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early March with the prairie still deep in snow. Finally, well after dark on the night of March 9, they arrived at the couple’s sod house—“14x16 feet with a dirt floor and straw roof,” Osten remembered, “but it was good and warm.” The next day a terrific snowstorm blew in and raged for four days over the open prairie.
    If Osten and Kari were discouraged by their first taste of pioneering, Osten made no mention of it in his memoirs. Nor did Gro in her recollections permit herself more than a mild grumble: “We were young,” she wrote, “and didn’t lose courage because everything looked so gloomy.” The country was “pretty wild and desolate when we arrived,” wrote Osten. “No trees were to be seen for many miles. Everywhere we saw small sodhouses which were the first dwellings people had. Large groups of Indians passed through, but they did us no harm. We were 49 English miles to the nearest railroad, and it took four days with oxen to go there and return." The Rollags were born to be pioneers. Ole was strong and strapping, big and loud and booming with optimism. Gro, despite her penchant for reading, was a good manager who kept a level head in times of danger. Still, they quailed before the extremes of weather on the prairie, especially the blizzards that swept down from the northwest with unbelievable speed. Norway had cold winters and plenty of snow, but nothing like the American heartland. The Rollags and the Norwegian families who settled near them were not prepared for the severity of prairie winters. No one was.

    Johann Friedrich Schlesselmer left his village near Hannover, Germany, in the late 1870s to start over in America, settled in Nebraska, and promptly lost his pittance prospecting for coal south of Seward. He was still a young man when he died of smallpox in 1882, a year after he was naturalized, leaving his wife, Wilhelmine, to manage alone with a house full of children. The Schlesselmers’ five-year-old daughter Lena contracted smallpox at the same time as her father. She survived, though the disease left her face permanently scarred. Hard luck plagued the family, especially the little girl. Over the next five years Lena’s mother, Wilhelmine, remarried twice, bearing children with each husband (eventually there would be eleven children, eight of whom survived). It was shortly after the third marriage, to a fellow German named Wilhelm Dorgeloh, that Wilhelmine decided—or agreed—to farm Lena out to a new home.
    The Dorgeloh household out on the prairie near Milford, south of Seward, was crowded with Wilhelmine’s latest crop of babies, and naturally Wilhelm Dorgeloh preferred his own children to those from the previous marriages. Lena was large for her age, strong and quiet. With those smallpox scars she would be unlikely to marry early, if at all. Lena must go.
    And so, in August 1887, Wilhelmine took her eleven-year-old daughter to live in a hilly section south of Seward with Wilhelm and Catherina Woebbecke, relatives from her native village of Herkensen in Germany. It was an odd stretch of country—the one place for miles around where the grassland was crumpled into slopes and deep ravines choked with wild plum and willow. Townspeople in Seward (a growing prairie town that boasted three rivers, two rail lines, and a flour mill) had taken to calling this district the Bohemian Alps because of all the Czech and German immigrants who were moving in and buying up the irregular terrain that no one else wanted. The Woebbecke house was small—only one room for the family and a second room used as a woodshed—and they had three little children of their own underfoot. But Wilhelm and Catherina agreed to take Lena in because they needed help with the farm chores and Lena was built like a worker. From then on she was known as Lena Woebbecke. Lena milked and herded the cows and carried water and minded the children when Catherina was busy.
    After the harvest was done, she started