In 1860, Norman Reese (b. 1846) age 14, his father, mother, two brothers and a sister braved frontier traveled to settle in Hall County, Nebraska, near the town of Wood River. His reminiscences, narrated in 1916, tell of encounters with the Sioux, frontier medicine as practiced by his father, stories of life along the Mormon Trail, and tales of other settlers in the area.

The following is from a handwritten journal, possibly either dictated by Norman Reese or written out as a fair copy of his own writing. The journal ends mid-sentence on page thirty-seven and was likely continued in a second unaccounted for notebook. However, the complete narrative was printed out in installments in the Wood River (Nebraska) Sunbeam in 1923, shortly after Mr. Reese's death.