Dakota Winter

Ever restlessly moving West, the young Wisconsin native  winds up in as-yet-untamed  Dakota:

Level as a floor,  these acres were,

and dotted with the  bones  of bison.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 244

Sufficiently disheartening.  Yet how much moreso, as the season grew bitter, and those bleached bones  proved the only bulwark against death by freezing:

Winter!  No man knows what winter means 

until he has lived through one  in a pine-board shanty

on a Dakota plain 

with only buffalo-bones  for fuel.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 248