If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I get all agitated whenever somebody from somewhere else dumps a whole lot of money into a North Dakota political campaign. I just can’t stand not knowing who those people are and why they want to spend a bunch of money in North Dakota. So I got curious Wednesday …
I intended to start this story with the words “This is a story about some Really Stupid People.” I thought that was a bit harsh, so I changed it to “This is a story about People who did some Really Stupid Things.” I decided that was pretty lame. So I’ve come up with a new start. “This is a Really …
A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article here about the Little Missouri State Scenic River Commission and how important it had been to protecting the integrity of North Dakota’s only “State Scenic River” during our first oil boom in the 1970s and ’80s. If you missed it, you can go here to catch up. Well, we’ve had another boom …
They’re going to bury Jim Pomeroy today. Former State Sen. Jim Pomeroy. Jim was a lot of things in his life. A minister. A carpenter. A musician. A counselor to the aged, sick and infirm. A husband. A father. A grandfather. A volunteer. A loyal Democrat. A cousin to a U.S. congressman. He was those things on purpose. He was a …
Political parties exist for one primary purpose: to nominate candidates, generally of a like mind, for political office. Everything else political parties do is secondary to that. To be sure, there are other important secondary functions: to provide a platform on which those candidates base their campaigns, to provide a supporting organization and to provide money, or a means to …
I love the Little Missouri River. It is one of the longest, free-flowing rivers in America. In reality, I believe it IS the longest because the Yellowstone, which claims the honor, is full of low-head dams that create little pools and eddies all along its length, even though they don’t create giant reservoirs like the Big Missouri’s dams do. The …
SPEAKING OF NEW DRESSES Wednesday, I wrote a long story about lieutenant governors, mostly, and in it, I poked some fun at my friend, Jim Poolman. If you missed it, click here. But here’s another addition to the story, and it demonstrates why I like Jim Poolman. He has a sense of humor and a thick skin. Last night, I was sitting in …
WAIT A MINUTE OK, the story below about state Sen. Nicole Poolman is funny, but according to her husband, it is not quite true. Almost, but not quite. The real story is even funnier. Way at the very end of this blog, I repeated a story that’s been making the rounds in political circles these days. A story about state …
Every time I hear the phrase “return to the scene of the crime” I smile and chuckle a little inside. It goes back to an evening about 10 years ago when Lillian and I and her two teenage daughters were living on a small farmstead north of Dickinson, N.D. One early spring evening, just after dark, I was driving Chelsea to …
Super Tuesday. Republicans and Democrats all over America will line up tomorrow to cast their votes for their favorite presidential candidates. By the end of the night, we might have a pretty clear picture of who the two national party candidates will be, although 34 states and a handful of territories won’t have completed their processes yet. Including North Dakota. …
Most of you didn’t know Burt Calkins. Too bad. He was one of the most interesting men I ever knew. Not that I knew him well. Nobody did. He was one of those characters who just drifted in and out of your life, and each time it was an enjoyable experience. I guess I came to Burt about halfway through …
When a friend of mine asked me yesterday how fishing was going this winter, I replied with a smile, “I have enough perch in the freezer to get me through Lent.” Today is the first Sunday of Lent, Father reminded us at Mass. Time for a little Lenten primer, for you non-Catholics (and some of us Catholics, too — I …
Note: In Monday’s article, I discussed the North Dakota governor’s race, in light of the economic downturn the state is suffering. Today, one of the candidates for governor, Doug Burgum, discusses the state’s economic plight in an op-ed he e-mailed to the North Dakota media late Monday. — Jim Fuglie By Doug Burgum The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia for …
What’s a Democrat to do? Just when the North Dakota Republican Party appears more vulnerable than it has been in almost 25 years, the North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party has retrenched into a hole so deep that it’s unlikely Democrats here will be able to climb out of it in time to compete in an election about 280 days hence. The …
U.S. Highway 85 is North Dakota’s deadliest highway. If you’re not familiar with it, it is the road that runs north and south along the western edge of the state, from our border with Canada to our border with South Dakota, through the North Dakota Bad Lands, some of the state’s most scenic and fragile landscapes. Even though it passes …
The strange saga of Roger Lothspeich and the Elkhorn Ranch gravel pit has taken a bizarre turn. Lothspeich, you will recall, is the fellow who bought the “surface minerals” (gravel, scoria, coal and uranium) on a piece of land owned by the U.S. Forest Service directly across the Little Missouri River from Theodore Roosevelt’s ranch home, which is now part …
Sunday, Jan. 10 update: As I predicted, look for much about Kevin Cramer in Rob Port’s Sunday columns in the Forum Communications’ newspapers. As I point out below, Rob owes much to Cramer’s communications director Jason Stverak. So it’s no surprise that Cramer is the hero of Rob’s first Forum column today. Expect a regular diet. And while I have resisted …
Here’s a question for some of you who spend a lot of time in the outdoors in the fall: How was your pheasant season? “Good enough, I guess,” would be my response. All of us who hunt pheasants in North Dakota are loathe to say anything gloomier than that, because saying “It wasn’t all that great” might mean admitting: We …
Call it our own private little Christmas miracle, if you will. It happened. After weeks and weeks of what I call a “white sky” over Bismarck every night — a function of city lights bouncing off a completely overcast sky — we had given up hope of seeing the expected nearly full moon on Christmas Eve. They say the real …
Well, every year about this time, in past years, Lillian and I would get together and draft a “Christmas Letter,” which we would then take to the print shop, have it printed on fancy paper, buy a bunch of colored envelopes and a whole lot of stamps, spend hours addressing each envelope by hand and writing personal notes on the …
Sebastian Fabian Hoffner, 91, Bismarck, died Thursday, Dec. 17, 2015, at St. Vincent’s Care Center in Bismarck. Mass of Christian burial will be said for him at 11 a.m. Tuesday (Dec. 22) in St. Boniface Church, Esmond, N.D. The praying of a rosary will begin at 10:30 a.m. Burial will follow in the church cemetery. Nicknamed “Buckshot” from a young age, he was born …
And so the North Dakota Veterans Cemetery will remain dark at night. North Dakota’s adjutant general, David Sprynczynatyk, whose command includes the cemetery, made his decision at the end of a week of input from the public on the efficacy of a well-intentioned but poorly thought-out proposal to light the cemetery at night. Thank you to those who called the …
Lillian had set the newspaper beside my coffee cup on the dining room table while I was at the Y the other morning. A big headline reading “Cemetery lighting project may seek $400,000” was circled, and she had written across it in big black letters: “This is a bad idea.” She was right. The story said local boosters were requesting …
OK, here’s a true story about the beauty of living long enough to be a part of the technological revolution of the 21st century. Read: Facebook. Last week, Lillian became Facebook Friends with a mutual friend of ours from our separate earlier lives, Rick Watson. In a note to her, he mentioned an old story I had recounted to him …
Note: I posted this on my blog more than five years ago, in August 2010, when immigration was in the news every day. It seems appropriate to repeat it now. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who, from all I can tell, is generally not a wacko, has joined forces, or actually taken leadership of, a group of wackos who …
You might remember that memorable line, uttered by Dick the butcher, from perhaps the least memorable of Shakespeare’s plays, “Henry VI.” I thought of it today because I was thinking about lawyers. And governors. It’s been 30 years since North Dakota had a lawyer in the governor’s chair. That’s about to end. Because it looks like the race for governor …
“Any discussion of proposed actions on the Elkhorn Ranchlands should harken back to a conversation held over pizza in the small community of Medora, ND, in 2000. Ranchers Ken and Norma Eberts carried a vision of theirs to then-Theodore Roosevelt National Park Superintendent Noel Poe for what is now the Elkhorn Ranchlands. That meeting pivoted on expanded protection for the …
In North Dakota, if you’re an oil field company and you violate laws or regulations, you sometimes get fined for your misdeeds. Sometimes, the fines are as much as $200,000. Sometimes, they’re only $50,000 or $10,000. No matter. No one ever pays them. Because the philosophy of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, and its chairman, Jack Dalrymple, our state’s governor, is …
Editor’s note: Jim Fuglie wrote this before this past weekend’s pheasant hunting opener in North Dakota. Tomorrow, I’ll join about 90,000 or so of my best friends on one of North Dakota’s favorite days, hunting pheasants on the opening day of pheasant season. I thought I might share here, for those of you who don’t read a magazine called Dakota Country, an article …
We return now to an old, familiar story, a story of some really bad guys doing some really bad things to the North Dakota environment (or enviornment, as the Bismarck Tribune spells it in really big headlines on the front page today — have you ever seen a worse newspaper?), getting caught by state “regulators,” then given a slap on …
“Then there’s the strange case of Drew Wrigley, the lieutenant governor and, many thought, heir apparent to the office. Wrigley has gotten himself tangled up in a messy personal situation that probably precludes his nomination …” That’s what I wrote a month ago today, on a quiet Tuesday morning, in an article ostensibly about Jack Dalrymple’s performance as governor (you …
The first decision of Wayne Stenehjem’s soon-to-be-officially announced campaign for North Dakota Governor comes today, when the three-person Industrial Commission, of which he is a member, decides to give the Oil Industry a big wet kiss on the lips or a tiny slap on the hands. At issue is whether the commission will stick to its guns and enforce its …
The noose around James Henrikson’s neck got a little tighter this week —figuratively speaking, since prosecutors have decided not to seek the death penalty for Henrikson for allegedly masterminding the murder-for-hire that included the killing of a young North Dakota oilfield worker. Henrikson sat in a Spokane, Wash., courtroom this past Wednesday and watched three men who carried out the …
Two comments on the state of politics today: John Hoeven lied. Start practicing now, so you are ready, in 2017, to say “Gov. Stenehjem” and “President Clinton.” First John Hoeven. I am glad that it took me a few days to get around to writing this because last week I was walking through a dusty parking lot in the Bad …
I want to bring you up to date on the threats to the Elkhorn Ranch, Theodore Roosevelt’s ranch in the North Dakota Badlands, called by many the “Cradle of Conservation.” It was there that the future president began developing his deep conservation ethic and later became our greatest conservation president ever. I’ve mentioned these things a couple of times in …
This morning’s Bismarck Tribune had a front page story about the Catholic bishop of Bismarck announcing that he would no longer allow Catholic churches in his diocese to sponsor Boy Scout troops. He said in the story that the Boy Scouts of America’s decision to allow gay Scout leaders “prompted him to decide that the diocese, its parishes and schools …
According to the man who says he killed Kristopher “K.C.” Clarke, the young oilfield worker who disappeared more than three years ago is buried in one of North Dakota’s Bad Lands parks — likely Little Missouri State Park or the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. That’s one of the apparent confessions made by Timothy Suckow of Spokane, Wash., …
I’m going to Hettinger, N.D.,my hometown, today. Class reunion. A chance to see many old friends. But I’d rather be in Chicago. Let me tell you why. Just about exactly 20 years ago, on the morning of July 8, 1995, I was sitting under the Gateway Arch at the Jefferson National Memorial in St. Louis, reading the St, Louis Post-Dispatch and …
Over the past couple of years, I have written several times about the decline in North Dakota’s wildlife population since the Bakken Boom began. It may just be a coincidence that numbers of game species (deer, sage grouse, bighorn sheep and pronghorn antelope, to name a few) have been decimated at the same time as the big oil boom took …
If you head for the Bad Lands this summer, be prepared for some new scenery. All along I-94 from Dickinson to Medora, N.D., you’re going to see the latest abomination brought to us by the oil industry: “repurposed” semi-trailers painted up with advertising messages parked along the ditches beside the freeway. It’s what happens when greedy, tasteless money-grubbers stretch the …
A month or so ago, in an article I first wrote for Dakota Country magazine and posted later here on my blog, I talked a bit about my father and his love of North Dakota’s outdoors. If you missed that, you can read it here. I need to share a few more words about my father — and growing up in …
A Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad train went off the tracks near the small village of Heimdal, N.D., just east of Harvey, N.D., about 7:30 this morning. That’s not news any more, since the train was pulling 109 tank cars of oil, and when six of them caught on fire, it made national news pretty quickly because it’s just the …
These are the three things I enjoy most about North Dakota’s outdoors: Wading across the Little Missouri River with my hiking shoes slung over my shoulder, on my way to a silent day hiking in the Bad Lands wilderness. Watching my dog lean into a patch of brush, just a glimpse of red feathers under her nose, her nostrils flaring …
Let me start with this. I was sitting in my recliner last Sunday evening watching a rerun of the old Lawrence Welk show from the 1960s. It was one of Lawrence‘s “theme shows,” and the theme this week was Los Angeles. As the show neared an end, after renditions of surfer songs and Hollywood movie themes, the band and singers …