Nancy M. Peterson

I have been writing since school days – articles, essays, reportage, humor, profiles and poetry – and have been published in such markets as The Reader’s Digest and American History Magazine. I am saturated with place and intrigued by people’s choices, generally finding real people more fascinating than fictional ones.

Growing up in western Nebraska on the North Platte River and the Oregon Trail, it was perhaps inevitable I began to focus my writing on the Western frontier. Not an academic, I’ve always been attracted to the personal side of history. I began searching out the intensely human stories that make Western history so fascinating.

I’ve written of the last moments of Lt. Caspar Collins as he faced Crazy Horse on the Platte Bridge. Of smoke drifting from ruined Cheyenne lodges after their final, futile battle at Summit Springs on the Colorado plains. Of Nebraska homesteader Luna Kellie’s grief and desperation as she buried her second baby. These stories appeared in my first book, People of the Moonshell, a history of the Platte River.

Going farther afield, I did a two-volume history of the Missouri River. I could join Edward Drinker Cope, clinging to a Montana cliff as he uncovered the first fossil of a triceratops. With a steamboat captain, I’ve “grass-hoppered” my boat over sandbars to find the maddeningly elusive river channel. And I joined a young Hidatsa girl, guarding the corn crop in her youth, and later giving birth in a tipi by the Missouri.

I don’t often tell stories of famous people. I try to tell of ordinary people who found themselves in extraordinary situations, and I search out women’s stories whenever possible.

Over the years, I’ve found myself drawn more and more toward native peoples. I’ve tried to understand their feelings as they were systematically driven from their homes. These interests have merged to produce my newest book, Walking in Two Worlds, released by Caxton Press in August 2006. Subtitled Mixed-Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Path, it tells the stories of 11 women of various tribes, most born of Indian mothers and white fathers. Snatched away to Eastern schools, where they were stripped of their native culture and trained for the white world, they had to discover who they were and what they could do with their lives. What they accomplished with those lives, each in her own way, I found amazing and inspiring and I wanted to write their stories.

As I say in my preface to my book People of the Old Missury, “Thrown against each other like cottonwood trees caught in the violence of the raging river, some people of the Old Missury splintered and disintegrated; others, though battered and torn, rode through the flood. Their stories, as individual as their faces, remind us how the currents of history can catch us all and sweep us irresistibly in directions never contemplated.”

I, too, am caught in the currents of history. It’s a great ride!