I don’t know if anyone has noticed—probably not, because these are the two most obscure states in the union—but for the first time in our history the Cabinet will include a member from each of the Dakotas: from the North, Doug Burgum, the drill-baby-drill Secretary of the Interior; and from the South, the comely canicide Kristi Noem, who will preside over the fascistically named Department of Homeland Security.

Wynona Huchette Wilkins, a professor at the University of North Dakota, published a marvelous essay in 1971 on “The Idea of North Dakota.” She noted that the state was “a synonym for remoteness, desolation, and exile.” Its southern neighbor got the balmy adjective, but the Peace Garden State was blessed with its own refractory variant of the American spirit.

Before the mass-media steamroller flattened provincial political idiosyncrasies, North Dakota cut a wonderfully sharp populist profile. In 1933, the North Dakota State Senate debated—seriously—a resolution by 83-year-old firebrand “Wild Bill” Martin that his state, “carrying with us the Star Spangled Banner,” separate from New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, whose “financial oligarchy,” centered in “the New York Stock Exchange and the House of Morgan,” was “making the people of thirty-nine other states financial peons.”

Coevally, North Dakota U.S. Senator Gerald Nye investigated those “Merchants of Death” who profited off the abattoir of the First World War, and Representative Usher Burdick kept lit the flickering flame of Upper Midwest populism. Burdick’s Cold War lament still rings true: “We are without a party that will stand for this country. Both old parties want war and profits and the plain people like you and me have no means of bringing our vote to account.”

Sometimes, alas, apples do fall far from the tree. As a young man, Usher’s son Quentin was the blocking back for Bronko Nagurski at the University of Minnesota. Very impressive. Yet Quentin Burdick, who succeeded his father in the House and was later elected to the Senate, made a pathetic dauphin. I once saw Senator Burdick bullied in an Environment and Public Works Committee backroom by representatives of the billboard lobby. The freaking billboard lobby! Would Bronko Nagurski have stood for that? I think not!

But if North Dakota’s politicos have been tamed, neutered, and homogenized into Burgum-mush, her writers have been dyed colorfully in the Dakotan grain.

The state’s best-known late 20th- and early 21st-century men of letters (both now deceased) were the hog-farming, venture-capitalist poet Timothy Murphy, a student of Robert Penn Warren’s, who described himself as a “Faggot Eagle Scout Libertarian Factory Farmer Carnivore Poet”; and state poet laureate Larry Woiwode, whose Beyond the Bedroom  Wall (1975) often makes the list of the best post–World War II American novels.

Woiwode’s personal C.V. was every bit as delightfully miscellaneous as Murphy’s: North Dakota enfant terrible runs riot through Brooklyn, palling around (and acting) with young Robert De Niro before repatriating to his native state, where he raises quarter horses outside Mott in western North Dakota; converts to Orthodox Presbyterianism; runs for the state legislature on a right-to-life platform; and writes highly regarded poetry, literary novels, and a biography of his state’s preeminent businessman, Gold Seal’s Harold Schafer, the genius behind Mr. Bubble.

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Those who returned to North Dakota are a helluva lot more interesting than those who left and never looked back (Lawrence Welk, Peggy Lee, Angie Dickinson), not to mention the intersectional bores who dominate the New Releases shelf at your local library.

I don’t suppose the cabinetization of Governors Burgum and Noem heralds a Dakota renaissance, desirable as that may be, but the big recent news from thataway is the South Dakota Historical Society Press’s beautiful reissue of Ole Rølvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1927), one of the handful of epics that can plausibly lay claim to the title of The Great American Novel, alongside Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, and Frank Norris’s The Octopus. It is at least The Great American Novel of the immigrant experience—marked by crushing loneliness, dolorous displacement, and extraordinary courage and hardihood—and in an act of pan-Scandinavian comity the Swedish-American Allan Carlson has annotated and introduced this saga of Norwegian pioneers in the Dakota Territory.

Ole Rølvaag was a contemporary of South Dakota’s best-loved writer, Little House on the Prairie’s Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Throw in South Dakota’s George McGovern, standard-bearer of the loveliest presidential campaign slogan in our history (“Come Home, America”); hell-raising American Indian Movement leader Russell Means; and Calamity Jane, and you have the ancestral makings of a powerful southern partner in the Dakota reflorescence that America—whether it knows it or not—desperately needs.