Sod and Stubble

This Osborne County country gave the world one of the finest books ever written about homesteading the Great Plains. Sod and Stubble tells the true story of a Kansas family clawing a living out of the prairie, fighting drought, blizzards, grasshoppers, and crushing debt to hold onto their claim. It was written by John Ise, a University of Kansas economist who grew up on a homestead near here and based the book on the life of his own mother and father.

Published in nineteen thirty six, it became a classic of frontier literature, honest about the hardship in a way romantic Western tales rarely were. There is a second thread too. A young printer named Howard Ruede settled in Osborne County in eighteen seventy seven and wrote letters home describing the homesteader's life, later published as Sod House Days.

Together the two books are treasured records of how the plains were settled.