from Travis Kavulla’s review of Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889:
‘…By the late 1880s, Dakota Territory had less illiteracy than any New England state, and more newspapers were published there, per capita, than almost anywhere else in America.
The ignorant, gun-slinging, oligarch-controlled West is not what Dakota looked like. The settlers named their towns after Virgil and Seneca. They read Tennyson, Pope, Byron. Such classical education did not, as today, destine young Dakotans for a life in academia. No, this was preparation for a life that took seriously the hard toil of the farm and the grave work of self-government.’
