Hello listeners, I’m Alysse Kathleen McCanna, here for Poets on the Plains. Today I’m excited to share a poem with you by a wonderful poet I’m lucky to call friend, Danny Rosen.

Hello Radio Readers! This is Marit coming to you from western Lane County with a Radio Readers BookByte about The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. This tragic story reminds me of a particularly bad winter storm we had when I was in high school in the early 2000s.

The western Oklahoma town of Cheyenne rests near ground scarred by a painful history. It was here, in late 1868, that Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led a dawn assault on the peace-seeking Southern Cheyenne village of Chief Black Kettle—an event once widely chronicled as a "battle," but now recognized as the Washita Massacre. Decades after, the town named for those displaced people found itself locked in a different kind of survival story: an early-20th-century rivalry for regional dominance.

In 1902, my great-great-grandfather H.B. Kliewer gained his U.S. citizenship. He had been living in Hillsboro, Kansas, ostensibly orphaned when his father died shortly after the family emigrated from Russia in the late 1880s. Until a few days ago, I had only a vague outline of this story. I knew my family had emigrated from Russia as part of the larger Mennonite migration discussed in David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard, but I was unfamiliar with the texture of this family’s settler story.