The photographs look hauntingly familiar. I lived for a few years in a mirror image town just across the South Dakota line an hour due south. Some stray thoug

The photographs look hauntingly familiar. I lived for a few years in a mirror image town just across the South Dakota line an hour due south. Some stray thoughts: The area was mostly settled by "German-Russians". These were Germans who moved to Russia under Catherine the Great, and then re-immigrated to America in the late 1800's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans. German was the primary spoken language in the area until World War Two (1940's) when it became too politically unpopular to continue. Which is to say, they made it through World War One before making this change. Pheasant hunting is probably the primary activity that brings visitors in to this part of the country. Pheasants were introduced from Asia about the time the German-Russians came, although they nativized faster. There is lots of public land available for hunting, much of it enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep land out of production and often opens it up to public access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_Reserve_Program#Enrollment_Procedures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_Reserve_Program#E.... The town's approach too "development" was different than other parts of the US. Primarily, they were concerned with tearing down houses before they became dilapidated, or worse, "bought up by some California trucker passing through who'll move in with his Go-Go girlfriend" (close to exact quote). You could (and still can) buy a very nice house in town for less than $50,000, or a livable fixer-upper for much less. There's probably better potential for being a remote technology worker now than when I was there trying to do it by dialup. I was back a couple falls ago, visiting from California for pheasant hunting. The town I was in looks exactly like the photos in the story, enough so that I wondered at first whether Napoleon was a pseudonym. Visually, it was almost identical to how it had been when I was last there a decade before. I had been wondering how much impact the internet has had on the culture, and this article gives nice insight. Thanks Rex!