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Land of the Buffalo Bones: The Diary of Mary Ann Elizabeth Rodgers, An English Girl in Minnesota
Children's fiction
Land of the Buffalo Bones: The Diary of Mary Ann Elizabeth Rodgers, An English Girl in Minnesota
192 pages · First published 2003
Mary Ann Elizabeth Rodgers leaves England with her family in 1873 to join a utopian farming colony in Minnesota. Her diary records the harsh climate, prairie isolation, grasshoppers, hunger, and the growing realization that promotional promises about abundant Western land did not guarantee successful settlement. The family’s English expectations repeatedly collide with the realities of American frontier agriculture. Marion Dane Bauer’s Dear America novel draws on the history of British immigrant colonies to portray prairie settlement from the perspective of a girl discovering how much survival can demand from hopeful newcomers.
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Content notes
Treacherous ocean and overland travel; severe Minnesota frontier hardship; poverty and failed settlement expectations; religious-community pressure and conflict.
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