Erika Bolstad begins her eight-year memoir with curiosity about her great-grandmother. “Her name was Anna Josephine Sletvold. That’s about all I knew when all of this began during the darkest days of the Great Recession.” She begins with family lore that Anna was a plucky woman who settled a homestead in North Dakota. Periodic checks from an oil company for mineral rights on that land add to her interest, and she begins a journey to find Anna’s story and learn about the lease money that had sent her mother to college.
Each chapter begins with the date of her entry accompanied by the price of oil per barrel. She is not far into her account when she discovers why so little is known of her great-grandmother. Legal records reveal that Anna filed a homestead claim in 1905 before getting married late that year. The author’s grandfather Ed was born in 1906 and the next year, Anna “took sick.” With only that explanation, Anna was committed to an insane asylum. In 1912, her husband Andrew filed to claim guardianship of Anna’s property and finished proving the homestead claim.
As an environmental journalist, Erika’s interest extended beyond her grandmother to the land itself and what the search for that oil had done. Her eight-year search that spans the coronavirus pandemic will turn up more than the answers to her curiosity about Anna and the lease money. She will follow the historical environmental changes to the land and examine the possibilities for the future. An aside to the bigger story are her own experiences of coping with infertility as she makes this journey.
The blurb on the cover reads, “The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her.” I would say the great-granddaughter also learned quite a bit about her own values and will leave her readers thinking about theirs.