I like this picture. When I developed it the colors came out so bright! Not much going on around the old homestead, mostly thinking things. I finished a short story and have sent it to a few readers for their input. One answered back already with positive remarks so I'm happy for that.It was about the wagon train of freighters who were stalled in a three day blizzard near Lisbon. I contrived a fictitious narrator to tell the story, so I guess it would be called historical fiction.
I'm ready to start another one. When Fort Ransom was still active it seems they attracted a small village of Indians, maybe half-breeds who camped on the outskirts. One summer after the grass withered and dried, what was probably a lightning strike on the prairie started a huge racing fire. Two young Indian girls had wandered away from the camp. They were driving a pony on a little cart and when they realized a fire cut them off from their camp, they whipped the pony to go as fast as he could to head for the relative safety of a spring of water. They could have made it except for the fact that one of the cart's wheels broke on a rock which threw them out, and by the time they recovered it was too late. Many stories like this exist in the area where I grew up, but they are not common knowledge. They have been forgotten, surviving only in dusty pages that no one reads.
A prominent writer, Frederick Manfred, wrote many interesting books and stories and placed them in the setting he called Siouxland, the region comprising the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska. Maybe I will have to come up with a name for my enterprise. I've got dozens of stories that need to be told that are set in my home area.
