Bent Northrop Memorial Library

"1838: James and Sadie Goodenough have settled where their wagon got stuck--in the muddy, stagnant swamps of northwest Ohio. They and their five children work relentlessly to tame their patch of land, buying saplings from a local tree man known as John Appleseed so they can cultivate the fifty apple trees required to stake their claim on the property. But the orchard they plant sows the seeds of a long battle. James loves the apples, reminders of...

Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers. The family's survival in their new home depends on the success of the first wheat harvest. Then, just before the wheat is ready to harvest, a strange glittering cloud fills the sky, blocking out the sun. Soon millions of grasshoppers descend on the farm and its fields.

After an October blizzard, Laura's family moves from the claim shanty into town for the winter, a winter that an Indian has predicted will be seven months of bad weather.

When Jack and Annie travel back to the Kansas prairie in search of "something to learn," they gain an understanding of how hard life was for pioneers and they experience the terror of a tornado.

At the age of fifty, the author set off on a journey following America's northern border from coast to coast. In the course, among other things, he flies the Maine border with a bush pilot, learns about the past and present hardships in the mines of the Mesabi Range, crosses into Manitoba to reach the sliver of U.S. territory called the Northwest Angle, and fishes for trout in northern Idaho.

Their magic tree house takes Jack and Annie back to the Wild West, where they experience excitement and danger and try to solve a riddle.

Set in rural Nebraska, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is both the story of an enduring friendship and a brilliant portrayal of the lives of rural pioneers in the late-nineteenth century. Ántonia and her family are from Bohemia and they must endure real hardship and loss to establish a new home in America. But Ántonia is never broken by adversity, and her strength and love of life stays with her childhood friend Jim for years to come, even as...

Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, this is a novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim. Spring, 1849. Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanches takes him captive. Brave and clever,...

A year in the life of two young girls growing up on the Wisconsin frontier, as they help their mother with the daily chores, enjoy their father's stories and singing, and share special occasions when they get together with relatives or neighbors.

When a failed wheat crop nearly bankrupts the Betterly family, Pa pulls twelve-year-old May, who suffers from dyslexia, from school and hires her out to a couple new to the Kansas frontier.