01.14.2023 - By Prairie Public
It was the very eve of the Dust Bowl era, the darkest time in the history of EuroAmerican settlement on the Great Plains, when the Greeley County News (that’s on the western tier of Kansas, smack on the Colorado line) chose to reprint the full text (eight stanzas plus chorus) of a ballad dating from the 1880s: “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim.”