Homesteaders study me whenever I sit down at my desk. But I’ve never known for sure about the gray faces in that old family photograph: Is that some of my mother’s Norwegian family, who homesteaded in the Red River Valley of what would become North Dakota? Or are they some of my father’s Finnish family, who homesteaded, a few years later and a few miles west, in the James River Valley in what would become South Dakota?
The question has always seemed irrelevant to me because the life they lived was similar; and the things they faced and the stories they told about this place—in Norwegian, in Finnish, in limping English—were pretty much the same.
I grew up between two border towns. We went to school on the South Dakota side. We went to church and bought tractor parts on the North Dakota side. There wasn’t a lot
