. His article along with all the other negative articles that have been written are a positive for North Dakotan. How so "It keeps all the trash from the rest of the US away from this beautiful state." We should be praising uninformed out of stater like Borden for his poor reporting in helping keep our state such a great place to live and work. Let's get over it!!! "