Thanksgiving Traditions—A Heritage of Gratitude Part One

You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread…, and the Feast of Harvest, the firstfruits of your labors which you have sown in the field; and the Feast of the Ingathering at the end of the year, when you have gathered in your labors from the field. --Exodus 23:15-16

Harvests in, the weather cools, colorful leaves swirl about, and Thanksgiving’s approach turns thoughts to family gatherings, feasting, and football games. Growing up on our small farm in eastern Washington’s Palouse Country, our Thanksgiving was one of the few times we left home to journey a hundred miles north toward Canada to our maternal grandparents remote home in the thickly forested Pend Oreille highlands. To this day Grandma Peterson’s bread and pork dressing with grated carrots and beets lives on as a favorite holiday recipe. A very devout soul, she personified thanksgiving and shared the bounty of their substantial gardens—as well as hand-me-down children’s clothes, firewood, baked goods, and other necessities—with families near and far. Thanksgiving’s approach has led me to think again about the holiday’s origins in ancient times and its association with early American history.

Harvesting Palouse Heritage “Eden Amber” (2021)
An Heirloom Mesopotamian Hard White Bread Wheat

Old Testament Israel’s Feast of Harvest (Shavuot), one of nation’s three principal holidays, was a joyous event celebrated in Jerusalem on the fiftieth day after Passover. Blessed with favorable Mediterranean growing conditions on the Plain of Esdraelon and in nearby fertile valleys, the ancient Hebrews’ barley harvest generally commenced with the beginning of the dry season in April and early May, followed by the gathering of wheat and lentils into June. The fiftieth-day spring harvest festival, also known as the Feast of Weeks (later Christian Pentecost), marked the completion of the grain harvest season and commemorated divine provision for the people with Promised Land bounty.

The subsequent Feast of Ingathering was held in Jerusalem several weeks later to celebrate harvest of olives, grapes, figs, and other fruits. It also involved Temple offerings of sheaves, bread, and flour for the priests, recitation of the Hallel psalms (113-118) and readings from the Book of Ruth, joyful dances, and splendid communal feasts. Historians Douglas Neel and Joel Pugh note that activities associated with these holidays and the biblical context of their pronouncements offered two important themes to Jewish and later Christian observers: thanksgiving for divine blessing and a bountiful land, and the resulting social responsibilities to the less fortunate.  

Cultures throughout the world have commemorated the life-giving blessing of harvest throughout recorded history with traditions evident in religious ceremonies and stories handed down through the generations. According to Jewish folklore, Noah’s resourceful wife resorted to unique combinations of ingredients as the Ark’s provisions dwindled near the end of its voyage. What in Turkish cuisine is known as “Noah’s Pudding,” or ashura, customarily features various sweet mixtures of pearled barley and bulgur wheat with beans, chickpeas, dried fruits, and nuts. Nutritious black emmer has been called “Prophet’s Wheat” from a tradition suggesting Noah fed it to animals on the Ark. Black emmer was one of many Middle Eastern grains introduced to the Pacific Northwest in the 1890s by legendary USDA “plant explorer” Mark Carleton who sought varieties from regions throughout the world with climates and soil conditions similar to various areas of the Columbia Plateau. 

Contemporary Wheat Weavings
Fern Enos; Colfax, Washington

Traditions honoring the vitality of grain perpetuated the Old World craft of wheat-weaving with artfully twisted shapes are still featured at county fairs throughout America. Agrarian folklorist Rene Peschel traces the origins of Northwest wheat-weaving to the 1974 centennial commemoration of Mennonite immigration to Kansas from Russia. Midwestern Mennonite women wove mementoes with Russian “Turkey” Red wheat and the following year Moses Lake resident Phyllis Franz learned the skill from a Mennonite visitor the area and taught it to members of her fellowship and other friends. One of the most spectacular examples of the craft is the life-size “Wheat Lady” (1997) by Aileen Warren and Jackie Penner of Dayton, Washington. The pair wove a grain dress from 225 feet of wheat straw and embellished the effigy with over 900 hand-tied decorative knots and 2500 heads of wheat.

Aileen Warren and Jackie Penner, Wheat Lady “Corn Dolly” (1997)
Straight and braided straw with 2500 heads of wheat
Washington Association of Wheat Growers

Plenty is Revealed, Beautiful Upon the Earth

Harvesting Heritage Grain Plots with Family “Volunteers”

We’ve had great fun here at the farm watching family members tend the heritage grain plot trials near the old farmhouse which allows us to determine which grains adapt well to our part of the country. Among the varieties we have grown are White and Red Lammas wheats that owe their enduring folk name to medieval Anglo-Saxon Lammastide (Anglo-Saxon hlaf-mas, “Loaf Mass”) of offerings traditionally held in early August when priests blessed the first ripe wheat. This annual commemoration’s antecedent included the sober rites of Celtic Luhgúhnadh, or the Celtic Sun god “Lugh’s Assembly,” which took place on August 1, when Scottish Gaelic Lùnastal (Welsh Gwl Awst—the Feast of August) was also observed.

In ancient Celtic folklore, Lugh established the festival to honor his foster mother, Talantiu, the “Great One of the Earth,” for dying from exhaustion after clearing forest for land to cultivate. By the early Middle Ages the festival came to include tribal assemblies attended by the High King, sporting contests, trade fairs, and other special events. The modern English word “earth” attests to these early peoples’ sacred regard for the land since the term is derived from Hertha, the Celtic goddess of the soil. (The word “harvest” is from Old English hærfest—“autumn,” the time described by the tenth century Menologium as “…[W]ela byð geywed fægere on foldan, or when “Plenty is revealed,  beautiful upon the earth.”)

Harvest Home in Sandomir (Poland)

Jozef Lienkowicz, Les Costumes du Peuple Polonais (Leipzig, 1841)

Columbia Heritage Collection

Early religious groups adapted these gatherings and vocabulary to the changing conditions of early medieval life and the new faith. Linguists trace the word “bread” (Nordic brøt) to Proto-Indo-European bhreu of northern Europe, a word suggesting the bubbling of leavened bread, the boiling of broth, and the brewing of beer. This northern term implies a process, while Mediterranean Latin’s word for loaf, panis (and derivatives French pain, Italian pane) emphasizes the end product. Medieval harvest festivals were commonly held throughout Europe for several days in late summer or fall depending on local traditions and after the crops had been substantially gathered. Folks of all ages but young people in particular looked forward to these spirited events as a time to don traditional costume, socialize, and engage in amusements after months of toil in the fields. Known in German as Kerbfest or Kirmes (Dutch Kermesse), these joyous times typically featured special church and market fairs with strolling minstrels, fellowship and feasting with family and friends and plenty of drink, and evening dances. The revelry is colorfully and sometimes comically depicted in such paintings as Kermis, Peasants Making Merry (1574) by Lucas van Valckenborch (1535-1597), Village Feast (c. 1600) by Marten van Cleve (c. 1527-1581), Brueghel’s The Kermesse of St. George (1628), and David Teniers the Younger’s Peasant Kermis (c. 1665).

Lucas van Valckenborch, Kermis, Peasants Making Merry (1574)

Oil on panel, 14 ½ inches

Danish National Gallery, Copenhagen

The beautifully composed painting Harvest Festival Procession (1826) by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) presents a romanticized view of such an occasion in the German countryside with elements that combine classical and medieval motifs with the artist’s Christian worldview. A celebratory peasant throng bearing grain sheaves follow a raised eagle standard as if a Roman legion marching toward a towering statue of Ceres. Other harvesters continue to labor in a distant field beneath the ruins of a medieval castle. Schinkel’s symbolic works characteristically depict historical and topographical detail in reverence to great epochs through the ages meant to inspire contemporary social renewal.

The painting presents the view of a people who appreciate the sacred bounty of the land which is used to uplift individual spirit and elevate overall area culture.  In many Catholic parishes the church consecration day that commemorated the founding of the church or its patron saint came to added sacred elements to the festival’s old folk traditions—often condemned by clerics, but did not greatly displace them in many areas. Catholic services commemorated the transmission of supernatural power upon a place of worship and featured a lengthy liturgical Mass with Holy Communion of wine and white bread. Protestant Kirchwiehen also involved solemn ceremony but as a sacred dedication and without the metaphysical connotations.

Country-Style Breads (Part 3)

This post is the third and final of a three-part series focusing on delicious, wholesome bread recipes that feature our landrace grains. These recipes and many others are included in our newly released updated edition of the Harvest Home Cookbook, available here in both print and eBook versions.

Braided Sweets

The restoration of landrace grains and availability today of identity-specific variety flours also makes possible the customization of time-honored recipes to flavor and texture preferences with consideration of new techniques. At Palouse Heritage we have worked for years to foster “flavorful authenticity” by providing an array of nutritious pre-hybridized landrace grain flours like Crimson Turkey hard red wheat, Sonoran Gold soft white, Yellow Breton soft red, and Purple Egyptian barley. These and other grains arrived from Eurasia during the earliest years of North American colonization to make possible a incredible continental cornucopia.

Blue Hill Restaurant Palouse Heritage Breads, Rockefeller Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture; Tarrytown, New York

Ancestral country-bread styles handed down through the ages were not necessarily meant to be unchangeable, fixed lists of ingredients and directions. Now in her hundredth year, spirited Vera Grove Rudd is the eldest member of our extended clan. She was raised at our Palouse Colony Farm and vividly recalls joining her mother to gather hops that grew profusely along the river in order to make a sourdough starter from the naturally occurring yeast that grew on the cones. I have recently learned that this practice was a folk remnant of common practice in medieval times. The hops still grow at the farm in abundance, but times change and Vera came to use store-bought active dry yeast for her country-style breads. As times change so can baking methods and availability of healthy ingredients. Rather like Van Gogh at work on his glowing harvest canvases or Thomas Hart Benton painting Midwest threshing scenes, distinct grain flours serve like paints to enable artisan bakers at home or elsewhere to follow long favored ways, as well as make marvelously new variations.

Although country-style breads have generally been made without eggs, dried fruit, or baked vegetables, these ingredients have long been included by experienced home cooks for special holiday breads. The following recipe from our extended family’s hundred-year-old matriarch, “Miss Vera,” brings to mind her stories of enjoying it every Friday evening when she was a girl living on the family’s Palouse River farm. Recipes like this were popular submission to the many school PTA, church, and social organizations loosely bound cookbook fundraisers. She noted that her mother gathered hop cones every summer for yeast that imparted a unique and wonderful flavor.

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Braided Sweet Bread

• 4 cups Palouse Heritage Crimson Turkey Flour
• 3 ½ cups Palouse Heritage Sonoran Gold flour
• ½ cup lukewarm water
• 2 packages active dry yeast
• 1 ½ cups lukewarm milk
• ¼ cup sugar

• 1 tablespoon salt
• 3 eggs
• ¼ cup soft butter
• 2 ½ tablespoons shortening
• crushed walnuts optional

Dissolve yeast in mixing bowl with ½ cup of water. Stir in milk, sugar, and salt. Add eggs, shortening, and half the blended flour. Stir with a spoon, add the rest of the flour, and mix by hand. Turn onto lightly floured board. Knead about 5 minutes until smooth and roll around in a greased bowl. Cover with damp cloth and let rise in a warm place 1 ½ to 2 hours until double in bulk. Punch down, round up, let rise again about 30 minutes until almost a double in volume. Divide dough into 6 parts, making six 14-inch long rolls. Braid 3 rolls loosely, fastening ends. Repeat for second braid. Place on 2 greased baking sheets, and cover with a damp cloth. Let rise 50-60 minutes until almost double in bulk. Heat oven to 425°. Brush braids with glaze of egg yolk and 2 tablespoons of water. May sprinkle with crushed walnuts. Bake 30-35 minutes.

Country-Style Breads (Part 2)

This post is the first of a three-part series focusing on delicious, wholesome bread recipes that feature our landrace grains. These recipes and many others are included in our newly released updated edition of the Harvest Home Cookbook, available here in both print and eBook versions.

Country Whole Wheat

Multigrain rustic breads contain ingredients unique to some cultures. Our ancestors’ Old Country Slavic neighbors often added small amounts of coffee and molasses to their round loaves of mouth-watering Russian rye-wheat Chyorni Khleb (Black Bread). Oblong boules of the Jewish mainstay Corn Rye Bread (Kornbroyt) can be enlivened by including a small quantity of dark beer in the recipe. Early American “thirded” breads brought together the auspicious prospects of wheat flour and cornmeal combined with a third grain flour—often from milled oats or barley. Non-gluten ingredients like buckwheat flour and hazelnut meal have also been creatively used in these ways.

Harvesting Crimson Turkey Wheat (2017), Palouse Colony Farm; Endicott, Washington

Legendary baker-chef Shaun Thompson-Duffy of Spokane’s Culture Breads points out that the range of family traditions and methods makes for an endless variety of bread possibilities with deeper flavors. He finds burgeoning interest among consumers to find out “what real bread has long been.” Shaun points out that you need not be an experienced baker to bring these succulent staples to life. In fact, until the appearance of French manuals on baking in the 1770s, breadmaking skills were primarily passed along in families through observation and trial and error over a wood fire at home. Whether for special occasions or throughout the year, the “staff of life” has long been a chief function of the household and counted among life’s greatest blessings for feasting and fellowship by young and old alike.

Spokane Master Baker Shaun Thompson-Duffy’s Palouse Heritage Breads

Country Whole Wheat Bread

• 2 cups Palouse Heritage Crimson Turkey flour
• 2 cups Palouse Heritage Sonoran Gold flour
• 2 tablespoons honey or molasses
• 2 tablespoons shortening

• 2 ½ cups scalded milk
• ⅓ cup warm water       
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 package active dry yeast 

Dissolve yeast ⅓ cup of warm water. Combine melted shortening, salt, scalded milk, and honey or molasses. When cooled to lukewarm add yeast mixture and enough flour to make a stiff dough. Knead until elastic, shape into two loaves, and place into 4 x 8 greased loaf pans. Let rise about 1 ½ hours to nearly double size and bake at 350° for 1 hour and 10 minutes.

Sickles and Sheaves — Farming, Faith, and the Frye (Part 3)

This blog post is part of a series I (Richard) am writing about my past life experiences that helped develop a love and appreciation for agricultural heritage in general and landrace grains in particular. The series is called "Sickles and Sheaves - Farming, Faith, and the Frye" and you can view the other parts of this blog series here.

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Like young people in many rural areas, I spent considerable time among community elders and while still in high school decided to interview all first-generation immigrants living in our vicinity who had been raised in our ancestral Volga German village of Yágodnaya Polyána (Berry Meadow). This mission led to dozens of visits, usually in the company of Grandpa Scheuerman or my heritage-minded aunt, his daughter Evelyn Reich. She was our indefatigable family genealogist and provided essential service in what I later learned from social anthropologists was the special role of “folk broker.” In this way I was able to start listening and recording a fascinating series of oral histories and other memoirs about life in another dimension inhabited by field spirits and dire wolves, braucheri (folk doctors) and hexeri (spell-casters). My special interest came to be life an dem Khutor (“in the country”) where villagers sometimes lived for weeks on the open steppe miles away from Yágodnaya to tend fields, range livestock, and harvest their crops.

I sometimes attended early morning German language services at Trinity Lutheran in Endicott with Grandpa, and remember him visiting afterward once with his old neighbor on the farm Conrad Blumenschein in their peculiar Hessian brogue about the unusually dry summer. A stately, powerfully-built fellow who always dressed for church in a double-breasted blue suit, Conrad had emigrated in 1913, so had been old enough to thoroughly experience the Old World seasonal farming cycle. That Sunday I heard him tell how in the Old Country they feared times of drought and the dreaded Hohenrauch (“High Smoke”). This withering wind sometimes mysteriously arose from the Caspian and could reduce a ripening grain crop to tiny, shrunken kernels in just a few hours. “The Russian peasants would fall on the ground and pray for rain,” Conrad said. I asked if it did any good. “Ach,” he smiled kindly, “das Gebet kann nur hölfen.” (“Well, prayer can only help.”)

Above: Lautenschlager and Poffenroth Threshing Outfit near Endicott (1911), R. R. Hutchison Photograph Below: St. John Harvest Carnival (1913), Whitman County Library Heritage Collection, Colfax, Washington

On a visit to see Conrad at his tidy St. John home in May, 1980, I asked about his farming recollections as a young man in Eastern Europe, which included his vivid memories of the Volga harvest and hints of Ilya Repin’s famous painting The Barge-Haulers and familiar eh-eh-ýkh-nyem (“heave-heave-ho”) dirge of The Volga Boatman:

“Harvest began the last of June and early July. Sometimes folks ran out of bread by then so cut several bundles to dry and get 40 to 100 pounds of rye to get by. In July rye was pulled up to aerate in rows, two to three weeks of drying, then hauled home to a threshing yard on the outskirts of town. Four to six men flailed the bundles, one side at a time. Then the bundles were cut open. The ground had been trampled hard by the horses and watered down. Others lift the bundles with forks while others flail and stack it for the horses and cattle. Those who didn’t have granaries often flailed bundles on the ice in the yard during winter. Fanning mills were then used after flailing, a pile of grain put in to clean it and wheat runs out on canvas then shoveled into hundred pound sacks.”

“...In early August wheat harvest began and was done differently. We put tents up where there were no buildings an dem Khutor. ...Cut [the grain] with a sickle and bundled, then bundles opened and spread into a big circle, about 100 to 200 bundles. Then [it was] trampled out with horses and wagons, left alone in the middle, then with a pole go all around the ring and turn it over to shake the wheat [kernels] out. Then repeat with the horses. The women shake the stalks and rake it out on a pile. The chaff and wheat are piled into the center of the ring, 200 to 300 bushels. Then it is run through a fanning mill and deposited again on a big canvas or bagged. Sometimes wheat was taken to the Volga River and loaded by hand onto boats which were stranded in the river because of low summer flow, but that’s where the buyers were.” 

Winter Sheaves and Celebration

Although holiday decorations and winter cold seem far removed from the affairs of summer harvest, in pre-industrial times life remained busy year-round as families needed to tend livestock and carry on other important chores. Considerable threshing of grain sheaves, for example, took place during winter as the brittle stalks that had been stored in barns since harvest were strewn about the covered threshing floor, or even on ice outside, to be struck with wooden flails in order to separate the golden kernels from the heads. To be sure, the winter time pace of labor was less intense than other seasons, and many agrarian traditions were associated with shortest days of the year.

Scandinavian farmers customarily saved the last harvest cuttings for the ceremonial “Yule Sheaf” (Norwegian Julenek, Swedish Julkarve) of oats or other grain which was suspended from a pole or barn roof during Christmas week and New Year as a blessing to the birds and goodwill offering for a favorable growing season. This tradition continued among some families in eighteenth century America as described in verse by Ohio poet Phoebe Cary’s “The Christmas Sheaf”:  

"And bid the children fetch," he said,
"The last ripe sheaf of wheat,
And set it on the roof o’erhead
That the birds may come and eat.

And this we do for His dear sake,
The Master kind and good,
Who of the loaves He blest and brake
Fed all the multitude."

As children we were always presented with a sack containing peanuts and an orange after the annual church Christmas program in our hometown of Endicott—a tradition that continues to this day. Only later did I learn that in ancient times oranges commonly symbolized the sun while acorns and other nuts were also given during the week of the winter solstice (December 21) to celebrate the return of longer days and life’s renewal. 

Suesspleena Before and After Flipping

Like families of many cultural backgrounds, ours has also long observed festive Christmas Eve dinners. A favorite entrée is the wide, paper thin Suesspleena egg batter pancakes and accompanying hot Schnitzel fruit soup of raisins, apples, peaches, and other flavorful “pieces” for which it is named, which is mixed with cream just before serving. When our beloved cousin Al first married into our clan many years ago, he led the procession around the holiday buffet and assumed the bowl of steaming brown was gravy, so proceeded to cover his mashed potatoes with it. We’ve never let him forget.

These pancakes remain an important part of Maslenitsa, Eastern Orthodoxy’s “Butter (or Crepe) Week,” celebrated now in the spring during Lent but observed in ancient times during mid-winter. Our German ancestors in Russia were known to stack them into layers spread with jam for a delicious treat, and the “4-3-2-1” recipe handed down to us remains a holiday staple. It calls for 4 eggs, 3 cups of milk, 2 cups of flour, and 1 tablespoon of sugar. We also add a dash of salt and fry them on a hot buttered skillet. Don’t worry if the first one or two are ruined as you gauge the proper temperature and master the flipping technique. After all, there is an old Russian saying that basically translates, “The first blina (pancake) is a disaster”!

We now LOVE making family Suesspleena meals using our Palouse Heritage Sonoran Gold flour. Not only is it more authentic than the modern flour you'd buy in the grocery store today, but it delivers a naturally sweet, nutty-tasting flavor. Delicious!

Sickles and Sheaves — Farming, Faith, and the Frye (Part 2)

This blog post is part of a series I (Richard) am writing about my past life experiences that helped develop a love and appreciation for agricultural heritage in general and landrace grains in particular. The series is called "Sickles and Sheaves - Farming, Faith, and the Frye" and you can view the other parts of this blog series here.

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Palouse Harvest Memories

Richard and Don's grandfather, Karl Scheuerman, during harvest

When I once asked Grandpa Scheuerman for explanation of harvest operations in bygone days, he retrieved his leather-cased sack-sewing needle—still razor sharp after many years in retirement, and an old photograph from his bedroom closet. The image (shown below) was labelled “Lautenschlager and Poffenroth, 1911”—surnames of familiar relatives, and I instantly recognized Grandpa standing under the wooden derrick clasping the handle of a pitch-fork. He then patiently described the role of each member of the substantial crew and introduced me to terms like derrick table, header-tender, hoe-down, and other agrarian vernacular from the steam-powered threshing era. Many farm families treasure such pictures today, and I have unrolled many that stretch as wide as a kitchen table. Grandpa delighted in relating tall tales of bygone August “thrashin’ weather” happenings—when the Moore brothers threshed a thousand sacks of grain in a single day the same harvest season R. R. Hutchison took that picture, the bumper crops of 1908-1911, and how Black field hand Otis Banks could lift a 120-pound sack of wheat with his teeth.

Among the few books I recall in my grandfather’s home were a Bible and ancient three-volume New Testament commentary in German, while our father’s most frequented volume may have been the weighty and exceedingly smudged parts manual to our dilapidated International-Harvester Model 160 pull-combine. I felt a bit embarrassed in a day of efficient self-propelled machines operating in every direction that in the 1960s we still resorted to an exceedingly faded red Rube Goldberg contraption of sprockets, pulleys, and straw walkers that Dad patiently guided through the seas of wheat during our annual month-long harvest. But the good feeling of accomplishment swept across all the crew with the cutting of the final swath that vanquished any boyhood unease over lost grain, equipment collisions, or other mistakes in the field. “No one should be deprived of harvesting,” artist-folklorist Eric Sloan observed in his illustrated 1971 rural memoir, I Remember America. “Beyond the value of feeling the fruition of nature all about you, there is the satisfaction of beholding the results of your own efforts.”  

Don and Richard "helping" during harvest

Richard and Don's father, Don Scheuerman

Like most boys in wheat country, my brother and I started driving truck in the harvest field on teen farm permits that legalized our trips throughout the day to the Endicott and Thera elevators to unload grain loaded into our faded red and blue ’56 Chevy truck and older black Ford. The obligation came with explicit warnings about harvest time dangers—field fires, equipment collisions, and tragic combine tip-overs on steep Palouse hillsides that claimed the lives of more than one boyhood acquaintance. While periodic visits to the field by friends and relatives provided welcome breaks in the daily routine of waiting for the several “dumps” needed to fill a truck, considerable time for other pursuits is available when waiting alone in a draw of stifling heat or on a breezy hilltop. Perhaps our mother’s example had led us to be readers of paperbacks available on a large revolving rack at the local drugstore. While my brother was attracted to Ian Fleming spy thrillers, I found myself introduced to new worlds of former experience through historical fiction. 

1925 Scrapbook of Country Poems Fragement (Vol 2, Winter 1925, Private Collection)

The Galilean archaeological dig in James Michener’s The Source (1965)—a thick book I thought would last all summer, acquainted me with Stone Age wadi life in the fictional village of Makor where the Ur family matriarch comprehends the value of planting grains for self-sufficiency while the men travel widely to hunt. Having grown up hearing many tales of our Norwegian-born Sunwold great-grandparents on the Dakota frontier, I was also incredibly captivated by Ole Rølvaag’s stirring and often disturbing scenes in Giants in the Earth (1927) in which Per Hansa and his wife, Beret, struggling against storms, locust plagues, despairing homesickness, and the mystical universe of Old World thought. The Hansas, in turn, led me to meet Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson in a subsequent summertime encounter with Vilhelm Moberg’s magisterial four-volume Emigrant Series (1949-1959). The books dramatize the 1850s Swedish farmer immigrant saga of home building and barn raising, and planting and harvesting in Minnesota Territory. Experiences described on many pages reminded me of family tales my grandfather often spun about Palouse “sod-bustin” days as he rode in the harvest truck with us to see the hills of his youth—

“He liked to sit at the window and look out at his fields; this was the land he had changed. When he came the whole meadow had been covered with weeds and wild grass. Now it produced rye, wheat, oats, corn, potatoes, turnips. The wild grass had fed elk, deer, and rabbits; now the field yielded so much there was enough for them as well as for other people.”