Synopses & Reviews
The daughter of German immigrants, Mary Knackstedt married Henry Dyck, a Mennonite farmer, and in 1905 moved west to a settlement near Lamont Township in Hamilton County, Kansas. For the next thirty years they enjoyed growth and prosperity. Then the drought and dust storms that had driven many farmers from the region in the early years of the century returned. The Dycks remained on their farm and witnessed the mass exodus of farmers and townspeople -- including close friends and family -- who fled the Kansas wheat country to find work.
Review
"Waiting on the Bounty is a valuable addition to the very limited number of available memoirs of 1930s Kansas farm life. Thanks to Riney-Kehrberg's fine work, scholars, teachers, and all sorts of other readers have a chance to travel with Mary Dyck's family through five of 20th-century Kansas's most challenging and memorable years."--Kansas History
Review
"Dyck's diary is a treasure trove for historians; detailed personal accounts written by ordinary people, and especially by farm women, living in the dust bowl region during the 1930s are rare. . . . Moreover, Riney-Kehrberg's introductory essay, 'A Woman in Her World,' provides a rich interpretive foundation for the diary, acquainting the reader with Mary Dyck's background, her children, her community, her farm, and agricultural and economic conditions of the 1930s."--Great Plains Quarterly
Review
"As an historical document that details the life of an uneducated, middle-aged farm woman on the Great Plains, one that was 'defined by family, home, and farm,' and as a report on the Dust Bowl and its impact on farmers and families, Waiting on the Bounty is an essential work."--Nebraska History
About the Author
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg is an associate professor of history and director of the Program in Agricultural History and Rural Studies at Iowa State University.