Windfall
The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her
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- €16.99
Publisher Description
Beneath the windswept North Dakota plains, riches await...
At first, Erika Bolstad knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, Anna: she was a homesteader on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. As Erika’s mother was dying, she revealed more. Their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna’s land—and oil companies were interested in the black gold beneath the prairies. Their family, Erika learned, could get rich thanks to the legacy of a woman nearly lost to history.
Anna left no letters or journals, and very few photographs of her had survived. But Erika was drawn to the young woman who never walked free of the asylum that imprisoned her. As a journalist well versed in the effects of fossil fuels on climate change, Erika felt the dissonance of what she knew and the barely-acknowledged whisper that had followed her family across the Great Plains for generations: we could be rich. Desperate to learn more about her great-grandmother and the oil industry that changed the face of the American West forever, Erika set out for North Dakota to unearth what she could of the past. What she discovers is a land of boom-and-bust cycles and families trying their best to eke out a living in an unforgiving landscape, bringing to life the ever-present American question: What does it mean to be rich?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this powerful debut, journalist Bolstad investigates a century-old family mystery involving the disappearance of her great-grandmother. All Bolstad knew about Anna Josephine Sletvold, a Norwegian woman who settled in the prairies of North Dakota, was that she disappeared from her homestead in 1907. In 2009, after Bolstad's mother received a surprise check from an oil company that leased land near where Anna once lived, Bolstad started researching Anna's life. What she learned is that Anna filed a homestead claim in the fall of 1905. Less than two years later, a judge declared Anna insane after a doctor diagnosed her with what is now known as postpartum depression, and she was committed to an asylum, where she remained until her death in 1921. Along the way, Bolstad chronicles North Dakota's history of "boom and bust cycles," details how the Homestead Act of 1862 allowed the federal government to displace Indigenous peoples so that millions of settlers could claim a "new start," and indicts the oil industry for its reliance on such disputed practices as fracking and flaring. Bolstad approaches Anna's story with empathy, and she lucidly explains the impact of oil and gas extraction on the communities that depend on it economically. In unraveling a family mystery, Bolstad tells a much larger, richer story.
