It was a bit like coming across Ridge zinfandels on the Dakota plains.

Yet people still wait on platforms in the Dakota plains, in the shadows of Chicago skyscrapers, in fast-food suburbs of Atlanta, for the train to pull up and take them away.

Rølvaag's authorship and scholarship focused primarily on the pioneer experience on the Dakota plains in the 1870s.

The company boomed as lumber was scarce on the Dakota plains.

For the last quarter of a century, this quiet farming and university town high in the Dakota plains stood sentry at the front gates of the cold war.

In the tawny summer landscape of the Dakota plains, where grasslands interrupt fields of wheat, flax and barley, the newest federally subsidized cash crop is fattening up before heading south for the winter.

Their mentor beamed even more broadly at this suggestion, his horsey, protruding bicuspids glaring like great white grain elevators on the Dakota plain.