Rachel Bella Kahn was born in Russian in 1876. Rachel’s mother died when she was four years old. Later on, she went to live with her aunt and grandfather. At age eighteen, Rachel traveled to the United States for an arranged marriage with Abraham Calof, who had family in America. He and his new wife, Rachel traveled to Garske, ND (near Devils Lake) to claim homestead lands. In North Dakota the family grew to nine children. The Calofs were members of one of the few Jewish settlements in North Dakota. While in North Dakota the family became well known and respected in the area. Rachel and Abraham Calof were also instrumental in establishing a local school district.

In 1917 the Calofs left North Dakota and settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1936 Rachel Calof began to record her autobiography in longhand. It was written in Yiddish using a standard tablet. After writing My Story Rachel Calof put it away in drawer where it stayed for many years. Rachel Calof died in 1952 at the age of 76 in Seattle, Washington. Years later, her children donated her memoir to the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was discovered in the 1990's at the archives and published in 1995.

Rachel Calof’s story began with her childhood in Russia. In 1894, 18-year-old Rachel journeyed from the Ukraine to marry Abraham Calof, a man she had never met. Together they traveled to Garske, ND where they homesteaded. During their years in North Dakota Rachel Calof bore nine children. In spirited, unsentimental prose, Calof recounts their brutal existence on the homestead near Devils Lake: the harrowing winters with little food and even less fuel, the lack of privacy, the multiple childbirths under primitive conditions.

Website Links:
Study Guide & Discussion Questions for Rachel Calof’s Story by the Union for Reform Judaism
http://urj.org/Articles/index.cfm?
id=1402&pge_prg_id=32794&pge_id=4803

Elizabeth “Libbie” Bacon was born in Monroe, Michigan, in 1842, the daughter of a wealthy and influential judge. As she was the only one of the judge’s children to live to adulthood, her father doted on her. Elizabeth was both beautiful and intelligent, and her father hoped she would make a good marriage with a man from her own elevated social class.

She met her future husband, George Custer, in 1862 in the midst of the American Civil War. She fell deeply in love with him but her father refused to allow them to get married. Custer was from a poor undistinguished family and the judge hoped Libby would have better than the life of an army wife. After Custer was promoted to Brevet Brigadier General, Judge Bacon finally relented and they were married on February 9, 1864.
After the war, he reverted from his rank of general and was assigned to a series of dreary and unsatisfying assignments in Texas, Kansas, and the Dakota Territory. Life on the frontier outposts was difficult and Custer’s career was plagued by problems including a court-martial (brought about by his leaving the field to be with Libbie).

The 1876 campaign against the Sioux seemed like a chance for glory to Custer. From Fort Abraham Lincoln in what is now North Dakota, he led the Seventh Cavalry in pursuit of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne who refused to be confined to the reservation system.
After her husband’s column was wiped out at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876, many in the press, army, and government criticized Custer for blundering into a massacre. President Ulysses S. Grant publicly blamed Custer for the disaster. Fearing that her husband was to be made a scapegoat by history, Libbie launched a one-woman campaign to rehabilitate her husband's image. She began writing articles and making speaking engagements praising the glory of her martyred husband. Her three books, Boots and Saddles, Following the Guidon, and Tenting on the Plains, were brilliant pieces of propaganda aimed at glorifying her dead husband’s memory.

Her efforts were largely successful. The image of a steely Custer leading his men against overwhelming odds only to be wiped out while defending their position to the last man became as much a part of American lore as the Alamo. It would not be until the late 20th century, more than a half century after her death, that many historians began to take a second look at Custer’s actions leading up to the battle and found much to criticize.
Libbie remained utterly devoted to her husband and never remarried. She died in New York City a few days before her 92nd birthday. She was buried next to her husband at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

The Wild West from a wife's perspective! Mrs. Custer describes her life on the plains with the General until his disastrous defeat at Little Big Horn. She nursed frostbitten soldiers, camped among the Sioux, and saw the capture of Rain-in-the Face. All the while she maintained a home - no mean feat in a land of punishing blizzards, scorching summers and few amenities. And she gives us quite a different picture of the Custer we are used to today.

Website Links:
Elizabeth Custer Library and Museum
http://www.custerlibrary.org/

Esther Burnett Horne was an educator and advocate for American Indian people. She was a member of the Wind River Shosone Tribe.
She graduated from Haskell Institute in 1929 and took numerous classes at colleges in the U.S. She taught in the Bureau of Indian Affairs educational system, in boarding schools in Oklahoma and the Wahpeton Indian School in North Dakota. She received numerous honors including Master Teacher for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Distinguished Service Award from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

In 1965, she “retired” to Naytahwaush. For the next 25 years, she served northwest Minnesota as advisor, mentor, teacher and cultural bridge-builder by reaching out to the region’s schools, churches and tribal organizations concerned with the education of American Indian children. In 1985, she was named Naytahwaush’s Senior Citizen of the Year and in 1989, the Minnesota Indian Education Association named her Outsanding American Indian Elder.

This is the story of Esther Burnett Horne, an accomplished and inspiring educator in Indian boarding schools. Her experiences as student and teacher enable her to provide a detailed portrait of Indian boarding schools. In Essie’s Story the reader finds an individual perspective on the complex meaning of boarding school education for Indian people’s lives and cultural identities.

We learn about the daily life at Haskell Indian Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, and about the challenges and rewards of teaching for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Wahpeton, North Dakota. Horne’s life story illustrates that boarding school experiences, both positive and negative, became fundamental components of twentieth-century Indian people’s identities, as individuals and as communities. Above all, Horne’s life illuminates the ongoing struggle by Native teachers and students to retain their cultural identities within a government educational system designed to assimilate them.

Esther Horne and Sally McBeth developed this life history in a collaborative manner. McBeth carefully documents both Horne’s personal history and the creation of this work. What emerges is an invaluable life account from a cherished elder – Esther Burnett Horne.

Website Links:
American Anthropological Association
http://www.aaanet.org/cae/aeq/br/horne.htm

Organization of American Historians
http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/deseg/davis.html

Northwest Minnesota Foundation – Women’s Hall of Fame
http://www.nwmf.org/html/inductees.htm

Debra Marquart is an associate professor of English at Iowa State University. Her work has appeared in numerous journals such as The North American Review, Three Penny Review, New Letters, River City, Crab Orchard Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Sun Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, Orion, Mid-American Review and Witness.

In the 1970s and '80s, Marquart was a touring road musician with rock and heavy metal bands. Her collection of short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, draws from her experiences as a female road musician. Marquart continues to perform with a jazz-poetry rhythm & blues project, The Bone People, with whom she has released two CDs: Orange Parade (acoustic rock); and A Regular Dervish (jazz-poetry).

Marquart’s work has received numerous awards and commendations, including the John Guyon Nonfiction Award (Crab Orchard Review), the Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award, The Headwater’s Prize from New Rivers Press, the Minnesota Voices Award, the Pearl Poetry Award (Pearl Editions), the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society, and a Pushcart Prize.

A performance poet, Marquart is the author of two poetry collections: Everything's a Verb and From Sweetness. Her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, was published by Counterpoint Books in 2006, and she’s currently at work on a novel, set in Greece, titled The Olive Harvest.

No matter how far we wander, it's an indisputable fact that who we are is intimately connected to where we're from. In this splendid family memoir, Debra Marquart explores the complicated geography of home and the strange symbiosis between place and identity. Raised on her family's North Dakota farm, a place she loathed for its unending drudgery, Marquart couldn't wait to shake the dust of the Great Plains from her feet. Yet, years later, when she returned for her beloved father's funeral, she rediscovered a connection to the land and to her family's pioneer history that surprised her mightily. For all of us who have stood poised between the need to escape and the desire to return home, this poignant and beautifully written book rings singularly true.

Website Links:
Official Website
www.debramarquart.com/

Timothy Murphy (b.1951) graduated from Yale in 1972 as Scholar of the House in Poetry. His tutor was Robert Penn Warren. The Deed Of Gift (Story Line Press, 1998) collects Murphy’s poems from 1976 to 1996. Set The Ploughshare Deep (Ohio University Press, 2000) is a memoir in prose and verse which recounts his experiences farming and hunting the high plains. A verse translation of Beowulf, on which he collaborated with his partner, Alan Sullivan, was included in the Longman Anthology of British Literature and published by Longman as a critical edition in 2002. When Murphy was 21, Mr. Warren told him: “Go home, boy. Buy a farm. Sink your toes in that rich soil and grow some roots.” A business owner and manager in Fargo, Murphy is now the managing partner of Timco Farms, Murphy Brothers Farms, Orchard Glen Development Company, and Bell Properties. As president of V.R. Murphy and Sons, Inc., he provides “venture capital” to the aforementioned farming and manufacturing companies.

Fifteen years in the making, Set the Ploughshare Deep is a memoir in prose, verse, and woodcuts. It depicts the consequences of Warren's advice for a writer who turned his back on cities and the academic world, who bought and sold, farmed and failed like his forebears, all the while distilling what he saw, heard, or felt into his tall tales and short verses. Timothy Murphy has harvested pheasants and ducks as well as wheat and apples. For him, hunting is often an extended reflection on mortality, yet it also affords apt occasions for his quirky sense of humor.

Like Murphy, artist Charles Beck has lived all his life in the bleak yet bountiful country near the Red River. His vividly colored woodcuts, along with Vincent Murphy's reminiscence of Dust Bowl days on a Minnesota farm, perfectly complement the younger Murphy's work. The result is a blending of forms and visions that poet and critic Timothy Steele has likened to Dante's La Vita Nuova.

Set the Ploughshare Deep cannot be easily categorized, only experienced. An American story from deep in the great Midwest, it is as timely as news headlines on the farm crisis, and as timeless as the bucolic poems of Horace and the landscapes of Van Gogh.

Website Links:
Ohio University Press
http://www.ohioswallow.com/bookinfo.php?
book_id=082141321X

Able Muse Book Review
http://www.ablemuse.com/book-reviews/l-krisak_murphy-review.htm

Cortland Review
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/18/murphy18.html

Poem Tree
http://www.poemtree.com/Murphy.htm

Interview with Timothy Murphy
http://www.star.ac.uk/darkhorse/archive/
CambridgeMurphyInterview.pdf

Kent Nerburn is an author, sculptor, and educator who has been deeply involved in Native American issues and education. He developed and directed an award-winning oral history project on the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation in Northern Minnesota. In addition to being a program evaluator for the Minnesota Humanities Commission and serving on their selection board, he has served as a consultant in curriculum development for the American Indian Institute in Norman, Oklahoma, and has been a presenter before various groups, including the National Indian Education Association, and the President’s blue-ribbon panel on Indian Education
.
Nerburn has served as project director for two books of oral history — To Walk the Red Road and We Choose to Remember. He has also edited three highly acclaimed books on Native American subjects: Native American Wisdom, The Wisdom of the Great Chiefs, and The Soul of An Indian. Nerburn is also the author of Letters To My Son; Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder won the Minnesota Book Award for 1995; Simple Truths: Clear and Gentle Guidance on the Big Issues of Life; A Haunting Reverence: Meditations On a Northern Land; and Small Graces: The Quiet Gifts of Everyday Life.
Kent Nerburn holds a Ph.D. in both Theology and Art, and lives with his family in northern Minnesota.

Acclaimed author Kent Nerburn creates an incisive character study of a Native American elder, against the unflinching backdrop of contemporary reservation life and the majestic spaces of the western Dakotas. Nerburn draws us deep into the world of this elder, identified only as Dan, as we journey to where the vast Dakota skies overtake us and the whisperings of the wind speak of ancestral voices.

As this spellbinding story unfolds, Dan speaks eloquently on the power of silence, the difference between land and property, white people's urge to claim an Indian heritage, and the selling of sacred ceremonies. This is a story of fathers and sons, of the struggle for redemption after the loss of innocence, of distinct cultures on a common land.

An unlikely cross between Jack Kerouac and Black Elk Speaks, Neither Wolf nor Dog is full of humor, pathos, and insight. It takes us past the myths and stereotypes to the heart of the Native American experience and in doing so reveals America in a way few of us ever see. After reading this book, you will never look at America or the American Indian in the same way again.

Website Links:
Official Website
www.kentnerburn.com

Aagot Raaen was born in Iowa on December 3, 1873, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, Thomas and Ragnhild (Rodningen) Raaen.  The family moved to Hatton, N.D., where Aagot attended the local schools and in 1903 was graduated from the Mayville (N.D.) State Normal School.  In 1913, she graduated from the University of Minnesota. She taught rural schools in the area and also at the Oak Grove Seminary in Fargo.  From 1917 to 1922, Aagot was Steele County Superintendent of Schools.  In 1922 she began teaching at a number of post-secondary institutions in Hawaii. She was the author of several books, including Grass of the Earth, Measure of My Days, and Hamarsbön-Raaen Genealogy, and wrote a series of historical articles for local newspapers.  She died on January 7, 1957, at Fergus Falls, Minnesota .

This is an engaging, richly detailed biography of a family of Norwegian immigrant homesteaders in eastern North Dakota in the late 1800s. Educator and world traveler Aagot Raaen wrote this reminiscence late in her life. Like Giants in the Earth and Old Jules, Grass of the Earth deals frankly with a darker side of pioneer life on the prairie.

Theodore Roosevelt is best known, of course, for being president of the U.S. – and everyone in North Dakota knows he lived in the badlands for a spell. Not as well known is the fact that for substantial parts of his life he was primarily a writer, and a good one.

He was also a naturalist, historian, and soldier. TR was born in New York City on October 27, 1858, into a distinguished family. An endlessly inquisitive young man, he was especially interested in natural history, which became the focus of his first published works. He was elected to the New York State Assembly on the Republican ticket and soon made a name for himself as a historian with The Naval War of 1812 (1882).

Following the death of his wife, Alice, in childbirth in 1884, Roosevelt sought change and headed west to ranch lands he had acquired in the Dakota Territory. After failing to win the New York City mayoral election in 1886 as a self-styled 'Cowboy Candidate,' Roosevelt married childhood sweetheart Edith Kermit Carow and retired for a time to Sagamore Hill, his estate at Oyster Bay, Long Island.
Roosevelt returned to public life in 1889 and was assistant secretary of the navy under President William McKinley. Resigning this office in May 1898 at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt helped organize and train the 'Rough Riders,' a regiment of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. A popular hero upon returning from Cuba, Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in November 1898, and two years later he became vice president of the United States in the second administration of William McKinley.

The assassination of President McKinley in September 1901 placed Roosevelt in the White House, and he was elected president in 1904. In 1906 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for resolving the Russo-Japanese War.

Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill on January 6, 1919.

No American president has been closer to the working life of the West than Theodore Roosevelt. From 1884 to 1886 he built up his ranch on the Little Missouri in Dakota Territory, accepting the inevitable toil and hardships. He met the unique characters of the Bad Lands—mountain men, degenerate buffalo hunters, Indians, and cowboys—and observed their changes as the West became more populated. Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail describes Roosevelt's routine labor and extraordinary adventures, including a stint as a deputy sheriff pursuing three horse thieves through the cold of winter. Whether recounting stories of cowboy fights or describing his hunting of elk, antelope, and bear, the book expresses his lifelong delight in physical hardihood and tests of nerve.

The complete text of Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail is at
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources
/archives/seven/w67trmem/w67tr00.htm

Eric Sevareid was one of the earliest of a group of intellectual, analytic, adventurous, and sometimes even controversial newspapermen, hand-picked by Edward R. Murrow as CBS radio foreign correspondents. Later Sevareid and others of this elite band of broadcast journalists, known as "Murrow's Boys," distinguished themselves in television. Indeed from 1964 until his retirement from CBS in 1977, he carried on the Murrow tradition of news analysis in his position as national correspondent for The CBS Evening News. There his somber, eloquent commentaries were either praised as lucid and illuminating, or criticized for sounding profound without ever reaching a conclusive point.

As one of "Murrow's Boys" during World War II, Sevareid "scooped the world" with his broadcast of the news of the French surrender in 1940, joined Murrow in covering "The Battle of Britain," was lost briefly after parachuting into the Burmese Jungle when his plane developed engine trouble while covering the Burmese-China theater; he reported on Tito's partisans; and he landed with the first wave of American troops in Southern France, accompanying them all the way to Germany.

In l946 after reporting on the founding of the United Nations, Sevareid wrote Not So Wild a Dream, which appeared in 11 printings and became a primary source on the lives of the generation of Americans who had lived through the Depression and World War II.

Serving as CBS's roving European Correspondent from l959-61, Sevareid contributed stories to CBS Reports as well as serving as moderator of series such as Town Meeting of the World, The Great Challenge, Where We Stand, and Years of Crisis. In addition, he also appeared in every presidential election coverage from l948 to l976.

After his retirement Sevareid continued to be active as a CBS consultant. His final appearance, before his death in 1992, was on the 1991 CBS program Remember Pearl Harbor.

In 1930 two novice paddlers—Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port—launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe into the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor, or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages. Nearly four months later, after shooting hundreds of sets of rapids and surviving exceedingly bad conditions and even worse advice, the ragged, hungry adventurers arrived in York Factory on Hudson Bay—with winter freeze-up on their heels. First published in 1935, Canoeing with the Cree is Sevareid's classic account of this youthful odyssey. The newspaper stories that Sevareid wrote on this trip launched his distinguished journalism career, which included more than a decade as a television correspondent and commentator on the CBS Evening News.

Former international editor of Ebony magazine, Era Bell Thompson (10 August 1905–30 December 1986) grew up a child of the only black family in Driscoll, North Dakota. This noted journalist and author has written several books including American Daughter, which tells the story of her youth in North Dakota.

Thompson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and in 1917, moved with her family to the Driscoll area where she attended school. She later studied at the University of North Dakota, where she established five state women's track records and tied two national intercollegiate women's track records. She graduated from Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, with a degree in journalism. Thompson served as associate editor of Ebony for four years, co-managing editor from 1951 to 1964, and was then international editor of Johnson Publishing Company. Her book, Africa: Land of My Fathers, recounts her frustrated attempts to comprehend her ancestral heritage, and many of her later essays denounce men's treatment of women regardless of race and class. She was awarded North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award in 1976.

Black North Dakotans were indeed something of a rarity in 1914, when young Era Bell Thompson and her family moved to a farm near the small community of Driscoll. In fact, when the Thompsons traveled thirty miles to join two other black families for Christmas dinner, "there were fifteen of us, four percent of the state's entire Negro population."

In this lively autobiography, Thompson describes the experiences of her North Dakota girlhood: busting broncos with her brothers; making friends with Norwegian and German neighbors; meeting Governor Lynn J. Frazier, for whom her father worked as a personal messenger; running footraces at picnics (and knowing that people were betting on her to win); selling used furniture in Mandan; working her way through college in Grand Forks; and facing prejudice without the support of a large black community. She also discusses the impact of her North Dakota background on her later adventures in St. Paul and Chicago. 

Ron Vossler, a humanities scholar, free-lance writer, and University of North Dakota writing teacher, is the recipient of numerous awards, honors, and fellowships.

In 1999, in competition against historical documentary films produced by ABC, NBC, HBO, and the Discovery Channel, his documentary film-script for The Germans from Russia: Children of the Steppe/Children of the Prairie received the highest honor, the Telly Award, as "one of Amer­ica's best documentary films."

Vossler has authored seven books, five documentary film-scripts, and his articles, fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, newspapers, anthologies, as well as on humanities and public education web-sites, and on North Dakota Public Radio.  His most recent documentary film, We'll Meet Again in Heaven, is based on his book of the same title, which has received national scholarly attention as "an important new work." Casting light on the genocide of Ukrainian and German villagers by the Soviet regime, the film draws on ten years of research and premiered on Prairie Public Television in July 2007.

Acknowledged as an internationally renowned expert on Germans from Russia, Vossler is a resident of East Grand Forks, Minnesota .

Dakota Kraut brings together twenty years of the author's publications in magazines, journals, newspapers, and websites. Included are also a radio-play, two poems, and one of the author's nationally award-winning documentary film-scripts. This collection is a must read for anyone interested in evocative writing about ethnicity, memory, and a small-town prairie past. The book begins with a poetic prologue, "God's Eye" - given that title for the highest window on a grain elevator which overlooks the author's mid-century childhood home in small town Dakota; and ends with an epilogue which brings readers back to that grain elevator, as the author understands how his prairie hometown has become, "My Russia": "a place I can't forget, nor find again."

Primarily fact, but with "some exaggerations," as the author admits in his introduction, this rich, wide-ranging book is a welcome addition for any reader seeking to understand the Germans from Russia ethnic group, who settled in the U.S. between 1881 and 1914, and whose descendants now comprise at least 35 percent of North Dakota's population. Dakota Kraut is a rumination on the fast-disappearing world of the prairie Germans in Dakota: it is also a literary work with power and grace and insight into the human heart, even if the heart is an ethnic one.