Central Kansas Library System

A collection of letters by nineteenth-century homesteader Howard Ruede in which he chronicles his first year in Kansas while writing back to his family in Pennsylvania, covering topics such as poverty, unsanitary conditions, and starvation.

When the magic tree house whisks Jack and Annie back to the 1870's, the land on a prairie near a one-room schoolhouse. They meet a teenage schoolteacher, some cool kids, and one big, scary bully. But just when they think their mission is over, a twister sweeps across the prairie! Can Jack and Annie help their new friends? Or will the twister blow them all away?

"Regional history at its best ... Many of the traditional tales of early hardships- grasshopper plagues, Indian attacks, the stress of loneliness and isolation, drought, blizzards, prairie fires, and the unaccostomed hazards of nature- are retold with vigor and a sense of immediacy. These gritty tales of pioneer persistence and stubbornness are used to illustrate the region's cyclical history of hope and despair ... Not the least is Miner's talents...

This is a fictionalized account of Kajsa Svensson Runeberg's first 20 years on her Kansas farm.--Pref.

"In 1873 the people of Labette County in Kansas made a grisly discovery. Buried on a homestead seven miles south of the town of Cherryvale, in a bloodied cellar and under frost-covered soil, were countless bodies in varying states of decay. The discovery sent the local community and national newspapers into a frenzy that continued for over two decades, and the land on which the crimes took place became known as 'Hells Half-Acre.' When it emerged that...

Deeply moved by his mother's memories of a waning era and rapidly disappearing lifestyle, John Ise painstakingly recorded the adventures and adversities of his family and boyhood neighbors—the early homesteaders of Osborne County, Kansas. First published in 1936, his "nonfiction novel" Sod and Stubble has since become a widely read and much loved classic. In the original, Ise changed some identities and time sequences but accurately retained the...