​Angels of the prairie: the role of women in North Dakota folklore

By Kooper Shagena

Just off of I-94 and Highway 83 on State Street in Bismarck, an abandoned Kmart sits behind an empty parking lot, watching the cars roll on and off the interstate exchange. It has been standing there quietly since it closed down in 2020, after providing the Bismarck area with 50 years of Christmas shopping and grocery runs. Then one day in 2023, it began to snow inside the old department store.

Canticle Productions, founded by Daniel Bielinski, the Chair of Dramatic Arts at the University of Mary in Bismarck, signed a lease to use the Kmart as a film studio to shoot a movie about Hazel Miner, “the angel of the prairie.” She was a 16-year-old girl who perished in the blizzard of 1920 in Center, North Dakota after she and her siblings had become lost in the storm on their way home from school; their sleigh fell down a coulee and they were stranded for over 24 hours. Hazel sacrificed her life to keep her younger siblings warm enough to survive the night and she has been memorialized as a folk hero in North Dakota ever since.

“Hazel's Heart,” Bielinkski’s adaptation of the folk story, premiered in Fargo on October 10 in the historic downtown Fargo Theatre. I sat about one third of the way back on the floor level, twisting my information brochure as the plot progressed. Of course, I knew how the film would end; the three Miner children would set out into that fatal blizzard and Hazel would die. I watched her portrayed on the big screen as a shy, nervous and weak young woman, and my wheels began to turn suspiciously. This was appearing to be just another film in which the female main character’s famous act of heroism is dying in order to uplift or advance the stories of others. Bielinksi’s adaptation shows Hazel immediately giving up her coat and holding a blanket, arms and bare hands outstretched, head bowed, over the exposed side of the overturned sleigh as a makeshift wall — a move that communicates submission. It also separates her from the siblings, communicating that her rightful place is different, colder, more painful.

In historical accounts, Hazel lays a blanket and robe overtop her siblings and then opens her coat and lays down on top of them. This image comes across as hopeful, steadfast guardianship rather than the doomed, submissive, blizzard fodder shown in the film.

Once the credits rolled (it was a very well-produced movie) I was inspired to dig into other famous women from North Dakota’s early history. Is it only sacrifice, service, or purity that earns women reverence in history? Furthermore, how can women and other underprivileged populations relate to history when it consists largely of their mistreatment or silencing?

Tom Isern is a professor of history and a University Distinguished Professor at NDSU who focuses on the Great Plains of North America. I asked him this question.

“I started jotting down; who do we think of as legendary women in North Dakota?” he told me. “And some patterns did start to emerge. One was sacrificial martyrdom and then the service trope is there, too.”

Wilhemina Giesler, for example, is memorialized in a bust of clay displayed in McIntosh County. In 1898, seeing her two daughters from the kitchen window, running from a prairie fire, Minnie Giesler ran straight into the fire once she saw one of her girls trip and fall, overcome by the flames. They both died from their burns in several days. Then there is Sacagawea, perhaps the most universally well-known female hero of the Great Plains.

“She took care of people. She was of service,” Dr. Istern said. “There you go, there’s another trope.”

Sacrifice and service are noble actions, deserving of respect and veneration, regardless of gender. These are women who were braver than most of us may ever be. In the stories that we tell and our rhetoric in society, unfairness only arises when a ceiling or expectation of these traits is placed on certain groups and not on others.

“It’s like there’s a lid on the legendary status of women in North Dakota,” Isern reflected, thinking of other local women who have accomplished great things and yet not received this aura of folk legend. Era Bell Thompson for example – a Black woman who grew up on a homestead near Driscoll, North Dakota in the 1910s and 1920s and went on to become a successful journalist and author.

“I consider her pretty damn heroic,” Dr. Isern said. “She went to UND and it wasn’t a comfortable time, but she persevered. Then she made her way as a writer, and she’s not much celebrated.”

Or take Katherine Kilbourne Burgum, after whom one of the largest buildings on NDSU’s campus is named. She was involved in the battle for women’s equal participation in sports and served as the NDSU Development Foundation’s president, but she is most recognized as the Dean of Home Economics… a “woman’s profession.”

I feared that “Hazel” reinforced this standard, this expectation, that a woman’s place is uplifting others, from beneath and from behind. Troyd Geist, a folklorist for the North Dakota Council of the Arts, pushed back, saying that Hazel Miner has been venerated because she symbolizes everything we are proud of.

“Here is this woman who represents the ideals of what we all admire in the Plains — especially if you’re from a rural, farming area — and that is strength, and that is sacrifice. The idea that you have to have amazing resilience to live here, whether you’re a man or a woman,” Geist said. He also advocates for the idea that homestead women were seen as (mostly) equal players down on the grassroots level.

“When immigrants came — whether it’s Germans from Russia or Norwegians — there were women here who set their own homesteads. These were women who were incredibly strong and brave and intelligent. They did things that would not be considered ‘typical’ by higher society,” Geist said. “So when you’re looking at the story of Hazel Miner, you really have to suss out how people in academe, newspapers and institutions see things like that, versus how people from the culture interpret the story.”

This made me rock back on my heels. Maybe I’m making a mountain of a molehill here, and maybe I too am guilty of perpetuating harmful stereotypes about women by pointing them out all the time.

We’ve arrived again at the core of the issue. Are we to learn from history or are we to move on from it? I think, as usual, the magic is in the gray area in between.

“We haven’t always done well and we haven’t always done right,” Dr. Isern said. “Unless you’re willing to face up to all the facts of your history, you can’t live in the land and claim that you own it.”

Hazel Miner, Minnie Giesler, Sacagawea, Katherine Burgum — these women and so many more have undoubtedly led incredible lives that were not entirely punctuated with oppression. But turning a blind eye to injustice is not the answer either. Troyd Geist told me why folklore is important: “We tell our stories so we can communicate to other people outside our region who we are before they can tell us who they think we are.” 

Reach Kooper Shagena at koopershagena@gmail.com.