Two years after Jake started his sheep farm near Big Alkali Lake, he put on his best clothes and went to propose. He even knelt down. Lanna laughed and then frowned. “Build me a proper house, and I will consider it.” He nodded. She was right. His house of sod wouldn’t do. He caught her eyes and they both smiled. “I will surprise you.”

They married in late summer of 1909.

My novel, Valentine, Nebraska, is based on stories of my grandparents (renamed Jake and Lanna) I heard from my mother as a child. My mother never lived on the sheep farm, but my Aunt Ortha, did. I have her copy of ‘Little Women’ she took to the pasture when tending sheep. She told me of blizzards, drought, and rattlesnakes lurking in the grass. She passed away years ago, and without her I struggled to write scenes. What did the house look like? Where was the farm?

My mother passed away recently, and my dad unearthed bulging file folders and photograph albums. A copy of an old official map with handwritten names of homestead owners includes my grandfather, Jos. A Thompson. His claims totaled more than a thousand acres.

On Google Earth, I find Big Alkali Lake south of Valentine in the rugged sandhills, a million acres of grass-covered dunes, and spring-fed ponds where livestock could drink when the stock tanks froze in winter.

They turned off the rutted wide track onto a narrow sandy trail. At the top of the hill, Jake stopped the wagon and looked down into a pocket of lush bottomland surrounded by hills. He reached for Lanna’s hand. “I own everything you see.”

A floor plan of the house drawn in my aunt’s hand shows two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a parlor, complete with chairs, tables, and beds. ‘Papa’s rocking chair’ sits near the cookstove. Across all four rooms, she scrawled, ‘Darn small.’

Photographs nailed the setting down for me. A wood framed house with clapboards, double hung glass windows, cedar shakes on the roof and a brick chimney—pure elegance given their circumstances. Uncle Joe, three years old, cradles a rifle. Ortha sits in a highchair outside the original soddie.

In the parlor of her new house sipping tea, Lanna thanked her friend for the two milk cows she gave them as a wedding present. A wagon rattled over the cattle gate. It was Jake returning from town. James’ face went pale. He arrived there, unannounced with a wedding present for Lanna. A camera. No doubt he thought he’d be alone with her. He had no sense of the appropriate.

Another sketch shows a fenced pasture for saddle horses, a winter corral for sheep, and a milk house cooled by water pumped in from the windmill. Set away from the house is a tiny rectangle with two circles inside. ‘Queen Anne,’ the ‘royal’ throne, no doubt.

Lanna walked to the top of hill behind the house, her mutton sleeves snapping in the unrelenting wind. She sighed. Their work brought them little profit. Sheep strayed and died. Lambs, rejected by their mothers, had to be bottle fed. And then the wool market bottomed out. In the evening light, she looked over the hills, hypnotized by acres of golden grass rising and falling like waves on an endless sea.

Thank you, Aunt Ortha.