Abstract A near-contemporary of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Tilla Dahl Deen lived a life nearly as adventurous, too. During her 19th-century childhood in, first, rural Wisconsin and then rural Minnesota, she lived in a sod shanty and lived through two of the harshest winters the Midwest has ever seen. Along the way, she fended off a wolf, watched a summer sky turn dark with grasshoppers, saw death at first hand, and saw, first-hand, too, the transformation of a small prairie settlement into a thriving...