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.

"David Laskin deploys historical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzard that caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise. . . . This is a book best read with a fire roaring in the hearth and a blanket and box of tissues near at hand." — Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City

"Heartbreaking. . . . This account of the 1888 blizzard reads

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This compelling, centuries spanning novel brilliantly interweaves the lives of two women, a writer working in the heart of modern academia and a daring young Sioux Indian on an incredible journey in the eighteenth century. The result is an unforgettable story of courage in the face of the unknown.

"A bankrupt widow embarks on a buffalo hunt in 1873 to try to save her late husband's land, and encounters multiple dangers along the way"--

Looking over the vast open plains of eastern Colorado, western Kansas, and southwestern Nebraska, where one can travel miles without seeing a town or even a house, it is hard to imagine the crowded landscape of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In those days farmers, speculators, and town builders flooded the region, believing that rain would follow the plow and that the "Rainbelt" would become their agricultural Eden. It took a mere decade...

Great Plains Bison traces the history and ecology of this American symbol from the origins of the great herds that once dominated the prairie to its near extinction in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent efforts to restore the bison population. A longtime wildlife biologist and one of the most powerful literary voices on the Great Plains, Dan O'Brien has managed his own ethically run buffalo ranch since 1997. Drawing on both extensive research...