GÜD BOOKS

We know the maternal role played by Necessity, but who’s the fertilizing-father of Invention? Lacking a name, we’re left to imagine Invention as a bastard child. That sure works for me.

Blessed with five manuscripts, two of them never before published in book form, a publisher has eluded me for the last couple years. Since the sand in my hourglass has drained almost entirely to the bottom, it’s time for a decisive — not to say desperate — measure: the world of publishing has grown by one. GÜD BOOKS has applied to the state for registration; we’ll soon have a P.O. box and a bank account. Only time will show the wisdom of this decision. We’ve also purchased a block of ISBN numbers.

Our first products will be five titles out-of-print or never before available in print versions. All deal with aspects of Dakota Territory’s last decade, 1880-1889, what we’re calling “The Dakota Quintet”. The first is the result of a twenty-five-year long investigation of my own. The others are works of both fact and fiction.

• FAITH & FORM: the Ecclesiological career of Benjamin Franklin Cooley. If you know me, you’ll be hard-pressed to not recognize the name: Rev. Cooley was rector of Gethsemane Episcopal church in Fargo for five years early in the target decade, 1881-1885.
• The Book of a Western Town is a vaguely fictional treatment of life in Fargo during those same years. Written by Ellen J. Cooley (née Hodges), clergy-wife of the good Father mentioned above. The Cooley’s time in Fargo were successful for the denomination but troubled for Rev. and Mrs. Cooley. She waited twelve years after their departure to write her novel, a thinly veiled tale of the abuse she endured; identities slightly disguised with borrowed names. Boom was published in 1897, went through one printing, and was unavailable in a Fargo-Moorhead library when I learned of it in 1994. Imagine that.
• “Trip to America” is a travel diary recording one hundred days in 1884 when Arthur Sykes and his friend and travel companion George Pritchard-Rayner sailed to and from Liverpool to inspect land investments each of them had made in Dakota Territory. Sykes was an older brother of Richard Sykes, founder of Sykeston and four other town in D.T., a dealer in more than 75,000 acres of what were claimed to be some of the most fertile agricultural land that aren’t in the Steppes of Asia. Arthur’s grandson provided a copy of the diary and permission to publish it in North America. who am I to pass up an invitation like that.
• The Sykes’s investments were real and representative of foreign investment at the end of the 19th century as the “Frontier” closed. A fictional treatment was written by Sarah Mabie Brigham, the comparable investment by a fictional member of the British gentry. WAVERLAND: A tale of our coming landlords explores the idiosyncrasies of that upper class as it (in her view) transplanted its valued from the Britification of Ireland to a parallel in the America West.
• Finally, William Hardman, editor of the London Post newspaper, trekked most of the way across our continent as part of “The Rufus Hatch Party” on its way from NYC to Yellowstone Country. Trip to America (not to be confused with the Sykes diary, of similar title) records the junket in pieces published serially in his London paper and later in book form in 1884, but never reprinted.

A few of us hope there’s enough interest in the history of this place during one of its most transformative periods. And, not incidentally, not leave me with a garage full of unsold paperbacks. Besides, I don’t have a garage.

Etruscan necropolis, Cerveteri, Italy / ca550 BCE

τεθνήκαμεν. σώζετε δάκρυα ζώσιν. / We are dead. Save tears for the living. ¹

The Shades is Agincourt’s formerly-Protestant, now non-sectarian cemetery located at the east edge of the original town site. Odd that I’m willing, even eager, to engage its design, while I’m constitutionally unable to cope with The Square and its focus on the memorialization of War.

The cemetery name, The Shades, invokes a decidedly non-Christian mythological reference to the dead — “the spirit or ghost of a dead person, living in the underworld” — reaching back to the middle of the 18th century and its fascination with the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime. Subtle distinctions lost on most of us today. Indeed, cemeteries are little-visited by anyone under the age of fifty, if at all, and only under duress.

I have only fond memories of Saturdays with my grandmother visiting the grave of her husband, my grandfather, Roy L. Ramsay (for whom I’m partially named. We’d pack a shopping bag with some lunch and small garden tools, then walk the two blocks to the bus stop on Archer Avenue (by the Moffet Technical Center, but that’s another story) and await the Bluebird suburban bus. The Bluebird ran this route from downtown Chicago southwest all the way to Joliet, and along those forty-five miles there were several large suburban cemeteries: Bethania, Resurrection, and finally Fairmont, where we had family plots. There’s a fourth at St. James-at-the-Sag, but that’s too far.

Alighting from the bus, there was a greenhouse where my grandmother purchased geraniums, then crossed Archer and passed through the gates. It was a hike up the hill along a winding road between several mausolea—not much vanity at Fairmont—until we came out on the broad flat southeastern (and far less picturesque) portion of the place, with few trees and much more orderly placement of graves: efficient, economical. Jeffersonian, like rural America; gridded, like Chicago.

We’d remove grass and weeds from around the headstone, a distance of three or four inches. Then plant the geraniums, one or two on either side but always symmetrical. My job was carrying water from a spigot some distance away. Odd that I don’t recall what I used to carry the water. Then we’d have lunch, enjoy the passing clouds, the breeze, and finally walk back to the bus stop at the bottom of the ravine for the trip home.

This was an important part of my childhood rhythm.

I’ve imagined just one special interment at The Shades: Agincourt’s half-term mayor Edmund FitzGerald Flynn and, some years later, his widow Amity Burroughs Flynn, a far more savory character than hizzoner. But their mausoleum is also far less romantic than the example pictured above, the former Medill McCormick tomb at Winnebago, Illinois.”² It’s time for me to tackle the larger, fuller story of Agincourt’s rhythms of death, burial and commemoration.

¹ Many thanks to Dr Carol Andreini for her translation into ancient Greek of this phrase, inscribed at the public entrance to The Shades.

² The McCormick tomb was designed in 1927 by architect Raymond Hood, far better known for his Art Deco and Moderne design. Vandalization of the tomb by teenagers seeking a place to drink caused the family to relocate the burials and destroy it in the 1970s. So I feel at liberty to “borrow” the Medill tomb for The Shades.