During World War I, my maternal grandmother grew up on a ranch in the sand hills above the North Platte River of Nebraska. My great-grandparents, Dennis and Mary Emily Ward, raised my mother’s mother as well as her five sisters and five brothers. The “war to end all wars” allowed them to prosper as prices for their beef cattle and wheat shot up. Not long after the armistice, Dennis Ward and his adult son, Bill, were critically injured in a wagon rollover after an automobile driver honked, spooking their horses. They lingered for more than a year, in and out of consciousness, at a nearby doctor’s office, the university hospital in Lincoln, then back home on the sand hills. Medical bills mounted to the point that Mary Emily Ward took out a loan, with the ranch as collateral.
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