Dr. Niels Ebbesen Hansen

The Remarkable Dr. Niels Hansen
South Dakota's Great Plant Pioneer
By Kevin Kephart and Lance Nixon, South Dakota State University

At a ceremony in his honor in 1949 at what is now South Dakota State University, botanist Niels Ebbesen Hansen, then 83, summed up in one pithy statement the work of an agricultural scientist: “The idea is to leave the land in a more profitable condition than you found it.”

For Danish-born N.E. Hansen, for whom some of the facilities on the SDSU campus are named, that meant finding or developing some 350 varieties of fruits, vegetables and trees adapted to the dry, severe climate of the northern Plains – the region Hansen called “my American Siberia.”

He knew something about Siberia. A professor of horticulture at what is now SDSU, Hansen also had a title and a job from the federal government that took him into remote parts of the world as “USDA Plant Explorer No. 1.” It was as a plant explorer, though not always for USDA, that Hansen made eight journeys through Europe and Asia at the start of the 20th century.

His first plant trip was as a student at Iowa State College in Ames in 1894. After that he made three expeditions for the USDA in 1897, 1906, and 1908. His reputation was so great that the state of South Dakota paid for two plant exploring expeditions in 1913 and 1924. His last trips overseas were a 1930 visit to the International Congress of Horticulture, and finally a 1934 visit to Russia at the invitation and expense of the Soviet Union.

It was during the three USDA tours that Hansen acquired much of his colorful reputation. He was commissioned in 1897 by Secretary of Agriculture “Tama Jim” Wilson, whom Hansen knew previously as director of the Iowa Experiment Station, to go out and find useful plants for the Great Northwest -- what we would call now the Northern Plains area. That meant rambles across Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia, and China in search of plants that American producers could use – a hardy red clover from Lapland, crested wheatgrass and alfalfa from Russia, fruits from wherever he could find them. Hansen’s master’s degree thesis in 1895 was a study of apples, but he had an explorer’s interest in all kinds of plant material.

Purpleleaf Sandcherry, one of Dr. Hansen's notable introductions

From my point of view, the greatest economic impact from N.E. Hansen’s work has been in the forage crops side – alfalfa, smooth bromegrass, crested wheatgrass, plants such as those that could help agricultural producers make a living on the Northern Plains. Forages paid the bills, so to speak, for his travels.

But his heart really was in fruits – apples, pears, the stone fruits and pome fruits in general. His collections show that he also brought back a lot of melons and garden vegetables. All of those things were very valuable if you imagine a homestead out on the northern Great Plains. Besides ranching or grain farming, a house out on the prairie would have to have a garden, and some fruit trees. Those were among the resources rural families relied on, and Hansen saw them as crucial in a century of steadily increasing world population.

“As population increases, we must look to Horticulture as one important way of making a living on a smaller area of land,” Hansen wrote in a 1930 report to the South Dakota State Horticultural Society.

Philosophy Of A Plant Breeder

If N.E. Hansen had a philosophy that guided him in his work, it may be found in what he wrote after visiting legendary plant breeder Luther Burbank in California in August 1905.

	Dr. Hansen the great plantsman

“Mr. Luther Burbank is earnestly endeavoring to produce better flowers and fruits for the public good. Mr. Burbank’s courage and persistence in bringing plants together from all parts of the world, and making so many new combinations, is to be commended as it has upset some old ideas as to the relationship of species, and plant breeders are less hampered by the restrictions of systematists,” he wrote in another of his reports to the South Dakota State Horticultural Society. “Plant breeders now look upon a species as a more or less definite bundle of characteristics, all capable of great modifications.”

In later years, Hansen would sometimes be called the “Burbank of the Plains,” for good reason. He not only pursued the same goal as Burbank, he espoused some of the same methods.

He took material he had back from Asia or elsewhere – perhaps some Prunus species such as cherries or plums – and then crossed those introductions with the wild relatives of the northern Great Plains such as sand cherries or native plums. He was looking for a good fruit producer that would have the hardiness that would stand up to our environment. In some cases, the hardiness was what he found on the Northern Plains; in other cases, it was in the plant material he brought back from more northern latitudes.

“By going to northeast Asia I believe I saved 50 years time in getting pear culture on a successful basis, because these I believe are the hardiest pears in the world,” Hansen later boasted. Other plant breeders might not agree. But certainly his introductions gave plant breeders new material to work with.

Hansen’s approach in many cases has been successful. Not in every case, because plant material introduced from elsewhere is often subject to new disease pressures – the “Hansen Manchurian elm” that N.E. Hansen and his son, Carl, brought back from Asia in 1934 is an example. Yet in specific instances Hansen was able to work a little plant magic.

Hansen wasn’t always the breeder who did the work. The seed of the Persian winter melon that Hansen brought back from Turkestan in 1897 went to Utah and California, enabling plant breeders through hybridization to develop Persian and Honey Dew melons.

What’s In A Name?

Hansen’s expeditions around the globe in search of plant material are often commemorated in the names he gave to his own releases. Twelve varieties of apricot that Hansen released all bear Chinese names: Mandarin, Chow, Sing, Ninguta, Tola, Anda, Zun, Manchu, Sino, Lalin, Hulan, Sansin. Hansen’s pears, similarly, most often carried names of Russian or Cossack heroes or often place names from Siberia or elsewhere in Asia, such as Yermak, Finsib, Tanya, Selenga, Okolo, Sangari, Ilya.

Yet his rambles in search of plant material were not limited to overseas trips. Hansen gathered grapes in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Canada for his breeding program. In 1924, Hansen remarked that he had made 10 trips to Canada in the previous five years to collect plants: “I got a lot of small fruits, including one fragrant raspberry, also pin cherries and ornamentals. I pick up anything that I think is worthwhile. What will become of them I don’t know.”

Doubtless many of them found their way into his breeding program, which produced new plant varieties at an amazing pace. In 1925 he released 32 hardy grapes. That was about the time he was releasing eight varieties of crab apple as well.

Pembina plum is still popular today

To plants developed from native stock he might give names that suggested the Native Americans who first used them. The Zitkala rose, for example, got its name from a Native American word, as did the Wapago golden currant, developed from wild fruit from Cottonwood, S.D. Hansen’s plums typically had Native American words in the name -- Cikana, Sapa, Opata, Hanska, Kaga, Tecumseh, Waneta, Tokeya sandcherry hybrid, Yuteca, Tokata, Waseta.

So did virtually all Hansen’s grapes except for the Sungari that he brought back from Asia. He named them Arikara, Atkan, Azita, Caddo, Chonkee, Chontay, Edapa, Emana, Eona, Lachala, Luza, Mandan, Manota, Napka, Nompah, Oglala, Onaka, Osbu, Pontigo, Ree, Santee, Shakoka, Siposka, Sonona, Tahama, Teopa, Toscha, Wachepa, Wakpala, Wecota, Wetonka, and Yasota.

Hansen gathered wild grapes from the Missouri River near Pierre, S.D., and also near Bismarck, N.D. But he used the wild grapes from South Dakota as a parent in only two of his varieties, Teopah and Nompah. Perhaps with the goal of hardiness in mind, he used North Dakota wild grapes as a parent in 13 varieties. With 16 varieties, Hansen crossed varieties of cultivated grape -- most often a cross in which at least one of the parents was a hardy Minnesota grape called Beta.

Though Hansen’s grapes have arguably all been superseded by newer varieties, nurseries occasionally still grow and sell Hansen varieties such as Chontay and Siposka.

Here at South Dakota State University, there’s another debt to Hansen that fruit growers can look to, though it’s not one his introductions. SDSU has released 33 varieties of grape during its history – the 32 that Hansen released and one other. Decades after Hansen, SDSU plant breeder Ronald Peterson, using much the same method as Hansen, pressed as far north and west into Montana as he could find wild grapes growing. He crossed that hardy native plant material with a New York State variety called Fredonia to create the variety grape growers know as Valiant. It just might be the hardiest grape anywhere, and it’s partly because Peterson followed Hansen’s method.

“A Good Deal Of A Publicist”

Already in his senior year as an undergraduate in 1887, N.E. Hansen was writing to his father, “There is both money and honor to be gained by someone who succeeds in bringing out fruits, better than old ones.” The money seemed to elude Hansen, though – he never got wealthy from his work as a plant breeder. But he did win honor, and he cultivated it carefully.

An article about Hansen written on the eve of World War I sums up Hansen in a nutshell. The unnamed author in Farm, Stock and Home describes him as a “quiet, unassuming, middle-sized, middle-aged Danish-American – much of a scientist and a good deal of a publicist.”

	His famous portrait from Siberia

The fact that people find Hansen so interesting even now, decades after he did his work, has to do with his gifts as a self-promoter. No matter how busy he was in foreign lands, Hansen still managed to pause for the photographer – whether scouting for pears and apples near the Hingan Mountains, traveling the grasslands by cart with an armed guard near Harbin, China, or feeding crested wheatgrass to camels at Semipalatinsk, Siberia. In Omsk, Siberia, he even found time to pause for a studio photograph – a dagger at his side, a revolver in his belt, field glasses, a bundle of alfalfa under one arm.

His gifts as a publicist served him well when the U.S. Department of Agriculture, no longer headed by “Tama Jim” Wilson, politely refused his offer to do more plant exploring work for the agency. Determined to get the plant material he needed, Hansen asked the South Dakota Legislature to fund his work – and state lawmakers agreed to foot the bill, not once, but twice.

It was also Hansen’s reputation that led to his last major expedition abroad. The Soviets invited Hansen to join an agricultural exploration tour to eastern Siberia in 1934. During that trip, Hansen was surprised to learn that some of his bulletins had been translated into Russian, and that some of his hybrid fruits were under cultivation in Russia.

In a lifetime of working with plants, Hansen earned many honors and awards. The American Pomology Society gave Hansen its biggest award, the Marshal P. Wilder Medal, for his new fruit varieties in 1929. The American Rose Society gave Hansen a First Prize in 1936 for 41 new seedlings of hardy roses. The Manitoba Horticultural Society awarded him the A.P. Stevensen Gold Medal for new fruits in 1935. Hansen must have been tickled, too, to find himself the subject of a biography in 1941 by Mrs. H.J. Taylor – a book called “To Plant the Prairies and the Plains” that still serves as a valuable look at Hansen’s life and career.

Yet the best reward may have been what that unnamed writer for Farm, Stock and Home hinted at in his article before World War I. In describing a conversation he writes: “Professor Hansen touched upon what I would interpret as the dominant note of his life’s work, the making of life easier and better for the people who must find homes in the dry lands.”

Without a doubt Hansen succeeded, to the degree that any one man’s career can have that kind of lasting impact. But it’s an ongoing job. Other plant breeders and agricultural scientists are carrying on the same work today – only perhaps not quite as colorfully as N.E. Hansen did it.

Kevin Kephart is the Director of the South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station at the South Dakota State University (www.sdstate.edu) in the beautiful college town of Brookings. Lance Nixon is with AgBio Communications at the South Dakota State University.

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