When Mother and I returned to South Dakota in 1996, she was alternately chatty and pensive at my side, realizing that there might not be many more trips to the small towns and countryside that she had called home. It was a kind of spiritual pilgrimage, as we made the turnoff that would take us to the farm where she had lived until she was 16. She leaned forward on the passenger side, looking for landmarks, momentarily confused by her memory of a treeless plain and narrow dirt roads where now there were mature cottonwoods and a two-lane paved highway.

Then, there it was: the Conley farm. Once it had been a collection of primitive buildings and a small, unpainted house perched atop a grassy prairie; now it was a prosperous-looking ensemble of a white two-story house, a red barn and a granary tucked into a thick grove of trees. A few miles away, her grandfather Tom's farm had disappeared. All that remained were a few old trees from the grove he had planted. As we drove down the country lanes, Mother ticked off the names of the families who had once settled here on their own 160-acre plots, now long abandoned to the efficiencies of much larger corporate farms. Her neighbors were mostly of Scandinavian and German descent, the dominant ethnic groups in South Dakota, drawn by the same lure as her father: cheap land and an independent life, a claim on the promise of the prairie as a reliable producer of grain and a friendly environment for livestock.