You had to go out and hustle every day just to stay alive. At the winter solstice, with the sun slipped away from the northern hemisphere, December evenings are lit by the giant dome of the prairie sky, which remains strangely luminescent, radiating purples and golds and mysterious silver light long after the sun has set. In the gloaming, if you stand above Big Slough, you can barely make out a ridge line here and a tree line there. From approximately 900 A.D. to 1200 A.D., it thrived in the nexus between the Great Plains and the Midwest prairies, extending northward from Iowa and Nebraska to southern Minnesota, and westward to the Missouri River in what is now central South Dakota. In 1972, Henning, then a professor at the University of Nebraska, led an archaeological dig at edge of the Great Oasis, the dry lake bed near Slayton that gave its name to the culture.
Trees have yet to dominate the Murray County horizon, and the wind still blows mostly unchecked.
Fish and fowl. Lots of nearby game. Wood for fires, implements and housing. Good soil for planting corn. Shelter from the wind and, possibly, from enemies.