Nonie Tanner

The Life of the Tree Nonie Tanner

Martha's Norwegian grandparents risked everything in the 1850's to come to the land of promise: America. Now comfortable in their two-story white farmhouse in southern Minnesota in 1906, her Pa decided to gamble on homesteading in the Dakotas. Selling everything, he moves his young family to a 'soddy' on the North Dakota prairie. Unable to afford a hired hand, Erick Johnson teaches his daughters Martha and Agnes, ages 10 and 9, to plow their fallow fields behind a team of oxen. Using every fiber of their being to keep the plow turning the sun-baked earth, they plan what they will do with their pay: a penny for each time they circle the field. Returning exhausted and dirty to their sod house each evening the girls are proud to tell Pa how many pennies they earned that day. Excitedly visiting the general store in the newly founded town of Plaza when payday arrives, the girls spy the fancy patent leather shoes they've been saving for. Leaving the store in great disappointment, they carry the more practical 'clod-hoppers' that Pa insisted on - clumsy wide shoes that will more easily break up clumps of earth behind the oxen next spring. With great insight into her everyday life, we follow Martha's life on the prairie, as she falls in love with a handsome, enterprising Swedish immigrant and raises her big family in the Dakotas during the Great Depression. With innocence, good humor, laughter and tears, Martha faces life and death issues on the prairie in the early 1900's: life in a sod house, birthing babies at home, visits from Mandan Indians, a band of travelling gypsies, homelessness, locusts, and reaping the rewards of faith and perseverance.