In the Far Country: A Portrait of Three Generations

The author, Warren E. Schwartz, is a grandson of Jacob Schwartz, one of the Swiss Mennonite immigrants to the United States in 1874. Warren’s grandfather, his father and their relatives and friends are the characters in his stories.

This book is an episodic history of three generations of Swiss Mennonites who came to America from Volhynia and settled first near Freeman, South Dakota, then later in Montana.

Warren E. Schwartz writes in the Preface: "The episodes in this book are based on oral tradition. The characters, most of them deceased, were real men and women known to my grandfather and to my father, whom reminiscences provided most of the material for this work and through whose eyes most of these stories are told. The book begins in a Mennonite settlement in Russia when my grandfather, John, was a very small child. It follows his people’s migration to America in 1874 and relates their early experiences in what was then Dakota Territory. The narrative continues with my father’s boyhood in Freeman, South Dakota, and – later – in Montana, where John homesteaded in 1910."