Lin Enger Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

In this brief essay, Lin Enger discusses how his own family history inspired The High Divide.

In 1883 my great-grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant, arrived in Dakota Territory to homestead 160 acres of rolling prairie. A year later, according to family legend, the last wild buffalo east of the James River wandered onto the newly broken soil of his farm. He shot the animal behind his sod barn as it drank from the stock tank. Or so the story goes. Like nearly all of our family legends, this one has to be taken on faith (my ancestors were not given to writing things down) but as a boy I was more than willing to do so, and ever since, I have been fascinated by the American bison, which at one time roamed through most of the North American continent, sixty million strong. As I grew older, my romantic attachment to the buffalo—that ragged behemoth of the plains—grew more complicated, especially as I learned how its demise was connected to the destruction of the Indian tribes that wandered those lands and consequently to my own family's American beginnings.

One story in particular took hold of me.

In 1886, it came to the attention of William Temple Hornaday, curator of the National Museum in Washington, D.C.—now called the Smithsonian Institution—that in his natural history collection he had no...