Windfall: The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her

by Erika Bolstad

Beneath the windswept North Dakota plains, riches await... At first, Erika Bolstad knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, she was a homesteader on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. As Erika's mother was dying, she revealed more. Their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna's land―and oil companies were interested in the black gold beneath the prairies. Their family, Erika learned, could get rich thanks to the legacy of a woman nearly lost to history. Anna left no letters or journals, and very few photographs of her had survived. But Erika was drawn to the young woman who never walked free of the asylum that imprisoned her. As a journalist well versed in the effects of fossil fuels on climate change, Erika felt the dissonance of what she knew and the barely-acknowledged whisper that had followed her family across the Great Plains for we could be rich . Desperate to learn more about her great-grandmother and the oil industry that changed the face of the American West forever, Erika set out for North Dakota to unearth what she could of the past. What she discovers is a land of boom-and-bust cycles and families trying their best to eke out a living in an unforgiving landscape, bringing to life the ever-present American What does it mean to be rich?

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, History, Biography Memoir, Biography, Audiobook, Adult

352 pages, Paperback

Published March 5, 2024

Reviews

[Erika Bolstad · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm the author and I loved every minute of working on this book—from the moment I first stepped foot in North Dakota in 2013 in search of Anna. I hope you all will love reading Windfall as much as I loved writing it!

[L.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fascinating, yet sad story! This is the second book of a woman being whisked away from her home, family and freedom to be isolated in an asylum because her husband ordered it. The setting is in the early 1900's in the plains and prairies of North Dakota. The author's depiction and research of this time period is fascinating and well-informed. This would be a great asset to our library and more of why I wanted to read it. Instead of hiding away this dark time period, it is there reminding us of the lack of women's rights for this era.
When Erika researches her family's history after her mother informs her of a dark secret, she travels with her husband Chris to find the truth. Not only does the family revealed dark secrets, but the land's structure and all the disasters that follow in this region...droughts, plagues, the cold and the isolation alone can make raising cattle and farming a risky undertaking.
Erika's great-grandmother, Anna, and her husband Andrew Haraseth have a son, Ed and when he was just a baby her husband has her committed to an asylum. With no voice, letters, journals and very few photos it is hard to know the extent of her stay and her situation. I can't imagine the horrors that occurred.
Anna's land contains oil beneath its rich soil and Erika is an heir to its rights. The story leads you into detail of the climate change and the environmental issues that the country is facing. There is so much more that could be added, but the history is lost inside the woman that lost everything.
An excellent job and incredible research that will make a great asset to libraries.
Thank you NetGalley and SOURCEBOOKS (non-fiction) for this ARC in exchange for my review.

[Bam cooks the books · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was attracted to this memoir because of my own interest in genealogy and Bolstad's desire to learn more about her great-grandmother Anna, who claimed a plot of land in North Dakota under the Homestead Act in the early 1900s. Unfortunately within a year or so, after having married and given birth to a son, she was committed to an insane asylum. That's all the family really knows about what happened to Anna.

But the mineral rights of her land still bring the family a 'windfall' now and then as oil companies lease the rights to drill for oil. 'We could be rich!' they think, now that oil fracking has become a lucrative endeavor in North Dakota.

As a freelance journalist, Bolstad wants to go sniff out the story there--not only to learn more about what happened to her great-grandmother, and whether their land rights are worth something, but also what effect the oil drilling is having on the land, the environment and the people. Someone is getting rich but, as usual, it's not the workers. Each chapter begins with the price of oil in ND on a certain day because the ups and downs of the industry mean boom or bust for the communities tied to it.

Bolstad spent eight years looking into this information, traveling, doing research, talking to experts. She ties this information nicely to her own family's story. The human side is also represented by Bolstad's admission of her struggle to conceive her own child. The result is an interesting memoir.

I received an arc of this book from the author and publisher via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

[Karren Sandercock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erika Bolstad is a freelance journalist, when her mother passes away, she discovers her mum owns a share of the mineral rights to Erika’s great-grandmothers land. With very little information to go by, Erika starts investigating the lives of her great-grandmother Anna and her great-great-grandmother Martha Sletviod.

Erika travels across Nebraska with her husband Chris, through the Badlands of North and South Dakota, trying to find clues, landmarks and the scattered graves of her ancestors. What she uncovers is a sad tale of what homesteaders had to deal with, grasshopper plagues, drought, flood, blizzards, fires, and isolation.

Her great-grandmother Anna married Andrew Haraseth on the 13th of December 1905. Anna already owned 160 acres of land in North Dakota, within a year she and her husband built a small house and barn and had their son Ed. When Ed was only a few months old, Anna was taken to an asylum, she was likely suffering from the after effects of a difficult birth and post-natal depression. Her only child Ed inherited her land, the family still owns a share of the mineral rights, and does this mean if the company strikes oil they will be rich?

Erika looks into Dakotas oil boom and it’s many revolutions, what she discovers is, it’s a male dominated workforce and a political one as well. Everything centers around finding and producing oil, populations of towns, and the building of roads and schools and do they consider the long term effects it has on the environment and do they even care about climate change?

I received a copy of Windfall by Erika Bolstad from Edelweiss and Sourcebooks in exchange for an honest review. It was interesting reading about the Homestead Act, life in North Dakota and how many Americas are descendants of the original homesteaders. A sad story of how a woman lost her rights, over her own body, land, son and most of all her freedom. Three and a half stars from me, the memoir was a little slow in places and Ms. Bolstad focuses too much on her own life at times and not enough on Anna.

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Windfall doesn't read like a traditional memoir and that's where I struggled with this book. It's very heavy on facts relating to climate change and the oil industry. It felt much more research driven than a personal account for the majority of the book.

I did enjoy the parts of the book where the author spoke about herself and family. The stops along her journey, and the research she shares about her great-grandmother.

If you're looking for a well researched and fact driven memoir, you will likely really enjoyed this book.

My thanks to Sourcebooks for this gifted review copy.

[Beary Into Books · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wasn't what I thought it would be. Started out strong but then became very dry. I struggled to get into it. Love the beautiful cover though.

Thank you so much for the gifted copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[Destiny · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a native North Dakotan I thought this book would be interesting however it is very little about the authors ancestor and a lot about climate change and the authors struggles with infertility. It condemns oil and gas and is a liberal authors love letter to many liberal ideals. In a subtle and condescending way she puts down many of the good people that call North Dakota home. If you are from this area beware it is not the book you think it is!

[Dawn Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this late last night and needed time to try and write a review. Apparently, I didn't take enough time [this book gave me massive book hangover and I am still feeling the effects of what I read/listened to] as I am still struggling. As there are plenty of excellent reviews out there, I will just try and sum up how this book made me feel.

First, I wasn't sure what to really expect; was this going to be like a modern Little House on the Prairie? Was it going to break open the world of homesteading [something that has intrigued me since my introduction into said Little House books] and give me more information [Not really unfortunately]? Or was it going to be some sappy memoir that would just make me roll my eyes [thankfully, this was not the case. Not one eye-roll to be found].

So, what did I get?

An absolutely gorgeous story about family. And loss [both in death and by Alzheimer's <--these parts, at the end of the book, were extremely difficult for me to listen to. Life is about to get super hard here and this was just a reminder of what is to come and while my heart was breaking for the author, it was also breaking for myself and my family]. And hopes and dreams and the loss of those [Y'all. There was some seriously UGLY crying at times in this book. I mean the kind of ugly crying that makes it hard to breathe and left me not only with a hideous headache but bereft all over again from the very personal hopes and dreams that were also dashed in my life. I felt her pain like it was my very own and now that it has been brought up all over again, I am NOT quite sure how to deal with it].

And this book [while filled with information about drilling and oil and mineral rights and fracking {I was glad to learn a little more about that as I knew the word, but not what it really was} that was both informative AND so so so confusing] was truly a labor of love to Anna, the great-grandmother who defied tradition and homesteaded and in turn, due to something beyond her very control, was paid back by being put in an Asylum to die alone. The author learns as much as she can about the woman who did so much and some of the women who came before her and learns just where the strength both she and her sister have came from. It was a fantastic read that I could barely put down, thought about when I DID put it down and will think about for many days ahead.

I was lucky enough to get an audiobook for this read and wow. just wow. The narrator did an excellent job narrating the whole book, but the sections that were particularly heartbreaking, you'd have thought it was the narrators personal experience [and perhaps it was] and the way she reads these sections, all the emotion and heartbreak in her voice...well, I can only say that I would have cried if I had been read reading it, but the ugly crying that I experienced came simply from both the story and how it was delivered. You feel all the feels you are supposed to and there is no higher compliment you can give an audiobook narrator.

Thank you to NetGalley, Erika Bolstad, Marni Penning - Narrator, SOURCEBOOKS [nonfiction], and Dreamscape Media for providing both the ARC and the audiobook ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Jodie · Rating 2 out of 5]

About 1/6 of this book was absolutely fascinating and well written. I loved the author’s quest to learn about her great grandmother. She is a skilled writer and researcher. However… it was an odd choice to take a dig at genealogists when they are likely a major audience for this book, at least as it was marketed. The larger problem, though, is that much of this book’s content is tangential at best to the quest for the grandmother. It’s like the author braided a memoir and an academic piece on oil rights — which only brought both down. This book needed to focus on what was promised versus taking us far away into the oil industry of North Dakota. It could have been summed up in a page or two and that would suffice for what we needed to understand Anna and her family situation. I think the author tried to merge two or three projects here — and it doesn’t work because they are entirely different styles, with different goals, for different audiences. I wish she had followed her stated theme in full as that story was intriguing as we followed her search, and then the sad information she learned about both Anna and her mother. I wanted to know more about that, and the land, and more about the generational themes of being a mother especially as the author wanted to become a mother herself. It was jolting to then read about fracking, oil rights, hydrocarbons in the next breath for chapters on end. It pains me to give this a two. Where was the editor!?

[Grace (alatteofliterature) · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reminded me of Eat Pray Love for all the worst reasons.

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

While not exactly what I was expecting going into it, I ended up loving this book. I wasn’t sure the juxtaposition of Bolstad’s search for her great-grandmother and the energy industry in North Dakota would necessarily mesh well together, but they did. They did because Bolstad was able to capture how complicated it all actually is, while telling a captivating story that kept me turning pages. As a life-long resident of North Dakota, the state is full of contradictions and at times, an almost overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. The state also has gone through so many boom and bust cycles (not only with oil, but with coal in the early 20th century, albeit on a smaller scale) that I sometimes think we wouldn’t know how to live outside of that cycle. Bolstad captures all these contradictions on the page, and works through her own complicated feelings about her connection to it all in a way that is so relatable. I do wish there had been some more of her great-grandmother Anna’s story, but I know that Bolstad most likely has found all the information she’ll ever find about Anna at this point, because unfortunately, women in Anna’s position were generally hidden away and very little information regarding their lives survive after that. Overall this was a compelling story, one that doesn’t look at the oil boom or homesteading in North Dakota with rose-colored glasses but one that doesn’t turn away from the uglier parts, and is one that I would definitely recommend.

Pub Date: January 17, 2023

Thank you to Sourcebooks and NetGalley for the review copy.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautifully written memoir of one woman's quest to learn about her great-grandmother while also wrestling with the complicated inheritance the great-grandmother left her. Bolstad, who is a environmental reporter, had mixed feelings about inheriting mineral rights to her great-grandmother's land—does she want to accept the financial rewards of drilling for oil or fracking, when she knows both of these things contribute to climate change? I'm not going to give away the ending. But I highly recommend this book!

[Cornmaven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many, many thanks to Sourcebooks for providing an advanced copy of this important story.

I wanted to read this book because of the genealogy mystery which inspired it. Bolstad goes in search of what happened to her great grandmother, family lore being she was a homesteader who married, had a baby, and then disappeared. What really happened is exceedingly tragic, and illustrates the fate of many women in thee 19th century as well as the misogyny which still exists today, albeit more subtle.

But I also found a tale of paradox: the way small communities makes decisions to uplift their living standards, with the price of destroying their environs and contributing to the destruction of the planet via climate change. So this is a story of fossil fuel capturing (and wasting), and what it does to everyone. There's the corporate greed, of course, but more importantly there's the natural human component of eagerness to have a "windfall," and what that windfall becomes.

Bolstad clearly did lots of research, put a lot of miles on her car, and talked to tons of experts in the eight years it took her to write this, all begun with an oil lease and inheritance of a piece of land in North Dakota. The 3 boom/busts of the state are featured, along with what happened to the communities in them, and how human memory is transient, with lessons learned forgotten with another promise of windfall.

It is a necessary story to read, with many questions to answer, and I was glad to see that the published book will include reading guide questions, as this is perfect for a serious book club. For women, our stories could all be Anna's (Bolstad's great grandmother), Bolstad's father's, and even Bolstad herself.

I absolutely loved what she decided to do in the end, and I ached with her as she and her husband pursued pregnancy, with failure after failure. I hope at some point they asked themselves whether they wanted to be pregnant or be parents, because their infertility journey is as tragic as Anna's short life.

HIGHLY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!

[Sarah Lavender Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am blown away by the breadth, depth, and originality of this book and its exhaustive research, which stays engaging and personal despite its fact-heavy topic. Erika manages to tell a story as vast as the Bakken formation yet as intimate as one of the many hotel rooms in which she stayed on her reporting road trips. I knew next to nothing about the North Dakota oil boom-and-bust when I picked up her book, and was skeptical the subject would hold my attention, but the story of her ancestors and her connection to them and to the land—and all our fate tied to it, because of climate change—fascinated and moved me. Mostly, I’m glad she chose to tell her personal story as well as theirs. By detailing every step she took as a journalist to get this story while coping with personal setbacks (from financial to fertility), I found myself wrapped up in her reporting and cheering for her along the way. I highly recommend this book, which will be categorized as a memoir but is so much more given its sweep of history and hard-hitting journalism. I'm grateful I received an advance reader copy of Windfall from the publisher, Sourcebooks.

[Scarlet Cathel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am unsure how to rate this book. I feel as if the title and summary is a bit misleading as it felt only a small fraction was actually focused on her grandmother (though she threw her name around a lot to try as a thread holding her to the original idea) and the majority was written about her views on fracking and oil.

At times it felt extremely condescending towards those whose lives are directly impacted by the oil industry and felt like this woman from Oregon and then Washington, D.C. sweeping in to tell them why they’re livelihood is terrible and how sad she feels for them before going back to her IVF treatments. At times it felt a bit as if there was a white savior complex.

It was a strange combination of thoughts, which a memoir has a right to be as it’s the authors story. I was just not expecting it given the title.

Edited to add: To put down the woman who lost her way when she was institutionalized by her husband for what sounded like either postpartum depression or psychosis feels really icky. (I can’t think of a better word)

[Marti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another non-fiction book I really enjoyed!

"Nancy Drew meets Little House on the Prairie, my flawed but indelible childhood literary influences."

"If you know where you are, you always know where you stand."

The description of the scenery in North Dakota reminds me of 143 Ostriches, my current in-the-car audio book. And, Anna's confinement reminds me of Carville, from a recent read.

"Twice glad" a phrase for twins - would be good for baby cards.

[Infosifter · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. When you express the idea that you're afraid you're going to have to have the dreadful experience of eating at Applebee's, you're not going to win friends or influence people in the upper Midwest.

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I expected. The search for the ancestor was interesting but my interest waned with the tangent into climate change and fossil fuel angst. I listened to the audiobook and felt the reader overly emoted in the telling. Some emphasis is good. Near constant emphasis makes it meaningless. Too often people apply their modern sentiments and ways of thinking to things in the past and cannot comprehend that things were the way they were. There are things done wrong in every era.

[Robert Ownbey · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you read the book details you are lead to believe this is a book about Anna the authors ancestor who settled in North Dakota. That actually covers about two chapters of the book. The rest of the book is a liberals ( very liberal) view of just about everything that they believe starting with climate change and how wonderful the Obama and Biden Administrations are. I kept hoping at some point the store would get back on track but that never happened. I found it shocking that just because someone or persons have different views that the author would even think of resorting to violence. She states that she would love to grab them by their lapels and shake some sense into them. Another journalist she idolizes states she would love to knife them. This book is false advertised. Call it what it is.

[MomofTeen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a lot to process: mineral rights, genealogy, history, fertility, geology, feminism, fracking, journalistic trips to pay the bills to write the book, Native American and tribal history, and mental illness, just to name a few topics. I found all the themes, while well researched and written, didn’t cohere.

The chapter headers listing crude oil prices are an attempt to signpost boom and bust times, but are distracting and too cute a narrative flourish. Adding Anna’s name to every chapter felt heavy handed to me and a weak attempt to remind us (or the author?) about the author’s original writing intent. We might be rich? Her mother didn’t grow up thinking/saying that. Her 2009 email proves that.

Where the author hits her stride and where this book comes alive for me is the discovery about her great -grandmother’s (and HER mother’s) battle with postpartum depression and eventual banishment to insane asylums. It is a chilling reminder of the not-so-distant past’s stigma of mental illness, especially for women and doubly so for mothers. That a woman could be so bold to homestead and then find herself deposited in an asylum mere years later is heart-wrenching. That a boy grew up without a mother (and who did raise him?) is also terrifically sad.

While I learned about geology (mainly as a byproduct of the stories she reported for pay) and history, I wished that this book could have focused on Anna and others like her. How many women endured what she did in a time before talk therapy and medication? How many women suffered due simply to an imbalance of chemicals post-birth? I want to hear their stories.

[Gerry Durisin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In an author interview that was included in my audiobook download, the author characterizes this book as a memoir. I hadn't thought of it that way, but since she obviously did, her choices of what to include and what to leave out do make a bit more sense to me, since it's her life experiences she's recalling. I found the book quite unfocused, with much less time given to the actual story of the author's search for information about her grandmother (whom she'd never known) than I'd hoped for. In that same interview, the author comments that Anna, her grandmother, is actually included in every chapter, if only in a single sentence. I suppose that's true, but I'd have estimated that Anna's story comprised only about ten percent of this memoir. The bulk of the book was devoted to details about the oil industry (financial corruption, bending or ignoring regulations, environmental impact, racial inequity, etc.), all of which was interesting, but not what the book's subtitle led me to expect. The author also wrote often about her own struggles with infertility, her journalistic ambitions and other reporting projects, and social justice issues that were much in the news during the time she was writing this book. In the last couple of hours of listening, I found myself speeding up the audiobook's narration just to get to the end.

I received a free audiobook download from the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an objective review.

[Hedda · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are too many topics fighting for attention - family history, women’s rights, oil industry, climate change, travel, and personal struggles.

I enjoyed the family research aspects though the author’s dismissive attitude toward genealogy is a bit off track for someone writing a book on family research…

The title and back cover blurb promise a family history story and answers about this country’s troubled past. That is not the story we are given. There is more about the oil industry than family or US history. While Bolstad touches on the systemic institutionalization of women this book worthy topic is handled in passing. Both her great grandmother and her great great grandmother spent their final years in asylums, and that is the story I thought I was getting.

Marketing for this title could be more honest and with a title such as: Windfall: unraveling the complexity and false promises of inherited mineral rights and the oil industry that controls their value.

I would recommend The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore for a riveting and disturbing picture of the lack of autonomy and the concentrated efforts of our misogynistic country to place women in institutions to keep them quiet and under control.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was an amazing story of the dreams and hopes of our ancestors, and our own dreams and hope for the future. Erika tells the story of her search for her great grandmother Anna, a Homestead Act pioneer. But the story can’t be told without all that surrounds it, from the displacement of the original indigenous peoples, the early oil drilling booms, the economic windfall and its unintended consequences, and the callousness of the billionaires who reaped the profits. It’s a story of how so often, the past foreshadows the future, and if we don’t pay better attention, we become part and parcel of our own downfall. From an environmental standpoint, Erika gets the point across without ever really pointing a finger—that of the oil business as an environmental wrecking ball, rolling over people, land, the air and our future. And yet we have to have oil. The world must have oil. But there is always hope for the future. Erika finds it in the smallest places and people who don’t demand attention, yet leave their mark towards a better future. As Erika herself has done. I recommend this book if you enjoy investigative journalism written with a historical fiction bent coupled with technical facts. It’s a story of our country, personified in one person’s search for her roots.

[Shelby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Idk, man. Give me a memoir about the North Dakota oil fields and I'm there.

In an author interview at the end of the book, I discovered Bolstad and I share a very similar reading taste. RIYL Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sarah Smarsh, and Terry Tempest Williams

[Tara Sypien · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wavered between 3 and 4 stars for this one. I wanted more of Anna and her story, if you pulled that from the book it was probably 40 or so pages. To me it was marketed as a prairie true crime book; even the title. And that is what I wanted more of. There were a ton of side stories and some were not interesting to me. Why I still gave it a pretty high star rating was because the writing was really good and what I did read about Anna was excellent, haunting, and devastating.

[MarthaG · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up at the library thinking it sounded like something I might possibly enjoy - and I was hooked from the start. The author balances her role as a journalist, documenting many facts about oil and gas drilling in western North Dakota and the communities in which it occurs, with her own personal story, including how she did the research and how it was connected to her family. It taught me things about an industry about which I knew virtually nothing - and probably would not have otherwise been disciplined enough to learn. The way she captured what she saw and heard from many people in many places carried me along with anticipation and some dread. But I definitely wanted to find out where she was taking me.

[Jacqi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was "meh" for me. I read it to participate in a meet up of area book clubs. My take away from the meeting was the only people who really enjoyed Windfall were people that had lived out in western ND or had a family member who had directly been involved in the oil industry. The book felt random and disjointed at times. Two stars is actually a generous rating. I would really give it a 1.5.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up and live in North Dakota, my family didn’t get land via the Homestead Act but they did come to the area around the same time as Erika’s and my dad works in natural gas. It was so fascinating to hear the history of homesteading and oil/natural gas production in the state. Erika did a wonderful job weaving a story about her family lore, wanting a family of her own, and the ins and outs of oil production in North Dakota. I really enjoyed her story and writing style.

[Catherine Richmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the book I just finished, "How the Word is Passed," author Clint Smith asks if we're all patchworks of the stories we've been told. Erika Bolstad had been told her great-grandmother had homesteaded by herself in North Dakota. Over a century later, when her family receives a check for mineral rights, Erika sets out on a journey of discovery. She finds out what happened to her great-grandmother, explores the US national obsession for hitting it rich, and uncovers the impact of oil companies on the environment.

Part of this author's exploration reminds me of my research in writing "Spring for Susannah." North Dakota intrigues me. Why would anyone choose a land whose emptiness, even now, gives me goosebumps? It's a challenging land with a beauty that grows on you.

[Jill Kandel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Most disappointing book I've read in ages. I was expecting to read about a prairie mystery and missing great-grandmother. The book barely covers this story. It descends into a college thesis on oil and fracking and gives a lopsided view of local people, not taking into consideration that a rural state can also be a complex state and home to people with many viewpoints. Poor journalism mixed with lots of whining and complaining about her job.