Winter Reading Roundup

With average high temperatures in the 40s and lows in the 10s, and an average of 20 to 40 inches of snow, Nebraskans can go outside and ride a toboggan or go water tanking in the Sandhills, or they can curl up at home with hot chocolate or a latte and a copy of Nebraska Life and a good book, especially one that deepens a reader’s love of our Nebraska home. What follows are six books released in 2023 that will entertain and inform.

Caril Ann Fugate: Guilty or Innocent?

In January 1958, a horrific eight-day murder spree shock-ed Lincoln. Also shocking was the fact that the accused killers were teenagers. Charles Starkweather was just 19 years old, and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, 14. The coverage of the case captivated the world and led to multiple movies loosely based on it (like Natural Born Killers), songs about it (Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska”) and numerous books.

Harry N. MacClean grew up in Lincoln. He knew of Charlie Starkweather, and his family knew some of the victims. Yet that’s not why this former lawyer and author of several other true-crime books chose to write Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That Changed America.

Instead, it was a 1988 interview with Fugate that he came across when he was researching a possible book character who was “somewhat like Caril.”

“She was dramatic and very convincing in her claim of innocence [in that interview],” wrote MacLean. “Everything I’d ever seen or read about her almost assumed ab initio that she was. She had been tried and convicted, but that was in the justice system of the 1950s. Maybe the issue needed to be reexamined after all these years.”

In Starkweather, MacLean lays out the facts of the case, and the pertinent backstory – the troubled lives of both Starkweather and Fugate. He discusses the trial and the sentencing with his lawyer hat on, and he gives the reader his opinions related to Fugate’s guilt or innocence. Yet he’s also careful to offer up enough leeway for the reader to draw their own conclusions.

“In an effort like this one, the author seeks to come up with a coherent narrative of events,” wrote MacLean. “One doesn’t – because one can’t – attempt to establish the actual truth of what happened; rather the author sets forth a (hopefully) convincing presentation of the way he sees it and why he sees it that way.’

A stricken farmer remembers his helpers

Harlan Brandt will never forget that horrific day in 2013, when he was violently thrown from his tractor and landed in a ditch along the highway in Antelope County, Nebraska.

“I felt a hand in the middle of my back,” Brandt later recalled. “I blinked. I seen a bright light. I blinked again. The light was brighter. A third time I blinked; I couldn’t see. The next thing out of my mouth was, ‘God, if you want me to go to heaven, I’m ready.’”

The rural Nebraska cattleman, now in his 70s, believes he died that day, then came back to life. When brothers Kent and Kevin Warneke first heard Brandt’s story, the two former newspapermen knew the tale was worth sharing with others. Yet they didn’t want to focus solely on the near-death experience; there are plenty of those stories out there, they thought.

As they dug further into the events of that day, and into the stories of all those who offered aid – at the scene, on the way to the hospital and for weeks and months afterward – they had an idea: Why not tell the Brandt’s story from the viewpoint of the many Good Samaritans who helped save him, along with how and why the desire to help others is especially prevalent in rural America?

The Warnekes’ new book, Saving Harlan Brandt: A Survivor and His Good Samaritans, recounts the events of that horrific day. It lays out the details of the crash, then tells the stories of the motorists who stopped to help.

There’s Truman Rossman, who happened upon the crash just moments after it happened; he grabbed a towel from his car and used it to help stop the bleeding from Brandt’s head and tried to keep him calm and still. There’s Vonnie Pitzer, who heroically stopped her SUV in the middle of the westbound lane and turned on her hazard lights so that other cars couldn’t happen along and make the accident even worse.

Pitzer knew Brandt personally, but later recalled that she didn’t even recognize him because of all the blood. And there’s the off-duty nurse, Diane Morgan, who came upon the scene just before the ambulance did and who assisted Rossman in trying to stop the bleeding and also keep Brandt from moving. As Morgan walked back to her car, she remembered thinking, “He’s going to be lucky to stay alive.”

The book also includes compelling “Sidelights.” These are companion chapters about things like lending a hand, the sacrifices volunteers make to help others, and what makes the rural parts of this nation so special.

There’s even a chapter in which some of Nebraska’s elected officials – including Governor Jim Pillen – share their own stories of being on the receiving end of a Good Samaritan’s kindness and assistance.

“The overriding message,” the Warnekes wrote in the intro, “is that modern-day Good Samaritans are alive, well and plentiful throughout Nebraska and throughout rural America.” The book is available at barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com and other online retailers.

Hand-planted forest in the Sandhills transformed forestry

The village of Halsey, pop: 76, straddles Thomas and Blaine counties. Next to it is the Nebraska National Forest, a collection of hand-planted trees that cover 25,000 acres of former grassland. The trees greatly outnumber the people.

How this forest came to be, and what it means for human society, is addressed by three essayists and portrayed through black-and-white photographs, where composition, not color, captures the eye. The words and pictures are collected in Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln imprint, Bison Books.

The forest is the brainchild of Charles Edwin Bessey, a professor of botany at UNL who died in 1915 and whose bust appears in the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

Bessey requested Nebraska Sandhills land from U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and started planting trees of all types. The federal tree nursery he created on the south bank of the Middle Loup River, the first of its kind, “is now saving other forests, with trees from the nursery supplying important botanical infrastructure to forestall soil erosion and propel healing from fires,” writes essayist Katie Anania, assistant professor of art history (modern and contemporary) at the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts at UNL.

Rose-Marie Muzika writes that portions of the forest show the kind of resilience that will enable the forest to persist.

The forest photography of Dana Fritz, who has an eye for composition like Ansel Adams, will persist in the memory just as long as the trees stand.

An Omaha courtroom showdown made civil rights history

The U.S. District Court of Nebraska had seen nothing like it. No U.S. court had. The judge, Elmer Scipio Dundy, allowed a Ponca chief who’d been jailed to speak in his courtroom. What the judge and others in the courtroom heard shook them, as recounted by Lawrence A. Dwyer, an Omaha attorney and Creighton University law school graduate, in his book, Standing Bear’s Quest for Freedom.

The author sets the scene of Standing Bear’s quest. At 9:30 p.m., on Friday, May 2, 1879, the incarcerated Ponca chief stood to speak in Dundy’s courtroom, his interpreter beside him, extending his right hand for several minutes before turning to look directly at Dundy and stating, “That hand is not the color of yours. But if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine, will be the same color as yours. I AM A MAN. The same God made us both.”

Standing Bear continued speaking, and as he did, the courtroom was silent.

Dundy ruled 10 days later that Standing Bear and other Poncas had the rights of every other American to seek their day in court and be heard. The journey from servitude to citizenship followed a tortuous path, which the author describes in detail.

Ma-chu-nah-zha, as the Ponca people called Standing Bear, grew up on ancestral lands near the Niobrara River.

The author describes step by step over decades how the U.S. government, through a number of presidential administrations and broken treaties, drove a peaceful tribe off its ancestral land. The government later seized from Standing Bear a home with two rooms. They took cows, steers, horses, hogs, chickens, turkeys, corn, wheat, plows, axes, hatchets and pitchforks.

A map in the book shows the forced march of the Ponca’s “Journey of Sorrows” from their land to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, between May 16 and July 9, 1877.

Standing Bear met with President Rutherford B. Hayes in Washington, D.C., who told him to return to Indian Territory. His sister, grandmother and mother-in-law all died before he returned home. The death of his son soon followed. Standing Bear and about 30 followers left Indian Territory in January 1879 for their homeland to bury his son. They were arrested for doing so and imprisoned at Fort Omaha.

The book then describes how Standing Bear got his day in court, with the help of an empathetic journalist and lawyers. After his court victory, Standing Bear slipped away and buried the bones of his son on their ancestral property, as he had promised to do.

Sandhill cranes star in a sci-fi thriller

A giant asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, making a furious beeline for the fictional town of Little Springs, in Western Nebraska. The small town’s residents are bracing for the impact, wondering how big the asteroid really is, and whether it will annihilate all they know and love.

But wait. An asteroid doesn’t have a head and arms and legs. It’s not an asteroid, but a three-mile-long (yes, miles) alien creature, seemingly dead upon arrival, looking like a cluster of hills in the distance. With the arrival of this alien – dubbed “the giant” – Little Springs is completely overrun with government and military officials, soldiers, protestors, conspiracy theorists, spies, curious onlookers … and dangerous criminals. It’s more than the town’s sheriff, David Blunt, can handle.

Godfall, from author, former crime newspaper reporter and western Nebraska native Van Jensen, is definitely what you’d call a “mashup” of literary genres. With an alien, it’s of course leaning toward science fiction, and it’s also a murder mystery. Yet with Jensen’s vivid descriptions of the beauty of Western Nebraska that set the novel’s scenes so perfectly, this book could also be considered a travel narrative. In what other science fiction/murder mystery do Nebraska’s famous sandhill cranes figure so prominently?

“The cranes grew louder. In ones and twos, then all at once, they beat their wings and pulled themselves into the sky, flying so close overhead that David and Sunny could hear the soft whap-whap-whap of wing against wind,” Jensen wrote. “They moved not as single birds but as one great body, each linked with the other, so that as one dipped or soared or turned, all did the same, etching a grand pattern overhead.”

A series of blizzards pushed prairie life to its limits

In the winter of 1948-49, one snowstorm after another buried Nebraska, from Nov. 18, 1948 through Christmas, New Year and into April 1949. Winds repeatedly re-drifted the snow, defeating the efforts of men in snowplows who had no cab or windshield to protect them against the cold and wind. Nebraskans had seen nothing like it since the 1888 blizzard and the “black blizzards” of the 1934 Dust Bowl.

Chronicling the white-stuff calamity of 1948-49 is Nebraska native Barry D. Seegebarth, in his book, The Nebraska Winter of 1948-49: Stories of Survival.

The author recounts two major initiatives to get Nebraska moo-ving again: Operation Haylift involved dropping hay bales from C-47 and C-82 planes to within a hundred yards of startled, starving cattle, approximately 2.5 million of them in the area of Nebraska hardest hit by the Jan. 3, 1949, blizzard. Operation Snowbound deployed 673 bulldozers, 123 snowplows and 116 Army Weasels, a Jeep-like body with tank tracks, to clear roads for cars that were 15 to 20 years old, due to the Great Depression and metal rationing during World War II. Leading the charge in both campaigns was Maj. Gen. Lewis A. Pick of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who had helped build the Ledo Road between China and India.

The Weasels kept agriculture, health care and postal service running. They delivered cow’s milk to dairy processing plants, meat to butchers, patients to hospitals and mail to rural addresses.

Survival stories abound. For a Gordon-area class of 13 students, snow didn’t mean a day off from the classroom. They and their teacher were traveling by bus when a Jan. 19 storm hit, stranding them. They reached Gordon Creek Hereford Ranch, where the teacher continued instruction in her makeshift classroom until snowplows arrived Feb. 12.