Pioneer Girl

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In the little Nebraska town where I lived as a child, life revolved around farming. My father was the superintendent of schools, yet agriculture shaped our days. Many of my classmates lived on farms, and when I visited them, I was struck by the endless work, the mud, and the vast cornfields where it felt all too easy to get lost. 

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​I had no desire for farm life, but I admired those families. Everyone worked, children included, and the land they labored on typically had been homesteaded by their grandparents. If farm life was that demanding now, I wondered what it had been like for those first settlers who broke the prairie sod. My quest to find out led me to a memoir dictated late in life by Grace McCance Snyder, who had come with her family to central Nebraska at the age of three to live in an isolated sod house on the vast, windswept prairie.

Grace leaped off the page—spirited, determined, and endlessly resourceful. Through her memories, and with help from her family’s recollections and historical records, I set out to show what a homestead childhood was really like. And it was never easy. For Grace it meant living in a soddie, enduring fierce winters, scorching summers, grasshoppers, rattle snakes, a prairie fire, a severe storm that blew away just about everything, backbreaking work, accidents, illness—and yet pioneers like Grace and her family loved the land and felt all the challenges were worth it.

I left Nebraska long ago, but I still think of this book as a love song to where I grew up.