The Red House on the Niobrara

British author Alan Wilkinson has grown up surrounded by photos of Buffalo Bill. They came from his great-great uncle Captain Wiltshire, who brought Cody’s troupe across the Atlantic in 1892. Hooked on tales of the Wild West, Wilkinson travels the land between the Missouri and the Rockies, seeking to know it as a pioneer might, or a cowboy. In the Nebraska Panhandle he moves into a tumbledown hunting lodge on the banks of the Niobrara. Dwarfed by the sky, lost in an ocean of grass, he hikes through snow, hail and blistering sun, meets rattle-snakes and a mountain lion, plants a garden and watches a plague of grasshoppers destroy it, then sees his only road washed away by a storm. But in helping his neighbours at spring round-up, cutting hay, repairing the lodge, he learns why people fall in love with a land once labelled the Great American Desert.