Nothing to Do But Stay: My Pioneer Mother

In eight enjoyable anecdotal essays, Young ( Green Broke ) offers a glimpse of the challenges and rewards of 20th-century pioneering life in North Dakota. In 1904, her Norwegian-born mother, Carrine Gafkjen, age 25, set out alone from Minnesota and staked a 160-acre claim; in those early days she walked five miles to a creek to wash her clothes and fetch drinking water. At 34, when she married homesteader Sever Berg and he moved onto her property (which was larger than his own), she became a prairie housewife, turning out five meals a day and preparing Norwegian specialties such as lefse, a 24-inch potato pancake baked directly on top of a cast-iron range. Young and her siblings endured their own trials, notably their efforts to herd their mother's flock of turkeys--animals, she wryly notes, that are ``congenitally indisposed to the principle of herding.'' Here too is celebration, like Syttende Mai (Norwegian Independence Day), a holiday ignored by the women, but which the men spent drinking and ``swearing deathless allegiance'' to the Old Country, ``on which most of them had never laid eyes.'' Photos not seen by PW . (Apr.)