Aboard a train heading out of Minneapolis toward frontier North Dakota, Era Bell Thompson in her autobiography "American Daughter" (1946) describes a landscape that grows steadily bleaker with each mile farther west: "Suddenly there was snow--miles and miles of dull, white snow, stretching out to meet the heavy, gray sky; deep banks of snow drifted against wooden snow fences.... All day long we rode through the silent fields of snow, a cold depression spreading over us." Thompson's realistic winter landscape descriptions also allegorically represent the social situation of herself and her family. The phrase "this strange white world," which she uses to describe the view from the train window, refers to both natural and social environments. In "American Daughter", the changed appearance of the physical world signals the crossing of the border from such settled and urban areas as Minneapolis to a frontier space recently opened for homesteading, and from a sense of belonging to an African American community to a sense of "exile" in a predominately white western settlement.