If I had promised to be a priest and kept my word, today I would be .
It will appeal to history buffs and scholars alike..
This meticulously researched, eminently readable book colorfully depicts a complicated patriarch, loving wife, and eleven children eking out a living.
Documented from a multi-generational journal and illustrated with vintage photographs, By the Sweat of His Brow sets the Probstfield family\'s daily activities in the context of state and national agricultural, social, and political history and opens a window on rural life at the eastern edge of the Great Plains from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.
After some continental rambling and the federal government forcing Native Americans from the Red River Valley, a decade toiling for the Hudson\'s Bay Company persuades him that the Valley\'s rich soil offers opportunity, and as one of the earliest settlers establishes Oakport Farm near the well-timbered Red River.
Probstfield emigrates from the Rhineland to Minnesota.
M.
Defying his Catholic parents\' insistence that he join the clergy, twenty-year-old R. earning his bread by the Sweat of his brow. . . a feted-up, high-living hypocrite in the so-called vineyard of the Lord, and not a farmer . . .
If I had promised to be a priest and kept my word, today I would be