Lars Anderson stood at the edge of his wheat field in the summer of 1884 and allowed himself to believe they had made it. Forty acres of wheat stood tall and green. The garden produced more than it had since they arrived. A house, built from sod blocks and stubbornness, held nine people instead of the four it was meant to hold.
The children who had arrived one by one, orphans delivered by fever, accident, and disappearance, had become his children. Three years earlier, when the train brought Lars and Birgitta to Dakota Territory with their two children, Sven and Ingrid, they had carried a dream narrowed by six years of struggle into something hard and specific. Land. Not wealth.
Not ease. Just land where the name Anderson would mean ownership instead of debt. The land office in Huron took fourteen dollars for the filing fee on a hundred and sixty acres. Birgitta counted it from the cloth bag tied inside her coat.
The money had been saved across two years in Minnesota. It was supposed to last six months. The claim was nothing but grass moving in wind like water that had forgotten how to be still. No house.
No well. No shelter except sky. They slept the first night in the wagon, and Birgitta lay awake beside him. We cannot fail here, she said.
We will not, Lars answered. The first structure was a dugout carved into a low rise. Lars cut into prairie sod that resisted like something alive, roots woven eighteen inches deep. Four days to excavate ten by twelve feet.
Birgitta stacked the sod blocks for the front wall, her hands blistered and bleeding, wrapped in strips torn from a petticoat. By week’s end they had shelter, a hole in the ground with a sod roof and a door made from a shipping crate. Dark even at midday. No floor but packed dirt.
No windows. They planted wheat in early May, forty acres broken with a borrowed plow that jarred Lars’s shoulders with every stone. Birgitta walked behind, broadcasting seed by hand, the motion her father taught her in Sweden. They finished in ten days.
The potatoes went near the dugout, twenty rows, fifteen feet each, planted by hand. This was food they would see before autumn, food they could eat or starve without. June brought heat that sat on the prairie like something solid. The wheat germinated.
The potatoes came up strong. When rain did not come, Birgitta carried buckets from the creek until her shoulders bruised. Forty trips a day. Fifty when the heat was worst.
By mid-July the wheat was knee-high, heads beginning to form. Lars walked the field every evening, running his hands over the stalks, feeling for the weight that would come when kernels filled. It was the first crop on land that belonged to him. The thought sat in his chest like a stone.
A kind of hope that felt like dread, because hope was a risk he could not afford. Then the child came. Late July, evening. Lars was mending a harness strap when he saw the rider approaching from the south.
Torsten, the Norwegian neighbor three miles down. He dismounted holding his hat the way men hold hats when delivering trouble. Lars, there is a boy, he said. Orphan.
Parents died three days ago. Diphtheria. He is seven, no family. The county says the poor farm, but I thought.
Birgitta appeared in the doorway. She had heard. Where is he? she asked.
At my place. My wife. We have six already, Lars. We cannot.
Birgitta looked at Lars. The look lasted two seconds, an entire conversation in silence. Bring him, she said. Torsten brought the boy next morning.
His name was Anders, small for seven with dark hair and wary eyes that tracked everything, calculating whether this place would feed him or fail him. You got food? he asked. Birgitta’s hand tightened on his shoulder.
We have food. They did, enough for four, now five. Two months later another came. A girl of nine, found wandering the section roads after her mother died in childbirth and her father disappeared west.
The county clerk brought her directly to the claim. The knowing had already started. The Anderson place was where orphans went. Her name was Karen.
She arrived silent and did not speak for three days. On the fourth morning Birgitta found her in the potato rows pulling weeds with hands already calloused from work somewhere else. I can work, the girl said. Birgitta knelt beside her.
I know. By winter of 1882 there were six at the table. The dugout held them barely. They slept in shifts of warmth, bodies pressed together against cold that seeped through sod walls like water through cloth.
Spring of 1883 brought twin boys, eight years old, whose father had died in a railroad accident near Huron. No relatives. No options. The county contacted Lars directly this time.
Birgitta looked at the arithmetic. Eight people. The same forty acres. The same garden.
The same creek that ran thin by August. We will manage, she said. Lars wanted to believe her. The twins were named Eric and Karl, identical in face but different in temperament.
Eric quiet and watchful. Karl restless and quick to anger. They worked without complaint, hauling water, gathering fuel, working the field beside Sven, who was now eight and growing into his father’s build. The harvest of 1883 was good, not abundant but sufficient.
The wheat yielded enough to sell a portion in Huron and keep enough for flour through winter. The potatoes filled the root cellar dug into the north wall. They ate through winter with portions that were small but regular. No one went hungry, no one starved, but no one was comfortable either.
By spring of 1884 there were nine. The last child came in March, a girl of five found on the road outside town by a mail carrier. She could not or would not say where she came from. No one claimed her.
Her name was Johanna. She ate with the mechanical consumption of a child whose hunger was so established that eating had become automatic rather than pleasurable. Nine people now. Lars stood in the field that spring looking at the same forty acres that had fed four, then six, then eight.
The mathematics were clear. Forty acres of wheat, even in a good year, produced maybe thirty bushels per acre. Half went to seed. Half went to flour.
What remained sold at seventy cents a bushel. Minus costs for milling, transport, and the supplies they could not produce themselves, they were living on the margin. And the margin was thinning. Birgitta expanded the garden.
Another quarter acre turned by hand. More potato rows, carrots, turnips, anything that would grow and store. The house was a house now, no longer a dugout. Lars had added a room extending the structure west.
It was still dark, still damp, still smelled of earth and grass roots, but it held nine. Summer of 1884 was hot. The wheat grew tall. The garden produced.
By August, Lars allowed himself to believe they would make it. One more harvest, one more winter. The pattern sustainable, if barely. Then the rain stopped.
It did not stop suddenly. It stopped the way hope stops, gradually, in increments too small to notice until the accumulation becomes impossible to ignore. July had been dry. August drier.
By September, the grass on the unplowed sections had turned brown and brittle. The creek slowed to a trickle. But the wheat was already harvested. The potatoes were in.
They had made it. Or so Lars thought. What he did not know, what none of them knew, was that the rain would not return. Not that autumn.
Not that winter. Not the next spring or the one after. What had stopped in August of 1884 would stay stopped for three years. Spring of 1885 arrived without the rains that were supposed to come with it.
By April, the soil had turned to dust that rose in clouds when the wind blew, which was always. Lars walked the fields and felt the earth crumble under his boots like ash. He planted anyway. Forty acres of wheat pressed into ground that felt more like powder than soil.
Birgitta planted the garden with the same precision she had used every year before, but watered immediately, carrying bucket after bucket from a creek already lower than it should have been in spring. The wheat germinated, but grew slowly. By June, the stalks were thin, the grain pale. The heads formed small and sparse.
Lars walked the field each evening, counting kernels that should have been plentiful but were not. The garden suffered worse. Birgitta watered twice daily now, morning and evening, the trips consuming hours she did not have but spent anyway, because the alternative was watching everything die. Then the grasshoppers came.
They arrived in August on a day so hot the air shimmered above the wheat field like water. Lars saw them first, a dark cloud on the western horizon he mistook for storm until it grew closer and he heard the sound. A clicking, rustling hum like wind through dry corn, but louder, constant, growing. They came in millions, billions.
The sky darkened with them. They landed on the wheat, and within an hour the field was stripped. Not damaged. Stripped.
The stalks stood bare, the heads gone, the leaves devoured down to stems that looked like skeletons. Birgitta shouted for the children. They came running with blankets, coats, anything they could wave. It did nothing.
The grasshoppers fed until there was nothing left to feed on, then lifted as suddenly as they had arrived and moved east in a cloud that blotted the sun. The field was gone. The garden was devastated. What remained were stems and roots and the skeletal outline of what had been their harvest.
Lars stood in the field and felt something break inside him that he did not have words for. Not hope, exactly. Something deeper. The belief that work mattered.
That effort produced result. That a man could farm his way out of poverty if he just tried hard enough. Birgitta found him there after dark. We plant again in spring, she said.
Her voice was flat. With what? We have no seed. We have no crop to sell.
We have nine mouths and one winter to get them through. We use what the garden produced before the grasshoppers finished it. We buy nothing we do not absolutely need. We do not fail.
It was not optimism. It was refusal. They harvested what little remained. Potatoes mostly, the tubers underground having survived even though the plants above were gone.
Maybe three hundred pounds where they should have had a thousand. Birgitta stored everything and counted it with the precision of someone calculating days until starvation. Lars sold the plow, the extra harness, a wool coat Birgitta had brought from Sweden. Everything that was not essential.
They bought flour, beans, salt pork. The minimum. It cost twenty-three dollars. They had forty-one left.
Winter came early. Snow in October. The children gathered fuel obsessively, cutting down sparse cottonwoods and willows along the creek and dragging the wood back in loads that took two boys to move. The pile would not be enough.
It was never enough. But it was what they had. The house held nine people in a space designed for four. The stove burned constantly, fed every two hours through the night by whoever was awake.
The temperature inside hovered just above freezing on the coldest nights. Birgitta rationed food with a precision that bordered on cruelty. Three meals became two. Breakfast was thin cornmeal mush.
Supper was potatoes and salt pork boiled into soup. One bowl per person. The portions measured exactly so no child received more or less than another. There were no seconds.
There was no waste. The children grew thin. Not starving, but hungry in the way that becomes permanent. Anders ate slowly, making each bite last.
Karen divided her portion with Johanna when she thought Birgitta was not watching. The twins competed silently over who could make their bowl last longest. In January, when the potatoes ran out and they were down to flour and beans and the last of the salt pork, Lars found Birgitta in the root cellar counting what remained. She did not hear him approach.
She was holding a single potato, small and sprouting, and her lips were moving in calculation. He cleared his throat. She turned. For a moment, before her expression smoothed, he saw what she carried.
Not fear. Something colder. The knowledge that she had made a choice, and the choice had a cost, and the bill was coming due. How long?
he asked. She set the potato down. March, if we are careful. And if we are not?
We will be. Being careful meant eating less. It meant the cold getting into bones in a way that did not leave. It meant watching Johanna develop a cough that rattled wet in her chest and lasted three weeks.
It meant Anders, usually quick and strong, moving slowly with the exhaustion of a body running on empty. February was the worst. The cold reached forty below on three separate nights. Frostbite marked fingers and toes with white patches that burned when they warmed.
But they survived. Day by day, meal by measured meal, they survived. On the first day of April, Birgitta served the last of the flour as bread divided into nine equal pieces. They ate it slowly, knowing it was the end, but also the beginning, because spring meant planting, and planting meant hope, however thin.
Then the county clerk arrived in mid-April. Behind him, tied to his saddle, was a boy, maybe ten years old, staring at the house with the same wary calculation Anders had shown three years before. Mr. Anderson, the clerk said.
His name was Howell. I have a situation. What happened to his family? Birgitta asked.
Father froze to death in the blizzard last month. Mother died two days ago. Pneumonia. No relatives willing to take him.
He paused. I know you have a full house already. But the poor farm is well, you know what it is. Birgitta stepped into the yard.
She looked at the boy, looked at Lars. The look was different this time, heavier. She knew what she was doing, knew what it would cost, did it anyway. What is your name?
she asked. Peter, he said. His voice was quiet but steady. Peter, have you eaten today?
He shook his head. Birgitta held out her hand. Then come inside. Ten people now.
The same one hundred and sixty acres. The same root cellar that had barely fed nine. The planting of 1886 happened under a sky that had forgotten how to make clouds. The wheat germinated weakly, thin shoots struggling upward through soil that offered no moisture.
By June it was clear the crop would fail, not catastrophically like the grasshoppers had destroyed it, but slowly, withering in heat that climbed past one hundred degrees and stayed there for days. By July, Lars stopped walking the field because there was nothing to see except failure written in brown and yellow across forty acres. The garden survived only because Birgitta and the children poured themselves into it. Then, without discussion, the children began to hunt.
Anders started it. He was eleven now, tall and quiet. He made snares from wire scavenged from a broken fence and set them along rabbit trails on the unplowed sections. The first rabbit appeared on the third morning.
He brought it to Birgitta without ceremony. She cleaned it that evening and added it to the soup pot. Four pounds of meat stretched across ten bowls made the difference between hunger and something that approximated satisfaction. Not much.
But much was not the measure anymore. Enough was the measure. Anders set more snares. Erik helped.
By August they were catching two, sometimes three rabbits a week. Then Karen discovered wild plums along the creek a half mile east, growing in a dense thicket where the land dipped just enough to hold moisture. The plums were small and sour, but they were fruit. She picked everything she could reach and carried it back in her apron.
Birgitta boiled them with a precious spoonful of sugar. Karen went back the next day with Johanna. They found wild grapes, chokecherries, rose hips that could be dried and boiled into tea. Foraging became routine, contributions that made the difference between the food lasting and the food running out.
The harvest of 1886 was worse than 1885. The wheat produced almost nothing. But the potatoes survived, not abundantly, but adequately. Birgitta counted them as they went into the cellar.
Four hundred pounds for ten people through a winter that would last six months. Less than two pounds per person per week. It would not be enough. That night, the children gathered in the extended room after the adults had gone to sleep.
Anders spoke first, his voice low. We need more food. Karen nodded. The snares are helping, but it is not enough.
The foraging, too, Johanna added. She was eight now, small but fierce. But winter kills everything, Karen said. There will be nothing to find.
We expand everything, Anders said. More snares. Further out. And we set them for winter, not just now.
I can fish, Peter said, silent until then. My father taught me. If we can break through the ice when the creek freezes. The chickens, Karl said suddenly.
We only have four. But if we keep them alive through winter, they will lay in spring. We need eggs more than we need meat now. We have almost no grain to feed them, Karen said.
Then we find something else. Insects. Scraps. Anything.
They talked through the night in whispers, planning not because the adults told them to, but because survival had become their responsibility whether anyone admitted it or not. By dawn they had a plan. Crude, desperate, but a plan. The winter of 1886 to 1887 was colder than the two before it.
But the children’s plan held. Anders and Erik ran a trap line that extended two miles around the claim. Three rabbits a week became four, sometimes five. Peter fished through holes chopped in the creek ice, pulling up small perch and sunfish.
The fish were barely bigger than his hand, but two a day added protein the potatoes could not provide. Karen and Johanna foraged until the snow covered everything, finding forgotten patches of Jerusalem artichokes and stripping rose hips from thorny bushes. The twins split firewood obsessively. Birgitta watched them work and said nothing.
She managed the food with the same precision as always, but she no longer directed the children’s efforts. They were directing themselves. Lars saw it too. They are keeping us alive, he said quietly one morning.
Birgitta did not look up from the bread dough. They are keeping themselves alive, she corrected. We are just here to witness it. By March the food was nearly gone.
But they survived. Spring came slowly, grudging and cold. Then the rain came. Not much, but rain.
Soft rain that fell for two days in late April and soaked into ground so dry it drank every drop without runoff. The grass greened. The creek flowed instead of trickled. When Lars planted the wheat in May, the soil felt different under his hands.
Still dry. Still uncertain. But not hopeless. The garden went in with the same care as always, but now Birgitta had help that knew what it was doing.
They planted more. Not just twenty rows of potatoes, but thirty. Turnips, carrots, beets, onions. The garden expanded to half an acre.
The children worked it in shifts that required no coordination because they had learned over two winters how to divide labor without being told. Summer of 1887 brought rain. Not abundance, but regularity. The wheat would produce maybe half of normal.
The garden would do better. By autumn, Lars calculated with grim precision. Enough to keep for seed and flour, but not enough to sell. They would enter winter with food enough for ten people if they rationed.
If nothing went wrong. If winter was not worse than the last. The first snow fell in October. The children reacted immediately, gathering fuel with an intensity that bordered on panic.
The wood pile grew again. The snare lines were set. By November the root cellar was full. Not overflowing, but full.
Birgitta counted it. Enough for six months if they were careful. December came cold. Something was different this time.
They were ready. The children had spent two years learning how to survive. They were not comfortable, but they were competent. And competence mattered more than comfort.
By January of 1888, Birgitta allowed herself to believe they might make it. That three years of drought and cold and hunger might finally be ending. She was wrong. The morning of January twelfth arrived warm.
The temperature climbed past freezing and kept rising. The sky was pale, almost white. The wind had stopped. Complete stillness.
The air tasted metallic. Lars stood in the yard and watched the older children prepare for school, five miles east. Anders, Karen, Erik, Karl, and Peter walked there three days a week. Sven was fourteen now and worked the farm with Lars.
The younger ones, Ingrid, Johanna, and a boy named Peter, stayed home. The weather is strange, Lars said from the doorway. Too warm. Too still.
Then they should stay home, Birgitta said. But Anders was already putting on his coat. It is warm, Father. Easier to walk today than it has been in weeks.
Lars wanted to stop them. But the sky was clear. They had missed too much school already. Stay together, he said.
If the weather changes, leave immediately. They left just after noon. Lars watched them walk east across the flat white prairie, five dark shapes growing smaller until they disappeared. He did not know he would not see them again for eighteen hours.
He did not know that within two hours the temperature would drop forty degrees. He did not know that what was coming had already killed people in Montana that morning and would kill more in Nebraska by evening. At one o’clock, the wind returned. It arrived as a wall, a physical force that shook the sod walls.
The temperature dropped so fast Lars could feel it through his coat. Within minutes the thermometer read zero. Ten minutes later, fifteen below. Snow came in horizontal sheets that reduced visibility to nothing.
They are at the school, Lars said. They will stay there. At the schoolhouse, the children had been working through arithmetic when the wind hit. The single window went dark.
The stove drew hard as the wind sucked air through every gap. The teacher, Miss Gunderson, seventeen years old in her first year, stood frozen. Anders stood. We need more fuel.
The woodpile was outside. Inside, maybe enough for two hours. The twins moved without being told, breaking apart the desks at the back of the room. Karen organized the younger children into a group in the center, piling coats and blankets over them.
Peter fed the stove with broken desk pieces. Anders scraped snow from the window and saw nothing. Absolutely nothing. White so complete it looked like the world had been erased.
We stay here, he said. We do not try to leave. Not for anything. The wind did not stop.
Not at three. Not at four. The temperature inside dropped despite the fire. The younger ones began to cry, not from fear but from cold that hurt.
Karen held them, sang old Swedish songs Birgitta had taught her. The twins fed the fire. Peter kept the younger children awake because falling asleep in this cold meant not waking up. At the house, Lars paced.
Birgitta sat at the table completely still. Sven stood by the door as if standing there could bring the others back faster. I should go, Lars said. You would die before you reach the creek, Birgitta said.
You would die and they would still be gone and I would have lost you too. I cannot just. You can. You will.
She looked at him. You will stay here and keep this house warm and keep these children alive. And the others will do the same where they are. Because that is what we taught them.
To survive. Lars wanted to argue. But she was right. So he stayed.
And he fed the fire. And he waited. By morning the wind had lessened. Lars opened the door into cold so severe it burned his lungs.
The thermometer read thirty-eight below. Snow had drifted so high against the north wall it reached the roof. He looked east and saw nothing. At the schoolhouse, the children had survived the night by burning everything that would burn.
The desks were gone. The teacher’s chair. The books themselves, pages fed into the stove one at a time. By dawn the room was wrecked, but the children were alive.
Miss Gunderson looked at Anders. We cannot stay another night. There is nothing left to burn. He had known this since midnight.
They had to leave. Five miles in cold that killed in minutes. He used rope from the well bucket, tying the children together at the waist in a line. Twelve people connected by rope that would either save them or ensure they all died together.
They left just after dawn. The cold hit them like a fist. Anders turned west, using the sun’s dim glow through the clouds to orient. Five miles straight west.
Do not deviate. Do not stop. Do not fall. They walked through snow waist deep in places.
No one spoke. Anders counted steps. A mile was roughly five thousand steps. Five miles was twenty-five thousand.
He counted and walked and pulled the rope when someone slowed. Karen broke trail at the front. They walked for two hours. Numbness spread from fingers to hands to arms.
Feet that could not feel ground. Faces that burned and then stopped burning. Then Peter fell. The rope jerked.
Peter was face down in the snow, not moving. Erik dragged him up. The boy’s face was white, his lips blue. His eyes open but unfocused.
Keep moving, Anders shouted. Drag him if we have to. They did, Eric and Karl holding Peter between them. The younger children were crying now, tears freezing on their faces.
Miss Gunderson had stopped speaking, her mouth frozen shut. Anders did not know how much further. Did not know if they were even going the right direction. He only knew that stopping meant dying.
So he walked. Then he saw it. A shape. Dark against white.
Low and solid. The house. They had found it. Somehow, impossibly, they had walked five miles through a blizzard and found the house.
They brought all twelve inside. Eleven children and one teacher, barely alive but alive. Frostbite had marked everyone. Peter was unconscious.
Birgitta worked through the day and into the night, warming them slowly because warming too fast could kill as surely as freezing. Lars cut away Peter’s boots and saw toes that were black and knew what that meant. Some would be lost. But the boy was alive.
By evening all twelve were conscious. Anders sat by the fire, staring at hands wrapped in cloth and swollen and useless. Birgitta knelt beside him. You saved them.
Anders looked at her. We saved each other. The blizzard ended the next morning. Across Dakota Territory the counting began.
Two hundred and thirty-five dead. Children frozen walking home from school. Farmers dead in their yards, ten feet from their houses. But the Anderson family was whole.
Battered. Scarred. Peter would lose three toes. Anders and Eric lost fingertips.
Karen’s feet would hurt every winter for the rest of her life. But they were whole. The county clerk came a week later. He looked at the ten children crowded into the sod house.
At the bandaged hands and wrapped feet. At the faces still marked by frostbite. How? he asked Lars simply.
Lars looked at Birgitta. Birgitta looked at the children working quietly around the house despite their injuries. Anders mending harness with hands that barely functioned. Karen managing the younger ones.
The twins hauling wood. Peter sitting by the fire with his ruined feet elevated, teaching Johanna to read from the one book they owned. They saved themselves, Lars said finally. We just gave them the chance to.
Spring of 1888 arrived. On April the rain came. Real rain, steady, for two days, soaking into ground that had been waiting three years to drink deeply. Lars stood in it without coat or hat and felt the water run down his face and did not bother to wipe it away.
The planting happened with no discussion. The children knew what to do. The wheat germinated strong. By June the field was green in a way it had not been since 1884.
The garden exploded. Potatoes so thick their leaves blocked light to the ground. Carrots pushing up in rows that overflowed their markers. Everything grew.
Everything produced. The harvest began in September. All of them worked. They cut for two weeks.
When they finished, the wheat yielded fourteen hundred bushels, more than they had produced in any year since arriving in Dakota. Birgitta counted as they filled the wagon for the trip to the grain elevator in Huron. She did not smile, but Lars saw her shoulders relax in a way they had not relaxed in three years. We made it, she said quietly.
Lars nodded. We did. But even as he said it, he knew it was not quite true. They had not made it.
The children had made it. The garden harvest filled the root cellar beyond capacity. Birgitta counted potatoes and stopped at eight hundred pounds. There were more.
Too many to count. For the first time since arriving in Dakota Territory, the Anderson household faced winter with abundance. The winter of 1888 to 1889 was cold but manageable. The house held twelve now.
They ate meals that filled bowls. In the quiet moments when the children were asleep and Lars and Birgitta sat together in the near dark, they allowed themselves to believe the worst was truly over. The pattern repeated through good years. Anders became a man who could work a field as well as Lars.
Karen managed the household with Birgitta. The twins left in 1892 for Montana, restless and twenty years old. Peter stayed; his feet never fully healed. Johanna left in 1895 to work as a seamstress in Huron, wrote letters Birgitta kept in a box under the bed.
Two more orphans came. The Anderson place was still known as the place they went. In 1908, twenty-six years after arriving in Dakota Territory, Lars died. Not dramatically.
Just the slow giving out of a body that had worked beyond its capacity for too long. He died in the house he had built, surrounded by children who were not his by blood but were his by every measure that mattered. Birgitta stood at his grave and did not cry. She had cried enough over twenty-six years.
She looked at the prairie that had nearly killed them and had not, and felt something close to gratitude. Not for the suffering, but for the fact that they had survived it. She died in 1921 in the same house where she had given birth to none of her children and raised ten of them anyway. The funeral was attended by seventy people.
Most were children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ten she had taken in when taking them in made no sense by any arithmetic that valued caution over compassion. All of them connected by the decision one woman had made to say yes when no was the only logical answer. The farm stayed in the family. The sod house was eventually replaced by a frame house, but the dugout portion remained, kept as storage, as memory, as proof that what they had survived had been real.
In 2024, a researcher going through county records in Huron, South Dakota, found a homestead filing from 1882. Lars Anderson, one hundred and sixty acres. The file was thin, just legal documents. But stapled to the back was a single page, handwritten, dated 1920, written by someone named Anders Anderson, who identified himself as the adopted son of Lars and Birgitta.
My mother used to say that the prairie does not forgive mistakes. She was right. But she also said that the prairie does not punish love. And I think she was right about that too.
We were ten children who should not have survived on one hundred and sixty acres during the worst drought Dakota Territory ever saw. But we did survive. Not because the land was generous, but because we were generous with each other.
And in the end, that mattered more than the rain.