Nessa can't remember a home other than the orphanage, and now she has no choice but to leave. Her plan is to escape on the next stagecoach west -- one headed toward Prairie River, Kansas, a town in the middle of nowhere. When Nessa arrives at the small settlement, she has no money and nowhere to go. Worst of all, she is alone. The townspeople are suspicious of her. They see her as a newcomer with no family and no past. Nessa is about to learn that life on the prairie is hard --it's a trial of her strength and her faith as a Christian.
Nessa is still struggling to find her place in Prairie River, and things aren't getting easier. She's having trouble making friends, her job as the town teacher is on shaky ground, and she learns many people still have doubts about her. Nessa strives to earn the trust of those around her, knowing it will take time. When a prairie fire whips across the landscape and heads for the schoolhouse, Nessa knows there isn't much time - and she won't get a second chance. She will need to find the courage to save her students from the massive blaze. Nessa must dispel all doubts as to whether she can succeed - most importantly, her own.
The memoirs of one of Illinois’ great poets, author of Spoon River Anthology, with many vignettes of the Chicago Renaissance. This intimate and provocative autobiography, first published in 1936, reveals the innermost thoughts of a great American poet. Edgar Lee Masters was a transitional figure in American literature with one foot planted in the nineteenth century and the other firmly placed on the path of what we now think of as the modern period. Richly illustrated throughout with black and white photographs. “Across Spoon River: An Autobiography is blunt and cranky about a life [Masters] saw as largely “scrappy and unmanageable.” Emphasizing life on his grandfather’s farm, his school days, his political battles, the workday world, and the growth of a poet’s mind through wide reading, the book is a valuable record of Masters’s work habits and offers considerable insight on his position as a critic and his place in American literature.”—Ronald Primeau, American National Biography
Trevor Herriot’s memoir and history of the Qu’Appelle River Valley has won the CBA Libris Award for First-Time Author, the Writers’ Trust Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, and the Regina Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction.
Award-winning journalist rafts down the Green River, revealing a multifaceted look at the present and future of water in the American West. The Green River, the most significant tributary of the Colorado River, runs 730 miles from the glaciers of Wyoming to the desert canyons of Utah. Over its course, it meanders through ranches, cities, national parks, endangered fish habitats, and some of the most significant natural gas fields in the country, as it provides water for 33 million people. Stopped up by dams, slaked off by irrigation, and dried up by cities, the Green is crucial, overused, and at-risk, now more than ever. Fights over the river’s water, and what’s going to happen to it in the future, are longstanding, intractable, and only getting worse as the West gets hotter and drier and more people depend on the river with each passing year. As a former raft guide and an environmental reporter, Heather Hansman knew these fights were happening, but she felt driven to see them from a different perspective—from the river itself. So she set out on a journey, in a one-person inflatable pack raft, to paddle the river from source to confluence and see what the experience might teach her. Mixing lyrical accounts of quiet paddling through breathtaking beauty with nights spent camping solo and lively discussions with farmers, city officials, and other people met along the way, Downriver is the story of that journey, a foray into the present—and future—of water in the West.
