Harvesting in 1906 meant hiring a threshing crew to come to your homestead. Different crews traveled over the area, some coming to the same places each year. Farmers often worked on a threshing crew when done with their own place, to make extra money. The work was grue...

Growing up, the farm next to ours--the only one in view from my family's home--was the Hartstrom farm. To me, the house had a grandness about it. My Mom's mother (a foster daughter of the Hartstrom's) was raised here for eighteen years. The original part of it was buil...

This past July, our daughter Jana and I went on a search for wild tiger lilies, my very favorite prairie flower. They are becoming more rare, at least around my Mom's farm, but I was thrilled we found three of them in a ditch along the road. Smaller than most lilies, t...

Peter Korhonen donated land for the Belden cemetery which was started in 1907. Over the years, many buried there no longer had families in the area which left graves uncared for. In recent years, Joyce Evans led a local bunch of volunteers who've cleaned it up and buil...

This whimsical rock pile was built by Billy Hartstrom, who homesteaded in Sikes Township in 1905. The prairie had a lot of rocks to remove before they could break up the sod with plowing. Loaded by hand onto a stoneboat--a flat "raft" of planks dragged by horses or oxe...

I grew up on a farmstead roughly bordered half by coulees and half by flat fields. Coulees (pronounced koo'-lee, the o's sounding like 'ue' in blue) are deep ravines often with creeks running through the bottom. These streams can dry up during the summer. Native trees...

My Grandma came to northwestern North Dakota when she was nine years old. Her foster family had left a two-story painted home with a yard of trees back in Minnesota. The rolling hills looked immense to her. One endless sea of waving grass--no roads, no telephone pole...

This is a picture of my grandfather after he'd finished (except for the door) his homestead shack. He used washers around his nails--others used strips of wooden lath. These kept the wind from ripping the tarpaper off the building. It has the required one door and one...