Dakota Land

DESCRIPTION: "We've reached the land of desert sweet Where nothing grows for man to eat." "O Dakota land, sweet Dakota land, As on thy fiery soil I stand, I look across the plains And wonder why it never rains." Settlers stay only because "we are too poor to get away"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1891 (a "Nebraska Land" version in The Farmer and Labor Songster, according to Cohen)
KEYWORDS: pioneer hardtimes parody
FOUND IN: US(MW,Ro,SW)
REFERENCES (11 citations):
Sandburg-TheAmericanSongbag, pp. 280-281, "Dakota Land" (1 text, 1 tune)
Fife/Fife-CowboyAndWesternSongs 23, "Dakota Land" (3 texts, 1 tune)
Ohrlin-HellBoundTrain 9, "Dakota Land" (1 text, 1 tune)
Pound-AmericanBalladsAndSongs, 86, p. 185, "Dakota Land" (1 text)
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia2, pp. 477-478, "Dakota Land" (1 text); p. 623, "Quincyland, My Quincyland" (1 text, a rewrite but still too close to "Dakota Land to bother splitting); pp. 491-492, "Nebraska Land" (1 text, patently the same as "Dakota Land" except for a change in the name of the stae)
Sackett/Koch-KansasFolklore, pp. 143-144, "Kansas Land" (1 text, which could either be a "Dakota Land" version rewritten for Kansas or a "Kansas Land" version with the references to the government removed)
Welsch-NebraskaPioneerLore, pp. 48-49, "Nebraska Land" (1 text)
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, pp. 460-461, "Nebraska Land" (1 text, 1 tune)
Pankake/Pankake-PrairieHomeCompanionFolkSongBook, p. 155, "Dakotaland" (1 text, tune referenced); pp. 248-249, "Sweet Dakotaland" (1 text, 1 tune, perhaps a parody of this parody!)
Silber/Silber-FolksingersWordbook, p. 119, "Dakota Land" (1 text)
DT, DAKOTLND* SWTDAKOT
Roud #4899
RECORDINGS:
Miriam "Mimi" Wright, "Dakota Land" (Piotr-Archive #297, recorded 10/10/2022)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Beulah Land" (tune, form) and references there
cf. "Prairie Land" (tune, theme, lyrics)
cf. "Saskatchewan" (tune, theme)
cf. "Webfoot Land" (tune, theme)
NOTES [156 words]: Although the "Dakota Land" form seems to be the most common in tradition, local versions have sprouted for much of the West. Thus the Fifes lists texts for "Dakota Land," "Nebraska Land," and "Missouri Land"; Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest has one "Nebraska Land" and two "Kansas Lands." "Saskatchewan" and "Kansas Land" also follows this form, but those have been adapted enough that I think it qualifies as a separate song. - RBW
The Pankakes report this to the tune of "O Tannenbaum." Based on the sheet music I've seen, this is common but not universal.
Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder) quotes a stanza of this on p. 6 of Laura Ingalls WIlder, On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, Harper & Row, 1962; she claims her mother and her aunt Grace sang it in the early 1890s -- but of course she was writing almost seventy years later. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.7
File: San280

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