Jamestown North Dakota Pioneer Village
Jamestown, North Dakota - Thursday, June 20, 2013
by:Timothy W. Shire
It is a common situation for many communities wanting to preserve their past to bring together a collection of buildings and artefacts into a village type of museum. Tisdale has an outstanding example of this sort of historical display and you will have visited many others in your travels. Jamestown, North Dakota, began their historical village in the 1950s and were able to combine it with a small herd of plains bison. Most remarkably they have four albino animals which were considered of great importance to the plains aboriginal people who depended upon the bison herds almost entirely for their sustenance. To put themselves on the map so to speak, the folks of Jamestown created a 32 foot tall bison as the icon of their park, this monument has been around long enough to have been only recently refurbished.
On a peaceful, but warm Saturday afternoon, we strolled about the village and documented only a small part of the sights we encountered. Many of the shops in the village are actually tourist shops with locally made products and in one case a huge antique store. In these active businesses, we did not take any pictures, but leave that to your imagination, or perhaps for you to see if you should ever visit Jamestown.
Of the pictures on the pictures page there are shots made from my camera and surprisingly enough, a lot of the shots were created with Judy’s iPad.
Of course the real highlight of a tour like this rarely involves the artefacts, buildings, or displays, but it is the people who make the event just that, an event. In our case there were two remarkable people.
In a shop selling North Dakota items was a wonderful lady who explained to us that Jamestown was the home town of the famous singer/entertainer, Peggy Lee, a person I have been a life long fan. She told us her stories about the famous performer and then related other details about cattle ranching in the Jamestown area.
Our second encounter was with Bill Nybo. Bill was looking after the arts store with a wide range of art work from the local area. The store is open and uncluttered, displaying the art works in a perfect setting. As we worked our way around the paintings and various curios we came upon a large collection of brightly and decoratively painted animals. All of them being young animals, from pigs to elephants, with their mouths open and tung protruding. They were fired clay piggy banks, all in a similar pose. I took one look and smiled, then discovered the wide variety of animals and the humour each illustrated and I laughed out loud. They are remarkable. As it turns out, Bill Nybo (701 659-1578) is the artist who created these little five or six inch tall masterpieces. I apologised to Bill for not buying one because I really have no place to put one of these creatures and somehow I liked them best as a group. He suggested I buy one for someone as a gift and I turned that idea down, because who would know if someone else would see one of these as I did and they too might not get the concept without seeing the group, so we thanked him and went on to the next shop.
Jamestown is enormously proud of one other very famous personality to have grown up and lived and worked in the community for most of his life. The thing about this guy is that he has and will continue for ages to come, carry his readers off on old west adventures, in a world that may have been real, or was a creation of his imagination. One way or another, Louis L’amour is one of the most popular writers of all time and Jamestown is quite justified in their pride.