Overview

What do the living owe the dead? Emma Vogel finds a photograph in her father's nightstand two days before they bury him: a young man in uniform, a young woman with dark eyes, and a name on the back: Ruth, 1946. The photograph her father carried for more than fifty years. The secret that changed everything. PASSAGE LAND spans 160 years on the contested ground of the American Great Plains, following three families whose fates intertwine across eight generations. The Grass People: The Walking Ahead lineage begins with an Oglala Lakota warrior who fought in Red Cloud's War and survives through Wounded Knee, reservation life, and the long struggle to maintain identity against erasure, down to a young attorney fighting for tribal rights in the present day. The Dust People: The Vogels arrive as Volga German immigrants, homesteading the Nebraska Panhandle under the Kinkaid Act. They endure the Dust Bowl, world war, the farm crisis of the 1980s, and the methamphetamine epidemic; each generation deciding what to keep and what to let go. The Iron People: The Callahans build their ranch through strategic acquisition during others' misfortune-after the Indian wars, during the Depression, through the farm crisis, until a daughter must decide whether to continue the family legacy or break the pattern. When Robert Vogel falls in love with Ruth Walking Ahead in 1946, then abandons her and their daughter to marry a white woman, he sets in motion a reckoning that will take decades to unfold. His son Michael's discovery of the truth launches a search for the half-sister he never knew existed, and forces both families to confront what was lost and what might still be recovered. From Red Cloud's War to the Wounded Knee Massacre, from the Black Sunday dust storms to the closing of Cabela's headquarters, PASSAGE LAND traces how the land shapes the people who live on it, how the sins of one generation pass to the next, and how the dead continue to make claims on the living. A multigenerational American saga in the tradition of Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry.

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