NCW Libraries

A family travels from the big woods of Wisconsin to a new home on the prairie, where they build a house, meet neighboring Indians, build a well, and fight a prairie fire.

"In the frigid days of February, 1870, Caroline Ingalls, her husband Charles, and their little girls, Mary and Laura, leave the familiar comforts of the Big Woods of Wisconsin and head west to settle in a beautiful, unpredictable land full of promise and peril--the Kansas Indian Territory. The pioneer life is a hard one, especially for a pregnant woman with no friends or kin to turn to for comfort or help. The burden of work must be shouldered alone,...

The author of Blood Orchid explores the history of the Sioux alongside that of his own family in this posthumous work. When award-winning author Charles Bowden died in 2014, he left behind a trove of unpublished manuscripts. Dakotah marks the landmark publication of the first of these texts, and the fourth installment in his acclaimed "Unnatural History of America." Bowden uses America's Great Plains as a lens-sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered,...

"The First Migrants explores the narrative histories of Black homesteaders in the Great Plains and the larger themes which characterize their shared experiences"-- Provided by publisher.

"In 1880, Pemmican lay at the western edge of the Great Plains. Nearly a decade later, surveyors of the 49th parallel reached the small community to find it straddling the new Canadian-U.S. border. Now known as Bordertown, local law enforcement is dealt with on one side by Clive Bennett, a Mountie, and on the other by U.S. Marshal Jack Craddock. Whiskey traders, buffalo hunters, gold prospectors, silver miners, drifters and drunks keep the two men...

"In 1880, Pemmican lay at the western edge of the Great Plains. Nearly a decade later, surveyors of the 49th parallel reached the small community to find it straddling the new Canadian-U.S. border. Now known as Bordertown, local law enforcement is dealt with on one side by Clive Bennett, a Mountie, and on the other by U.S. Marshal Jack Craddock. Whiskey traders, buffalo hunters, gold prospectors, silver miners, drifters and drunks keep the two...