The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

In 1917, Rachel DuPree is a Black woman homesteading in the South Dakota Badlands, thirteen years into a marriage that began as a bargain. Rachel had money and standing at a Chicago boarding house, and the ambitious Isaac DuPree married her so their combined claims would double his acreage. Now a two-month drought has pushed the family to the edge, and Rachel opens the novel lowering her six-year-old daughter down a well to bring up water. As she fights to hold the family together against heat, hunger, isolation, and the hostility of the white settlers around them, Rachel looks back on the choices that carried her from Chicago to this claim. Weisgarber keeps the story close and unhurried, drawing a portrait of Black frontier life that most histories left out.