Open Prairie

Public Research Access Institutional Repository and Information Exchange

When Carol (Dornberger-Jackson) Blackford ’80/’84 was growing up in Sioux Falls, she wanted to experience what life was like for explorers in South Dakota in the 1700s and 1800s. She rode her horse down 41st Street and would drag a sled around her neighborhood in the winter as she pretended to be an explorer.

That love of that period of history carried over to when she decided to go to college and eventually made her way to South Dakota State University in the late 1970s. Inspired by Frederick Manfred’s book, “Lord Grizzly,” she began a pursuit of an academic career that has put her in front of classrooms for the past 35 years at Huron University, Presentation College, Dakota State University, South Dakota State and now at National American University in Sioux Falls.

However, it’s not her time in front of the classroom that has garnered her attention recently, rather it’s a work she created while pursuing a master’s degree at State. Her 106-page thesis, “A Comparative Study of Frederick Manfred’s Lord Grizzly and A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s The Big Sky,” has caused that attention due to the popularity of the 2015 movie, “The Revenant,” and its portrayal of Hugh Glass, who is also the main character in “Lord Grizzly,” following a bear attack suffered near Lemmon.

As a result, her thesis is one of the early successes of Open PRAIRIE (Public Research Access Institutional Repository and Information Exchange), an open-access, online repository that started in 2015. The repository is maintained by the Hilton M. Briggs Library with the goal of collecting, preserving and disseminating the intellectual and creative output of SDSU faculty, staff and students while supporting the ongoing mission of South Dakota State as a land-grant university.

“The repository is a treasure trove of scholarly works,” Blackford said. “It’s a teaching tool. It’s not just for enjoyment. It opens the door to the world of what SDSU has to offer. When they mentioned how often my thesis had been downloaded, I cried. It doesn’t get any better than that. I put my heart and soul into that thesis.

“This attention is unusual and completely unexpected,” Blackford continued. “You could knock me over with a feather. Some people are born expecting things like this; not me. I was born to expect nothing special, just forge ahead, do your best, don’t expect anything and remember always be grateful.”

As a result of her thesis on Open PRAIRIE, Blackford has been contacted by The Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, Wyoming, and by Jon T. Coleman, a professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Notre Dame. Coleman has also written a book about Glass.

Her current students have discovered it, too.

“One night in class, one of my students said ‘I just got done downloading your thesis.’ I didn’t know what to say,” she recalled, noting her students have legal, medical, law enforcement or military backgrounds. “He said, ‘I love your thesis because I’m learning so much.’

“If some of my students can be inspired to look beyond their world of technology and possibly look at the amazing true story of the American West, that’d be one of those great teaching moments.”

Michael Biondo, the institutional repository coordinator, expects the collection to grow as more people know of its existence and give permission to have their works uploaded.

For more information on Open PRAIRIE or to give access to have one’s works uploaded to it, contact Biondo at Michael.Biondo@sdstate.edu.

Matt Schmidt