Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 309-19.
Abstract
In 1991, when he had just turned seventy-nine years old, Frederick Manfred was interviewed at his Luverne, Minnesota, home by three young writers for an article that was to appear in the Agassiz Review that spring.1 He answered questions about his earliest urges to become a novelist when he was writing under the pen name Feike Feikema, questions about people who had encouraged his ambitions, and about the autobiographical sources for his novels, or his rumes, as he preferred to call them. He was asked about his writing methods and the motivations for some of his characters and even about his favorite Fred Manfred book. Then there was the inevitable question about Manfred's invention of the term "Siouxland" as a name for his home territory and whether the creation of Sioux land was influenced by William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Manfred's answer, a crystallization of the dozens of times he had explained his creation, was that the reason for "Sioux land" was a practical one. In his manuscripts, he had gotten tired of typing over and over the names of the four adjacent states that made up his home territory-Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Nebraska.
CREATING "SIOUXLAND"
The decision to coin a name for the region had come in 1945, when he was finishing his third novel, This Is the Year, and he had said to himself,
"Why don't I just drop all that state stuff and give the name for that Big Sioux River drainage basin?" So I went through a bunch of different things like "Big Sioux River Country" and so on, but I finally settled on Sioux land. And I drew up a map, which is in the end pages of the book This Is the Year. I drew that up in '46, when I was finishing typing the book, and in '47, in April, when it came out, it was in the end pages. And within two months, all the advertising guys in Sioux City and Sioux Falls glommed onto it because it saved them from having to mention all these states .... So unlike Y oknapatawpha, which has never been picked up by anybody else except Faulkner, mine was taken by these people. Then I became aware of Wessex and Hardy ... and John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley and so on. But I did it for a practical reason. I got sick of typing those states over and over again.2
Manfred knew well the land that he wrote about in This Is the Year. He had been a farmer there most of his life, and, as he wrote to college friend John Huizenga on 10 November 1945,3 he had traveled all across that Big Sioux drainage basin in preparing for the writing of the novel and had even gathered flowers, weeds, tree leaves, and bits of mud and stone to be identified later by experts. He had studied the weather reports for the region as well in order to make certain that he had every detail right. To literary critic Van Wyck Brooks he wrote (6 May 1946) about Siouxland: "Already I've peopled it with many towns, mostly fictions (though real) and people, situations, and tragedies,"4 and to George Shively of Doubleday, he wrote on 17 August 1946,
About the maps. Could they be used? I feel that it's important for the reader to get a good visual outline of the country, of the farm and its environs, and of Sioux land (my literary territory). If these aren't good enough for reproduction, then we'd better have new ones made. (Maps in Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta were of great aid.) (Also, I think the maps will pass as an author's scratching. As a professional mapmaker, they wouldn't, of course.) I think that when they're reduced to book page size the little tails and so will vanish.5
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln