Teenage girls “dragging main” in 1957. Nina Leen, Getty Images

When I was a teenager, my friends and I spent endless hours “dragging main” in my hometown of Mitchell, South Dakota. Sometimes we paired off with our boyfriends, but many times a bunch of girls piled into a friend’s car, say a 1957 Ford, or a borrowed family car—a Chevy sedan with no style whatsoever—and drove from the railroad depot on the south end of Main Street to the bowling alley on the north end in endless circles. We might stop window-to-window with friends in the bowling alley parking lot and chew over the latest gossip or drive into the root beer stand for burgers and fries, but mostly we cruised up and down main looking for our boyfriends, or hoping for a peek at our latest heartthrobs, or speculating about who was going with whom. In our little town, even the sheriff and his deputy could be seen in the parade of cars on the main drag, keeping an eye on us. As a teenager, I never tired of this activity. I thought it was a product of the automobile era until I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl and learned that the practice was much older than that.

Cutter in Cedar Creek, Dakota Territory. South Dakota State Historical Society

Rather than automobiles, Wilder and her friends employed cutters and sleighs to ride up and down Calumet Avenue, the main thoroughfare of De Smet, South Dakota, during the winter months. “With all the rest of the gay crowd,” Wilder reported, she and Almanzo “were going the length of the street, around a circle on the prairie when the street ended, back down the length of the street, around a circle at the other end, and repeat, laughing and shouting from one sleigh to another.”¹ When transferred to These Happy Golden Years, this appealing image led Wilder’s literary agent to comment that he “would like to go back to the days when the Sunday sport was to drive up and down Main Street in a cutter with your best girl tucked snugly in beside you.”²

In 2003, a writer for Deseret News in Utah noted that dragging or “cruising” main had “been passed down for generations” as a “staple of social life in the small rural towns.”³ The ritual, which “involved driving a central stretch of road in loops,” had become “a rite of passage.”⁴ Whether the participants drove automobiles, sleighs, or buggies, the activity itself always involved socializing while driving up and down the main street in endless circles. Dragging main may have reflected the fact that small towns offered little for young people to do. Driving back and forth on the main thoroughfare allowed them to take over public space and make it their own. For my part, I recall my endless circles of Mitchell’s Main Street with fondness, remembering old friends and good times, just as Wilder remembered “that charmed circle” of De Smet sleigh riders.⁵

Nancy Tystad Koupal

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1. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal et al. (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, forthcoming 2021), p. 376. See also Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 1953 ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1943), p. 92.
2. George T. Bye to Wilder, Sept. 29, 1942, James Oliver Brown Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.
3. Jason Olson, “Dragging Main,” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), Aug. 21, 2003.
4. Andrea Tudhope, “Hey Small-Town Kansas, Whatever Happened to Cruising,” KCUR.89.3, Oct. 20, 2015, kcur.org.
5. Wilder to Rose Wilder Lane, Aug. 17, 1938, Box 13, file 194, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library,