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The story of Little House on the Prairie covers a year during which Laura’s family moves by covered wagon from Wisconsin to Kansas to build a new home on the open prairie in Indian territory. Their adventures reveal a family with admirable pioneer spirit. The major focus is on the girl Laura, who is shown observing and reacting to her father’s practical skills and courage. He must cope with limited resources, uncertainty, and dangers in this unfamiliar and difficult environment and while building the new house.

Prairie. Set just after the Louisiana Purchase, the novel’s events occur in a vague area of the prairie, about five hundred miles west of the Mississippi River. Cooper had not traveled in these western regions and was dependent on published accounts of others for his descriptions of the prairie areas. Thus, the places in the plot’s development are mostly imagined and generally not tied to identifiable spots on the map. Rather, it is the qualities of the prairie that interest Cooper: its vastness, wildness, emptiness, and sameness. Against this desertlike landscape, even a hero like Natty Bumppo is made to seem less sure and in charge than in the novels which place him in the eastern forests. Here, human efforts appear almost swallowed up by the land itself.

Although there had been Westerns with all-black casts in silent films, the 1937 African American musical Western Harlem on the Prairie was presumably the first of its kind. It starred the tall, handsome, Detroit-born, baritone singer Herbert Jeffrey, who was later sometimes billed as Herb Jeffries. The film was produced by Associated Features and was shot on a dude ranch in the high desert of Southern California.

At the beginning of Little Town on the Prairie, Laura and her family have just gotten over a hard winter, and Laura is overcome with joy when spring comes. She loves her family very much and enjoys the busy days on the homestead claim. One day Pa asks her if she wants a job as a seamstress. She takes the job, and she must walk to town daily and baste shirts. The family for whom she works is so impolite that it is hard for Laura to adjust to them. After six weeks, Mrs. White gives her nine dollars. She happily gives her earnings to Ma so that they can be added to the family fund to send her sister Mary to a special college for the blind in Iowa.

Greater prairie-chickens are flightless birds which live in the open grasslands of the central United States. They are members of the grouse family of gamebirds and used to be abundant on the plains. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, hunting and habitat destruction have caused a drop in the population of these birds.

Shortly after the time of the Louisiana Purchase, Ishmael Bush, his wife, Esther, and their children travel westward from the Mississippi River. Their wagon train includes their fourteen sons and daughters; Esther’s niece, Ellen Wade; Esther’s brother, Abiram White; and Dr. Obed Battius, a physician and naturalist. While searching for a place to camp one evening, the group meets old Trapper (Natty Bumppo) and his dog, Hector. The trapper directs them to a nearby stream for a campsite.

Per Hansa, as his friends call him, born Peder Hansen and later renamed Peder Holm to fit his new life in the Dakota Territory. A strong, self-reliant man who came to America to be near his best friend, Per Hansa saves his small Norwegian pioneer community by his ingenuity and perseverance in the face of great odds. Though beset by family problems, the powerful man turns his wilderness tract into the finest farmland, superior to all the other farms in the region. He is loving, cheerful, and even-tempered, except for a few black and angry moods caused mostly by his wife's piety on the one hand and her lack of wifely respect on the other. He goes to his certain death in a blizzard for the spiritual comfort of his best friend.

Natty Bumppo, the resourceful, independent old woods-man, now eighty-two years old. While trapping on the plains soon after the Louisiana Purchase, he camps one evening with a clan of tough, suspicious squatters, the Bush family. Later, accused of killing Asa Bush and having helped two young men to rescue their sweethearts from the Bushes, he is forced to avoid the squatters. Meanwhile, he and his companions are captured three times by hostile Sioux Indians. Natty serves as an interpreter, pacifies their captors, and helps the captives to escape. Finally, when the Sioux have been defeated and he has acquitted himself before the Bush clan, he decides to live with a tribe of friendly Pawnees until his death. Old and weak, he dies at sundown after rising to his feet and uttering a single word, “Here.”

Laura Ingalls, the five-year-old narrator, the second daughter of Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Laura, the author's autobiographical self, is high-spirited and inquisitive, and she has inherited her father's storytelling ability. She describes the pioneering experience and her own thoughts and feelings in detail.

Originally stretching east from the Rocky Mountains to Indiana and Ohio, and from Alberta, Canada, to Texas, the prairies were the major grassland of North America. The short-grass prairie extended about two hundred miles (three hundred kilometers) east of the mountains, and the long-grass prairie bordered the deciduous forest along the eastern edge, while the mixed-grass prairie was between the two. Going from west to east, the amount of precipitation increases, causing changes in plant populations. The short-grass prairie receives only about 25 centimeters (10 inches) of precipitation each year, mostly as summer rain, and, as its name suggests, has short grass, less than 60 centimeters (2 feet) tall. Today, it is used primarily for grazing because the soil is shallow and unsuited for farming without irrigation. The mixed-grass prairie receives moderate precipitation, ranging from 35 to 60 centimeters (14 to 24 inches) and has medium-height grasses, ranging from 60 to 120 centimeters (2 to 4 feet) tall. Much of it is now used for growing wheat. The tall-grass prairie receives more than 60 centimeters (24 inches) of precipitation, mostly in the summer, and had grasses that grow to over 150 centimeters (5 feet) tall. It has rich soil and has been mostly converted to very productive cropland, primarily for corn and soybeans. The prairies experience very cold winters (down to −45 degrees Celsius, −50 degrees Fahrenheit) and very hot summers (up to 45 degrees Celsius, 110 degrees Fahrenheit). They are often windy and experience severe storms, blizzards in winter, thunderstorms and tornadoes in summer.

The Texas Blackland Prairies are a temperate grassland ecoregion running from the Red River in north Texas to San Antonio in south-central Texas, an area of about 20,000 square miles (51,800 square kilometers). The area consists of a main belt of 17,000 square miles (44,030 square kilometers) and two islands of tallgrass prairie grasslands. Tallgrass prairie is an ecoregion dominated by tall grasses, as opposed to the shortgrass prairies characteristic of the western Great Plains, with less than 10 percent tree cover. A similar grass-dominated ecoregion with 10–49 percent tree cover is the savanna.

The ethnological origins of the Atsina, or White Clay People, are mysterious. The Atsina, also known as the Gros Ventre, once belonged to an Algonquian parent nation that included the Arapaho. Until the seventeenth century, the Arapaho-Atsina hunted, gathered, and perhaps planted near the Red River of Minnesota. In the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, the Atsina broke off from the Arapaho and moved northward and westward to the Eagle Hills in Saskatchewan. The Atsina probably subsisted by gathering and pedestrian buffalo hunting, although they also planted tobacco. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Atsina acquired horses and became equestrian buffalo hunters. In the late eighteenth century, the Cree and Assiniboine pushed the Atsina from Saskatchewan southwest to the Upper Missouri River.

When Carol Milford graduates from Blodgett College in Minnesota, she thinks she can conquer the world. Interested in sociology, and village improvement in particular, she often longs to set out on her own crusade to transform dingy prairie towns into thriving, beautiful communities. When she meets Will Kennicott, a doctor from Gopher Prairie, and listens to his praise of his hometown, she agrees to marry him. He convinces Carol that Gopher Prairie needs her.

Carol Kennicott, an idealistic girl eager to reform the world. Interested in sociology and civic improvement, she longs to transform the ugliness of midwestern America into something more beautiful. Having married Dr. Will Kennicott, she moves to his home in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a hideous small town indistinguishable from hundreds of similar communities. There, she shocks and angers the townspeople by her criticisms and by her attempts to combat the local smugness. To its citizens, Gopher Prairie is perfection; they can see no need for change. To her, it is an ugly, gossipy, narrow-minded village, sunk in dullness and self-satisfaction. Her efforts to change the town fail, and she drifts into a mild flirtation with Erik Valborg, a Swedish tailor with artistic yearnings. Frightened by the village gossip, she and her husband take a trip to California; but on her return, she realizes that she must get away from both her husband and Gopher Prairie. After some argument, she and her small son leave for Washington, where she stays for more than a year. The flight is a failure, for she finds Washington only an agglomeration of the small towns in America. She returns to Gopher Prairie, realizing that it is her home. Her crusade has failed; she can only hope that her children will accomplish what she has been unable to do.

Paris. Kansas village in which Gantry grows up. With some nine hundred residents, it is smaller than the real town of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in which Lewis grew up, and the fictional Gopher Prairie, which Lewis satirizes in Main Street (1920). Pretentiously named Paris, Gantry’s hometown is even more culturally impoverished than either Sauk Centre or Gopher Prairie, and appears to have not even a pubic library or a social club. A small Baptist church and its Sunday school are the leading institutions of the village. Except for Fourth of July parades and circus bands, the only music Gantry hears is played during church services. Other than occasional political campaign speeches, weekly sermons provide his only exposure to oratory. Sunday school offers examples of painting and sculpture; Bible stories and the words of hymns provide Gantry’s main experience of literature. Lewis concludes his description of Paris by asserting that the church and Sunday School taught Gantry everything he needed, “except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.” (There is a real town named Paris in north-central Kansas, but Lewis’s Paris probably has no connection with it.)

Little Priest followed his father in the role of chief of his village in 1840. In that same year, the people of the village had relocated from Wisconsin to Iowa. Then, in 1846, he and other leaders of the Winnebago signed a treaty trading the reservation land in Iowa for land in Long Prairie, Minnesota. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1855 to sign the treaty that exchanged the Long Prairie lands for reservation space south of Mankato, Minnesota. Little Priest

Author. Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Pepin, Wisconsin, the second of four daughters of Charles Phillip Ingalls and his wife, Caroline Quiner Ingalls. They moved around frequently before finally settling in De Smet, South Dakota, in 1879. Because of an economic depression, the Ingalls family moved to Missouri in 1868, which Wilder’s father found too crowded, and then in 1869 to Osage Indian Territory in Kansas, as recounted in Little House on the Prairie Little House on the Prairie (Wilder) (1935). Returning to the woods of Wisconsin, the family found that it had become too populous for good hunting, so in 1874 the family settled in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in a dugout house described in On the Banks of Plum Creek On the Banks of Plum Creek (Wilder) (1937). On November 1, 1875, a brother, Charles Frederick, was born. The family decided to move again, to Burr Oak, Iowa, where Charles and Caroline ran the Masters Hotel. Baby Freddie died, and in 1877, sister Grace Pearl was born. In the fictionalized account of her life, Wilder omitted the two years at Burr Oak and, to compensate, placed the events of the first book, Little House in the Big Woods (1932), in 1870. After Burr Oak, the Ingallses returned to Walnut Grove, where the eldest daughter, Mary, became severely ill and lost her sight.

Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie living in a Northern California community called Vineland. He earns a government pension by taking an annual dive through a plate glass restaurant window in front of television cameras to prove that he is mentally afflicted. He tries to look after his daughter, Prairie, but has little control over her or over his own life. He is driven from his home by an invasion of federal and local police who ostensibly are looking for marijuana crops but whose real target is Prairie.

Writer. Bertram Brooker was born March 31, 1888, in Croydon, England, to Richard Brooker and Ann (Skinner) Brooker. He and his family remained in Croydon until 1905, when the Brookers relocated to Portage-la-Prairie, in the province Manitoba in Canada, when Bertram was seventeen years old. When he finished with school, Brooker sought work to help support his family. He laid track for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and quickly was promoted to an office clerk job within the company. After working with the railroad for six years, Brooker pursued his interests in motion pictures and the entertainment industry. By 1911 he and one of his brothers had formed a partnership and purchased a movie theater in Neepawa, Manitoba. Surrounded by movies, Brooker decided to try writing his own. Once satisfied with his screenplays, he contacted American movie studios and sold several of his scripts to Vitagraph. Encouraged by his sudden success, Brooker attempted other ventures in literature and journalism, and by 1914 became the editor of the Portage-la-Prairie publication The Review. He met and married Mary Aurilla Porter in 1913, and they had three children: Victor, Doreen, and Phyllis. He was called into service in the Royal Canadian Engineers during World War I, and in the years following the war he worked for several newspapers, including The Telegram and The Free Press. During this time, Brooker also began working in the advertising industry. By 1921 he had moved to Toronto, fused his journalism and advertising experience, and began his career as the editor of Marketing, an advertising trade journal. Through his editing work he began to develop an interest in design, which led to relationships with key visual and graphic artists in Toronto. These relationships resulted in the publication of three how-to books on graphic design and the advertising industry.

Old Melancthon Crawford had been one of the founders of a prairie town in the Osage country. In his last years, his eccentricities became so marked that relatives had him sent back to his birthplace, a Pennsylvania village he had always hated, where they could keep an eye on him and the disposal of his property. After his departure on the eastbound stage, Commodore Robinette and Apeyahola, a Creek Indian whom the settlers called Jory, climbed to the prairie swell where Crawford’s trading post had stood. Talking about the past, they thought back to a decisive night the three had in common, a night when Tripoli was being bombarded by American naval guns during the war with the Barbary pirates.

*Great Plains. Also known as prairie land, the largely flat grassland region of central North America spanning the region between Oklahoma and central Canada that is used for extensive cattle ranching and grain crops. To Per Hansa—a former fisherman—the prairie appears a sea of grass. At sunset its glowing rim resembles the horizon of a vast ocean. His wagon leaves a track like the wake of a boat, closing in rather than widening out astern.

Hanover is a frontier town huddled on the windblown Nebraska prairie. One winter day, young Alexandra Bergson and her small brother Emil go into town from their new homestead. The Bergsons are Swedes. Their life in the new country is one of hardship because their father is sick and the children are too young to do all the work on their prairie acres. Alexandra goes to the village doctor’s office to get some medicine for her father. The doctor tells her there is no hope for their father’s recovery.

Jim Burden’s father and mother die when he is ten years old, and the boy makes the long trip from Virginia to his grandparents’ farm in Nebraska in the company of Jake Marpole, a hired hand who is to work for Jim’s grandfather. Arriving by train in the prairie town of Black Hawk late at night, the boy notices an immigrant family huddled on the station platform. Jim and Jake are met by a lanky, scar-faced cowboy named Otto Fuchs, who drives them in a jolting wagon across the empty prairie to the Burden farm.

The geography of Canada refers to the physical features and land uses of Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the world, and its territory extends over approximately two-fifths of the North American continent. This land, occupied by humans for many thousands of years, contains a vast assortment of regions and landforms. It has both Pacific and Atlantic Ocean coastal areas, a mountainous area called the Cordillera, an extensive prairie flatland, a rocky central region known as the Canadian Shield, and a heavily populated and industrialized lowland. Canada also features millions of mountains, islands, rivers, and lakes. The climate in Canada ranges from temperate to frigid, depending on the region and altitude. The country is rich in natural resources and natural beauty, which is preserved in dozens of protected habitats. Mount Garibaldi, BC By Psi4ce (talk · contribs) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Köppen climate types of Canada By Adam Peterson (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Author. Bess Genevra Streeter, who would be more widely known as Bess Aldrich, was born on February 17, 1881, in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Her parents, Mary and James Streeter, had lived for twenty years on a farm nearby, and had just moved into a rambling house in town when Aldrich, their eighth child, was born. She attended public schools in Cedar Falls, and years later she described the excitement of being taught to play the new game of basketball, which the girls played outside wearing bulky flannel bloomers. Cedar Falls was a small town, and young Aldrich’s life centered on school, family, and Sunday school. During high school, she also began writing short stories. At fourteen, she sold a story to the Chicago Record, and at seventeen she won a five-dollar prize in a contest for a sentimental love story. She went on to the Iowa State Teachers College, walking the two miles to classes each day, and graduated in 1901. She taught elementary school until 1907, when she married Captain Charles Aldrich, who had served in the Spanish-American War. The couple moved to Elmwood, Nebraska, where they purchased the American Exchange Bank. While Aldrich raised their four children, Mary Eleanor, James, Charles, and Robert, she kept writing short stories and sending them off. With no agent and no personal contact with editors, she managed to sell stories to national magazines, including McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal and Harpers Weekly. Her stories featured pioneer or small-town women who willingly performing heavy labors to settle new land so that their children could have better lives. Many of the plots and characters were based on family stories Aldrich had heard from her parents and grandparents about their own experiences settling the prairie. As magazine circulation increased in the 1920’s, so did her fame. She hired a housekeeper so she could reply personally to her fan mail, which reached more than a thousand letters a year. In 1925, her husband suddenly died, and Aldrich, devastated, was left to support the children and manage the bank. Publication of her first novel, The Rim of the Prairie (1925), provided enough income to keep the family stable. A few years later, in 1928, she published her most important work, A Lantern in Her Hand. When the Great Depression came, she tried without success to sell A Lantern in Her Hand to a movie studio, hoping the income could help her through lean times. Before her death in 1954, she published eight more books, several short stories, and saw one of her novels, Miss Bishop (1933) made into a movie. In 1946, Aldrich moved from Elmwood to the larger city of Lincoln, Nebraska, where she lived the rest of her life. She died of cancer on August 3, 1954, at the age of seventy-three. Aldrich is known today for one novel, and for her presentation of strong and feminine Midwestern women. In her lifetime her work was always popular, and she won the O. Henry Award for the story “The Man Who Caught the Weather.”

Zoyd Wheeler has been living a quiet life in Vineland, a fictitious town in Northern California, with his daughter Prairie. Zoyd does odd jobs for neighbors, grows marijuana, and collects a government pension for committing a crazy act every year: specifically, for throwing himself through a plate-glass window in a local restaurant in front of television cameras. Prairie works in a local health-food pizza parlor and hangs out with a rock band, Billy Barf and the Vomitones.

The burrowing owl gets its name from its habit of living in abandoned burrows of ground animals like prairie dogs and tortoises. If no suitable burrow is available, the owl digs and expands an existing or new burrow. The burrowing owl has brown and white spotted plumage, or feathering, along its back and soft, white feathers along its face, belly, and legs.

Alabama is in the southeastern part of the United States, between Mississippi to the west and Georgia and Florida to the east. Most of Alabama’s southern border adjoins Florida, but a small portion of the state extends down to the Gulf of Mexico. The northern part of Alabama, just below Tennessee, is known as the Appalachian region. It is made up of high plateaus, ridges, valleys, and the high Talladega Mountains. The Piedmont Plateau, another rocky region, extends from the Talladega Mountains to the Georgia border. Until well into the twentieth century, many of the people in the highlands of Alabama lived the isolated lives of mountain and hill dwellers. The Interior Low Plateau region is the part of northern Alabama drained by the Tennessee River. Below the northern uplands, the Gulf Coastal Plains extend south to the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf Coastal Plains include the Black Belt, a dark-soiled prairie.

Defined by the Mississippi River on the east and the Missouri River on the west, Iowa is a rolling stretch of lush, green prairie with rich, black soil and ample rainfall for growing crops. The fertility of the earth and the lack of trees make for excellent farmland, and as a result, Iowa has been and remains a state focused on agriculture.

Much of Louisiana lies in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, flat lands that stretch from each side of the Mississippi River. As the river moves south to the Gulf of Mexico, the elevation of the land becomes progressively lower, and most of it is damp and swampy. Far western and northwestern Louisiana is part of the West Gulf Coastal Plain. In the northern area of this region, the land is hilly, and it becomes prairie further south. On the eastern side, near Mississippi, lies the East Gulf Coastal Plain, which is similar to the territory in the west. These three regions correspond roughly to the historical and cultural divisions of Louisiana. The swampy south central and southwestern areas have corresponded to French Roman Catholic Louisiana. The western region and the eastern region have been home to mostly Protestant, English-speaking people.

Historical fiction is a popular genre within young adult literature. From early works like Johnny Tremain (1943), set in Boston during the American Revolution, to Sarah, Plain and Tall (1986), about life on the American prairie during the 1800s, young readers have long been drawn to stories about the past. Historical fiction is beguiling because the act of writing it is akin to filling in the margins of a history book. “Historical fiction is a hybrid form, halfway between fiction and nonfiction,” Larissa MacFarquhar wrote for the New Yorker. “It is pioneer country, without fixed laws.” E. L. Doctorow, the award-winning author of the novel Ragtime (1975), has been criticized for taking too many liberties with the lives of historical figures. In an interview with writer George Plimpton for the Paris Review in 1986, Doctorow defended himself and praised the way Shakespeare and Tolstoy also “fiddled” with history. “History is a battlefield,” he said. “It's constantly being fought over because the past controls the present. History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew.”

Summary: Alberta, one of Canada’s prairie provinces, yields wheat, canola oil, and dinosaur remains, but it is most famous for having Canada’s richest concentration of fossil fuels.

Writer. Kirk Munroe was born September 15, 1850, in a mission near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, on the banks of the Mississippi River. He grew up on the Fort Howard military post and went to school in Appleton, both in Wisconsin. Munroe’s family subsequently moved to Massachusetts, but he missed the frontier of his childhood and signed on at age sixteen with a party surveying the route for the Santa Fe railway from Kansas to California. During this period he was wounded in a skirmish with Native Americans and met scout Kit Carson at Fort Garland, Colorado. After reaching California, Munroe joined another party as a surveyor in South America. He eventually returned to Massachusetts, where he studied engineering for a year at Harvard University, but again forsook the East for the frontier. Now an experienced surveyor, Munroe went to work for the Northern Pacific Railway, meeting William (“Buffalo Bill”) Cody and U.S. Army officer George A. Custer along the way.

David Wittig was born in the middle-class town of Prairie Village, a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. At a young age, he excelled in school, especially in the area of advanced mathematics. He eventually won a scholarship to the University of Kansas and earned a bachelor of science degree in business administration and economics in 1977. Wittig then moved to New York City, where he began working as a stockbroker on Wall Street.

*Llano (YAH-no). Great savanna plains region of central Venezuela that represents nature in its wild and unruly state. Although beautiful and powerful, and therefore much like Santos’s nemesis, Doña Bárbara, the plains resist the order and discipline of any civilizing force. Danger lurks in the muddy, alligator-filled quagmires that threaten to consume interlopers whole. Rómulo Gallegos provides a poetic description of the enormous prairie. This region, with its unbroken horizon, conveys a sense of solitude and loneliness.

Burden farm. Ranch in pioneer Nebraska owned by Jim Burden’s grandparents. It is to this farm that the ten-year-old Jim Burden is brought from Virginia after his parents die, and it is here that he learns to love the prairie. It is also here that he meets the Shimerdas, a Bohemian family (immigrants from Bohemia) who are distant neighbors struggling to survive in this harsh new land.

Gopher Prairie. Fictional Minnesota town that is the novel’s primary setting and target of its satire. Lewis begins with a prologue describing Gopher Prairie’s Main Street as the “continuation of Main Streets everywhere. . . . the climax of civilization. . . . Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture.”

One of Canada’s major twentieth century historians, Harold Adams Innis, famously characterized the country’s economy as a “staples economy.” By that he meant that in the world economy, and especially in world trade, Canada was a major producer of raw materials and that these products were then exported to other countries, where they were manufactured into products that ordinary people could use. Canada’s major export, wheat, was turned into bread and other food products by other countries. Canada was a major producer of aluminum ore; other countries turned the aluminum ore into more elaborate manufactured goods. Canada was one of the world’s major miners of gold, and the trees that it harvested from the woodlands in northern British Columbia provided the raw materials for a large number of the houses built in the United States.

Writer. Robert J. C. Stead, a twentieth century journalist, poet, and author, was born in Ontario, Canada. His parents were Richard Thompson Stead, a homesteader, and May Campbell Stead. Stead received his early education at Badger Creek School, a one-room schoolhouse in the small Canadian prairie village of Badger Creek. While attending this school, at the age of twelve, Stead began his writing career by contributing articles to various Canadian publications such as the Western Home Monthly. Stead continued with his education at the Badger Creek School until the age of fourteen, when he dropped out in order to help support his family.

Brian Sean MacMurray O'Connal, who ages from four to eleven during the course of the story. A slight, lean, dark “black Scotch” boy, Brian is imaginative and always inquisitive about the rhythms of nature that he witnesses on the sweeping, beckoning, and now drought-ridden Saskatchewan prairie where he lives. By the age of eleven, Brian has experienced the deaths both of cherished pets and of beloved members of his close family, making him mature beyond his years. Always sensitive to the relentless patterns of birth and death around him, Brian perceives aspects of life about which his contemporaries Forbsie Hoffman and Artie Sherry comprehend little. Brian's sturdy independence makes his mother heartsick, but his independence and his extraordinary visionary capacity protect him somewhat from the harsh emotional blows he is dealt so early.

Writing-on-Stone/Áísínai’pi park is one of the largest areas of protected prairie land in Alberta. Along with protecting the natural surroundings, the park acts to preserve the culturally important Indigenous First Nation rock carvings and paintings. The area is sacred to the Blackfoot people, or Siksikáíítsitapi, who inhabited the area for generations. The park is known as Áísínai’pi in the Blackfoot language, which means, “it is pictured or written.” On July 6, 2019, the UNESCO World Heritage Convention designated the park as a World Heritage Site to protect it.

Canadian policies that threatened both the Métis and Indian ways of life were at the heart of two separate revolts in Canada’s newly acquired prairie region. (Métis people are of mixed Indian and European descent.) In 1869, the Hudson’s Bay Company relinquished its claim over Rupert’s Land and the Northwest to the recently confederated nation of Canada. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald set out to build a great nation joined from the Atlantic to the Pacific by a rail line. Although the government negotiated treaties that established Indian reserves, it offered the Métis, whom it did not regard as legally Indian, no such consideration. This contributed significantly to the erosion of the Métis economic and social life.

Southern Russia is covered by a vast, prairie-like grassland, "the steppe." Anton Chekhov's story recounts the experiences of the young hero, Yegorushka, during his journey of several weeks across the steppe to the great city of Kiev. His uncle, Kuzmichov, and a family friend, Father Christopher, are accompanying a cart train of sheep wool being taken to market. They are also charged with taking Yegorushka and arranging for his lodging and schooling in Kiev. It is the boy's first time away from his mother, the widow of a civil-service clerk.

The original title of Fruits of the Earth was “The Chronicles of Spalding District.” Although the publishers were probably correct in suggesting the richer, more suggestive title, the original one best describes the nature of the realistic plot of the novel. The work offers a chronological record of Abe Spalding’s career, beginning with his arrival on the bare prairie, on which he is eventually to build a vast farmhouse and barns. Abe’s career is followed step-by-step to the peak of his economic success while, at the same time, there is a continuing revelation of why his great achievement is flawed.

In “The Case against the Reds,” published in the monthly magazine The Forum, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer attempted to justify to readers his campaign against left-wing radicals (“Reds,” after the symbolic color favored by communists) and its violations of both civil liberties and congressional powers with the arrest and deportation of suspected Communists and anarchists. As he saw it, the American system was threatened by both radicals, under direction from the Soviet Union, and Congress for failing in its duty to protect the American people. He felt that this perceived failure required vigorous action from the executive branch, particularly Palmer’s own Justice Department. He portrayed these radicals as a subversive menace that was ethnically and culturally different from “mainstream” Americans—the article is tinged with anti-Semitism, anti-urban, and anti-immigrant bias. Palmer’s vigorous language portrayed radicals as a destructive “prairie-fire,” a conspiracy of criminals, and an epidemic disease.

The story opens by establishing the heritage of the Touhey family. Old Red, the ninety-six-year-old patriarch, along with his Vietnam War veteran son Aladdin and family, raise sheep and cattle in the arid bunchgrass region of northwestern prairie land in Wyoming. Grandson Tyler and granddaughter Shan, siblings of Ottaline, leave their home, proving themselves to be unreliable ranch workers. In contrast, Ottaline has little choice but to stay home and join her father as the primary workforce on the ranch. The narration suggests her numerous skills for working the place, but the loneliness of her existence becomes more pronounced as time goes by. References to her weight problem accentuate her isolation. She endures insults from her mother and serves as an often unappreciated laborer for her father. Her connection to the world outside the ranch is limited to listening to vulgar conversations on the police scanner. Her interior life diminishes to the point that she converses with a junked tractor.

Variously known as Native Americans, Amerindians, Indians, and so on, the 900,000 indigenous people of Canada in 634 bands are known collectively as the First Nations. Before European contact, there were six First Nations groups—Woodland, Iroquoian, Plains, Plateau, Mackenzie and Yukon River basins, and Pacific Coast. All lived in relative harmony with their natural environment, be it eastern forests, prairie grasslands, or the Pacific coast, in fertile agricultural regions, swamps, or harsh deserts. The social structure of the First Nations tended to be an independent group of around four hundred people. The groups were sometimes nomadic and sometimes sedentary.

Walter McKee, who is responsible for organizing his father-in-law's ninetieth birthday celebration, held in the prairie ghost town of Lone Tree. Although McKee is tired of the continual presence of Tom Scanlon, his father-in-law, he labors on under a sense of duty. This condition of denial accounts for an emotional decay in McKee, a corrosive element that distances him from his wife, family, and friends. McKee focuses on this lack of understanding, which produces a continual state of perplexity over the most normal circumstances of life. McKee's return to Lone Tree with the Scanlon clan reinforces his sense of isolation in the world. With the quiet death of the old man and the marriage of his niece and nephew, McKee is vindicated in his consistent decency.

The province of Manitoba lies midway between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, with the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan to the west and Ontario to the east. To the north of the province's prairie lands is the Inuit homeland of Nunavut and the Hudson Bay. To the south of Manitoba's lakes region are the American states of Minnesota and North Dakota.

Known as "The World's Bread Basket," Saskatchewan is one of Canada's "Prairie Provinces." Manitoba lies to the east and Alberta to the west. To the north are the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and to the south are the American states of North Dakota and Montana.