Hollywood stars and their lawyers have been buying Montana ranches for decades. Now, with retirement on the horizon, many urban and suburban baby-boomers with less tinsel but plenty of cash are looking for their own piece of paradise in rural America. In a recent story in The Wall Street Journal demographer Peter Nelson suggests that [...]

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When she graduated from high school, Kara Elsberry wanted to be an artist. “Since I could pick up a crayon,” she says, “it was all I ever wanted to do.” She dreamed of being a Disney animator or illustrating the gothic world and characters of a computer game. But in 1997 the cards seemed stacked [...]

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If you were “painted blue” in the 1970s, you were set for life. IBM dominated the computer market in the era before the PC, and people who worked for “Big Blue” usually stayed until they retired. Graduating from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (SDSM&T)with a degree in computer science in 1984, Don [...]

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At 25, Sharlet Brown loved Chicago. She was young and “still incredibly immortal.” Getting mugged once and hit by a cab didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for Lake Michigan, skyscrapers, elevated trains and crowds of people downtown. And why not? As a girl growing up on an isolated ranch in northwestern South Dakota, Sharlet heard her [...]

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Annette Slaba faced a tough choice. She loved teaching. The pay supplemented the income from the ranch that she and her husband operate with the help of their kids in the remote northwestern corner of South Dakota. But in 2003 her new school assignment meant driving 40 miles one way on gravel roads in all [...]

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