Home on the Range

Examining the last hundred years on the High Plains through the prism of his own hometown, the author records the epic drama of settling and developing the old West and looks at the uncertain future of rural communities. 15,000 first printing.

After the Civil War, the author's great-grandparents migrated to western Kansas to become wheat farmers on a lonely, treeless, windswept land with a harsh climate. Dickenson, a freelance journalist, who grew up in Macdonald, a rural community in the northwest corner of the state, here interweaves, in engaging detail, local and family history with his own memories of the 1930s and '40s. Life centered around school, church and harvest. In its heyday, Macdonald had a population of 435; today it is down to 200. Dickenson describes how the area was settled, how it developed and changed, where it stands now: farms and schools have consolidated, businesses have closed, people have moved away. It is a familiar tale of back-road America; readers with a farming or rural background will find themselves at home here. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Although begun as a family history to chronicle the life in McDonald, a rural, wheat-farming community in western Kansas, this book has a much wider scope. It presents a microcosm of what has taken place throughout much of rural America, presenting the epic drama of the settlement and development of the West and showing how technologies such as railroads, steel plows, windmills, and barbed wire once made possible the growth of strong communities on what was a harsh frontier. The result was a lifestyle that thrived for a century. Today's declining rural population puts present-day inhabitants in much the same position as the pioneers of yesterday as they face great change that challenges their very existence. More modern technologies, particularly in agriculture, threaten the viability of this society. Despite the threat, though, many advantages to this way of life survive, including good schools, low crime rate, strong family values, and a clean environment. Fred Egloff

Dickenson, a former reporter for the Washington Post, goes beyond the hustle and headlines of his profession to return to his Midwestern roots in McDonald, Kansas. He originally began this book as a family history centered around the stories of the author's maternal grandmother. In the course of putting these pieces of family lore to paper, he realized that the story of his family was somthing of a rural everyman's tale. The story begins with settlement in northwestern Kansas following the Civil War and continues up to the present, though the bulk of the account covers the author's youth in pre-World War II America. More broadly, however, it records the passage of the nation from agrarian innocence to international player and shows how these changes affected the once small but prosperous farming community. The author's attention to the broader picture makes this more than just a local family history; his warm, full prose is as engaging and inviting as the people about whom he writes and clearly cherishes. Recommended for most collections.
Daniel Liestman, Seattle Pacific Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.