Anyone who knows anything about our family knows that my
mother was born in South Dakota. Mom’s
great-grandfather, Michael Ryman came to Dakota Territory in the early 1880’s
and settled near the town of Warner just a few miles south of Aberdeen in
Brown County. When the Ryman’s arrived, Aberdeen was little
more than a train stop.
I am reading a book by David Laskin called The Children’s Blizzard that tells the
true story of one of the most unexpected blizzards in American history. It took place in 1888 and hit the Dakotas
especially hard. Laskin tells that the
family of L. Frank Baum, who wrote The
Wizard of Oz, moved to a farm just a few miles above Aberdeen and Baum
lived there in the early 1800s when the Rymans arrived. For a while Baum tried his hand at a variety
of stores in Aberdeen and failed miserably before eventually moving to Chicago
where he wrote his famous book.
Everyone who has ever seen the movie of The Wizard of Oz remembers the line where Dorothy says, “I don’t
think we’re in Kansas anymore.” The funny
thing is that Baum himself had never ever been to Kansas. The descriptions that he made of Kansas in
the book actually were memories that he had written about Brown County in the
summer of 1888, “Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country
that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed
land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass
was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the log blades until they
were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.” What he was describing wasn’t Kansas but the
neighborhood of our Ryman ancestors.
That is something to think about the next time I watch The Wizard of Oz.