Central Kansas Library System

"Always Dakota: People are feeling good about living in Buffalo Valley again--the way they used to. They're confident about the future. Stalled lives are moving forward. People like Margaret Clemens are taking risks on new ventures and on lifelong dreams. On happiness. Margaret is a local rancher who's finally getting what she wants most--marriage to cowboy Matt Eilers. Her friends don't think Matt's such a bargain; neither did her father. But Margaret...

Now living in Bismarck, North Dakota, Damon Richards, with his friends Kamryn and Jason, find themselves in an unwanted but unavoidable fight against fire-breathing night dragons.

In the early 1980s, farmers were suffering through the worst economic crisis to hit rural America since the Great Depression. Land prices were down, operating costs and interest rates were up, and severe weather devastated crops. Instead of receiving assistance from the government as they had in the 1930s, these hardworking family farmers were threatened with foreclosure by the very agency that Franklin Delano Roosevelt created to help them. Desperate,...

Catherine Weldon, a portrait painter from 1890s Brooklyn, travels to North Dakota to paint a portrait of Chief Sitting Bull and becomes embroiled in the Lakota peoples' struggle over the rights to their land.

"A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author's encounters with gun violence--for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Terese Marie Mailhot. Toni Jensen grew up in the Midwest around guns: As a girl, she learned how to shoot birds with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she's had guns waved in her face in the fracklands around Standing Rock, and felt their...

BADLANDS - Twenty miles across the North Dakota border, where the scenery goes from rolling grass prairie to pipeline fields, detective Cassie Dewell has been assigned as the new deputy sheriff of Grimstad, a place people used to be from, but were never headed to. Grimstad is now the oil capital of North Dakota. With oil comes money, with money comes drugs, and with drugs come the dirtiest criminals hustling to corner the market. In the small town...

"When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher 'KC' Clarke, had disappeared...