Last week while  browsing at a used book store, I was drawn to a book by its title:  900 Miles from Nowhere - Voices from the Homestead Frontier by Steven R. Kinsella. I succumbed and took the book home with me. It is a fascinating collection of letters, diaries and photographs from early settlers on the Great Plains. 

In his prologue, Kinsella writes: "I learned about my own family and their experiences on the Great Plains...I discovered my grandparents were homesteaders. These first- and second-generation Irish immigrants, whose ancestors had fled famine, sold their small successful farms on the edge of the Great Plains in southeastern Minnesota and moved onto 160-acre homesteads on the fabled wheat fields of northwestern North Dakota. Living in roughly built claim shacks, they suffered through blizzards in the winter and scorching heat and drought in the summer. They strugged to farm inhospitable land. They made money in the good years and fell into debt in the bad ones. Eventually, unable to eke out a living , they were forced to abandon their farms...

This book's plaintive title, 900 Miles from Nowhere, comes from a letter by a new bride whose husband had just taken her to a sod house in western South Dakota. The letters and diary entries...chronicle the spirit of a sturdy and determined people who sought to better their lives on the harsh, inhospitable landscape of the Great Plains."

My paternal grandparents homesteaded in Lyman County, South Dakota. Immediately after their marriage in 1907, they settled on 160 acres in Stony Butte Township and struggled there on the prairie for 12 years - approximately 900 miles from nowhere. My cousin and I are collaborating to write about our paternal grandmother. I picked up Kinsella's book to help us with historical perspective. 

As I turned the pages of his book, I half-expected to see a photograph of my grandparents. There is a picture of homesteaders posing on "proof day" in Murdo, South Dakota, 1907; that's only about 15 miles away from where my grandparents lived. But they "proved" their claim in Chamberlain, not Murdo, so their faces weren't in the photo on page 177. However, their story and circumstances are very much like those reflected in 900 Miles from Nowhere.  As one reviewer said about the book, "Open the covers, put your feet down in the grass, and glimpse the distant horizon. Revel in this visual and intellectual feast."