G. Keith Gunderson

I have written STRANGER ON THE PLAINS: A Spiritual Journey. It is not only a book about the everyday lives of common people who populate a small corner of the Great Plains where South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana meet. I was born among these people. And from them I learned how to be a pastor and a man. I was born in the county seat of Harding County South Dakota, pop. 400 or so during the Great War in March of 1943. My family, my parents, an older brother and an older sister and me moved to a vacant ranch about 35 miles northwest of Buffalo, not far from where, my grandfather from Iowa, homesteaded in 1910. My father grew up there, and that far corner of South Dakota was where his heart belonged from a three year old in 1910 when Grandpa's family joined him on the homestead.

I write this introduction, for this is the place where most of the common men and women who appear in my book were rooted.

We moved across the border into North Dakota when I was three and settled in Bowman, ND. And moved on from there five years later, after another brother was added to the family. The move was forty mile east of Bowman on U.S. Highway 12 to Hettinger, North Dakota where I grew up. And played football, basketball, and baseball. Although I was one with the common men and women of the Plains, something drew me in a different direction. I went to a small college north of Hettinger, met a girl who for some reason or another married me. (that was 61 years ago). I graduated and became a high school English teacher, dreaming of, someday, writing the great American novel. But after two years of teaching, instead of ending up at the writing school at the University of Iowa. And for some reason or another ended up at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN, where I studied to be a pastor.

Four years later my wife, Noel, my toddler daughter, Gretchen, and my infant son, moved back to North Dakota, to the Great Plains, where, for the next 18 years I served in small parishes in two small towns, the second on in Reeder, ND, a small town about halfway between Bowman and Hettinger on U.S. Highway 12. While I was there I studied many things, most importantly Ernst Kasemann's Commentary on Romans. Which became to inspiration for STRANGER ON THE PLAINS:A Spiritual Journey. It took me nearly ten years to write that little 93 page book. I finished it in 1964. I ran across it in my files 40 or years later and felt it spoke to a wider audience than those few who are familiar with Kasemann. And self-published it.

As I write this I am 83 years old, retired, living in a one bedroom apartment with Noel, 61 years after she decided to marry me.

I published this book for you. As soon as it hit the market I lost control of it. And it became what happens to your heart when you read it.

I am a poet of sorts, an obscure Plains poet. A noted Plains poet is one some people have heard of but never read. An obscure on is one they've never heard of. My first poems appeared in sermons in the mid-seventies. My book is written in prose, although many of the readers define my prose as "Poetic". It is as common and down to earth as the people of that little corner of the Plains. Written in their language. And mine. For you.