After more than 30 years in daily journalism in Minnesota, I moved to a trout stream near Durango, Colo., to stage a second act. Editors at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where I worked for 26 years, gave me a freelance contract to write a Minnesota History column every Sunday. Itâs morphed into a popular crowd-sourcing of history with readers feeding me delicious family stories. Iâm the lucky one who gets to weave these storiesâenriching my knowledge of what being Minnesotans is all about.
I wrote
Minnesota, 1918: When Flu, Fire, and War Ravaged the State
A master of nonfiction crime writing, William Swanson uses his W.A. Winter pen name for fictional works, including this 2022 book that clung to my thoughts weeks after the last page. Based loosely on a Minnesota crime spree in the 1950s, Winter takes readers into the mind of Joe Lavoieâthe wheelchair-bound lone survivor of three brothers who engaged in a shootout with police in 1953. Set in 1991, 38 years after the crippling police gunshot, the taut writing takes you into Joeâs mind and explores his dysfunctional family on what turns out to be his last stand.
Minneapolis, 1953âA wild crime spree stuns the Upper Midwest, leaving a trail of blood and betrayal that terrifies a region and shatters the family at its core.Â
Thirty-eight years later, the tattered remnants of the notorious LaVoie crime familyâsisters, brothers, and children too young to remember or understandâgather for an edgy reunion in a Minneapolis suburb. Among the guests is Joe LaVoie, sole survivor of the fraternal gang behind the â50s bloodshed, a convicted cop-killer crippled by a police bullet during the final shootout. Now, an old man facing his own death, Joe is both desperate and terrified to learnâŚ
Picking out one of this master storytellerâs plethora of great reads is nearly impossible, but this 2002 novel features Father Damien Modeste, a woman who has lived as a man on the remote Ojibwe reservation of Little No Horse. The gripping plot takes a turn amid an investigation into a potentially phony saint named Sister Leopolda.
A powerfully involving novel from one of America's finest writers, and winner of America's prestigious National Book Award for Fiction 2012
Sister Cecilia lives for music, for those hours when she can play her beloved Chopin on the piano. It isn't that she neglects her other duties, rather it is the playing itself - distilled of longing - that disturbs her sisters. The very air of the convent thickens with the passion of her music, and the young girl is asked to leave. And so it is that Sister Cecilia appears before Berndt Vogel on his farm, destitute, looking forâŚ
Secrets, misunderstandings, and a plethora of family conflicts abound in this historical novel set along the Brazos River in antebellum Washington County, East Texas.
It is a compelling story of two neighboring plantation families and a few of the enslaved people who serve them. These two plantations are a microcosmâŚ
This 2008 biography of a Hall of Fame baseball pitcher follows Charles Albert Bender from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to his heyday with the Philadelphia Athletics in the early-1900s. While fans know about Minnesota baseball stars like Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor, and Jack Morris, Benderâs amazing life has been all but forgotten. Swift breathes new life into a man with a foot in both his Indian and white worlds.
The greatest American Indian baseball player of all time, Charles Albert Bender, was, according to a contemporary, "the coolest pitcher in the game." Using a trademark delivery, an impressive assortment of pitches that may have included the game's first slider, and an apparently unflappable demeanor, he earned a reputation as baseball's great clutch pitcher during tight Deadball Era pennant races and in front of boisterous World Series crowds. More remarkably yet, "Chief" Bender's Hall of Fame career unfolded in the face of immeasurable prejudice. This skillfully told and complete account of Bender's life is also a portrait of greatness ofâŚ
This quirky 1966 memoir comes from a Chicago couple who traded in their big-city careers for a cabin at the end of the Gunflint Trail in Minnesotaâs remote northeastern Arrowhead country. She had been a top-notch metallurgistâfiddling with a new way to temper steel for farm implements at International Harvesterâs research lab near Chicago. He had been an art director for a textbook publisher. No one thought theyâd make it through one Minnesota winter but they endured for 17 years on the edge of the wilderness and write soothingly about their new lives amid nature.
The classic story of a family of deer and the humans who loved them
One Christmas Eve an emaciated deer stumbled across the yard of Helen Hoover's remote cabin in northern Minnesota. Barely surviving the brutal winter, gaunt from starvation, blind in one eye from a hunting wound, he became the central character in Hoover's best-selling book, The Gift of the Deer.
Hoover and her husband Adrian named this deer Peter and nursed him back to health, setting out cedar branches, corn, and carrots. From that Christmas on, the Hoovers observed Peter and his growing clan for four years. HooverâŚ
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are takenâŚ
The author, well known for his mysteries, used to write daily from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. at the St. Clair Broiler by our first home in St. Paul. In 2019, he penned a gorgeous narrative chronicling three boys and a sweet young girl named Emma and their 1932 odyssey from an Indian training school breakout down the Mississippi River. Krueger drops readers smack-dab into the Great Depression and a magical trek. It reminds me of Amor Towles' Lincoln Highway but was written first.
1932, Minnesota-the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O'Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent's wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.
Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will fly into the unknown and cross paths with othersâŚ
In what mushroomed into a unprecedented trifecta of woe, Minnesotans in 1918 faced the stateâs deadliest wildfires and a lethal influenza outbreak just as the nationâs first World War erupted. Award-winning Minnesota journalist Curt Brown puts a human face on the dreadâbraiding the three simultaneous calamities into a gripping read with true accounts impeccably researched from across the state. Published 100 years later in 2018, the book was written in the pre-COVID days but morphed into an especially relevant flashback.
In The Raffle Baby, Ruth Talbot spins a luminous tale of three Depression-era orphansâTeeny, Sonny Boy, and Vicâriding the rails, chasing harvests, and stealing when they must.
Survival is their only destination, yet Teenyâs fantastical stories, told by firelight in hobo jungles and migrant camps, keep hope aliveâincluding theâŚ
A poignant narrative about one young immigrantâs triumph in America, inspired by true events.
1938. Eli Stoff and his parents, Austrian Jews, escape to America just after the Nazis take over their homeland. Within five years, Eli joins the US Army and, thanks to his understanding of the German languageâŚ
