North Dakota looked like a Norman Rockwell canvas. Its people, largely untroubled by such big-city problems as pollution and crime, prided themselves on their church going values and small-town friendliness. Their grain elevators groaned with bumper crops. On Sunday, February 13, 1983, blue skies and bright sunlight bathed a peaceful land. The Heartland, however, was not as it seemed. "Something terrible, and terribly important, was taking place," writes Pulitzer Prize Nominee journalist James Corcoran. There was fear and hatred in the land, and it was about to erupt in violence.

It happened on a country road near Medina, North Dakota, when Gordon Kahl, federal tax protester and Posse Comitatus member, shot it out with federal marshals attempting to arrest him for violating terms of his probation. Kahl and his son killed two marshals on the road, after which Kahl became a notorious and elusive fugitive. Like a bandit hero, the income tax evader and cold blooded murderer was celebrated in legend and ballad. Even after federal authorities tracked him to a farmhouse in Arkansas and killed him, many of Kahl's admirers refused to admit he was dead; some still do not.

James Corcoran has native knowledge of North Dakota and intimate knowledge of the Gordon Kahl case, having covered it for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. Since first publication of his book in 1990, no other chronicler has produced such a compelling narrative of the events, or such an insightful analysis of them, as he. Bitter Harvest is an American tragedy treating a time of national discontent. More particularly, its republication by the Institute for Regional Studies reminds us that it is a story of the northern plains, a story upon which we must reflect.

Tom Isern, Professor of History