Join us at Henry’s Books in Spearfish on Saturday May 10 from 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM for a book signing with local Author Gary Wietegrefe as he shares his newest title with us, “Lessons of an Immigrant Father.”

About the Author:
Raised on a South Dakota farm and attended one-room schools, Gary Wietgrefe became one of America’s most diverse authors. He is a military intelligence veteran and attended the University of Maryland, University of Denver, and South Dakota State University before establishing a career in agriculture. Wietgrefe is an inventor with six patents in automated equipment design, engineering and biomass processing. He is an international researcher (Turkey and Mongolia), economist, agriculturalist, systems developer, societal explorer, cyclist, hiker, outdoorsman, poet, and author of eleven books. With his wife Patricia, they travel the world from Rapid City, South Dakota.

Gary and his wife, Patricia, traveled eight years on five continents after retirement while observing and documenting his findings and experiences. Example of one trip: After turning 65, he bicycled an average of 75-miles-per-day for 40 days from Pierre, South Dakota to North Pole, Alaska. When Covid shut down their travels they rented a cabin in the beautiful Black Hills of SD and he wrote his first award winning travel adventure: Destination North Pole—5,000 km by bicycle.

Want a quick read of humorous, mostly rhyming, country poems? Enjoy Dakota Country Poems.

Do you like historical fiction? If so, enjoy Wietgrefe’s first novel, Lessons of an Immigrant Father, based on a true family story. His grandfather, age 13 along with his brother 12, and 43-year-old immigrant father could not afford train fare to ship their cattle from Iowa to South Dakota. Instead, they walked two months behind their cattle for over 500 miles, hence the subtitle: 1905 cattle drive 500 miles to Dakota.

About the book:
Migrants, wherever they move from or to, teach children the past and future. Scholars, educators, migrants, and casual readers can absorb context of what immigrant ranchers and farmers taught their sons when moving into the Dakota Plains after initial homesteading.

What would an immigrant father teach in 1905?

This exciting historical fiction novel presents subtle lessons pre-teen boys would need to find food, cook meals, wash clothes, train horses, manage livestock and poultry, and farm while explaining military conscription, Christian concepts, business and social interactions, and reminiscing about the "old country." Why? Would something happen to their father?

Wietgrefe is a dying family surname. Likely the world has less than two hundred Wietgrefes. Lutheran German surnames demised during the 19th century due to wars and religious conflicts. Wars in one lifetime: rulers 1806-1871: Holy Roman Empire (Catholic), French to Independent Kingdom, Great Britian alliance (Anglican), North German Empire, German Civil War, Napoleonic (French) Wars, and eventually Prussia.

Henry Louis "H.L." Wietgrefe, age seven, fled Hannover Lower Saxony by ship from Bremerhaven, Prussia on the SS Main August 14, 1869 with his parents and four siblings and immigrated to eastern Iowa as farmers. They sought a better life.

A legal immigrant became a U.S. citizen. With five children and unable to afford his cattle's train fare, H.L. Wietgrefe (age 43) and his two sons, ages 12 and 13 (my grandfather), looking for a land-owning future, drove their meager herd in 1905 over 500 miles to a neglected 1880s homestead in northern South Dakota. Likely it was the last long-distance cattle drive in the U.S.