# Eagle, Richland County, North Dakota In 1920, the Cooper family made their home in Eagle, a small farming township in Richland County, tucked into the southeastern corner of North Dakota near the Minnesota border. It was the kind of place where families settled onto the land and lived close to one another, and for the Coopers it was home during a particular season of their lives. Charles Calvin Cooper had traveled a long road to reach this prairie. Born in 1879 in Shinglehouse, Pennsylvania, he had married once in Hecla, South Dakota, before that marriage ended. In 1913 he married Anna Elizabeth Bartosh, who had herself come from Center, Iowa, by way of an earlier marriage that gave her a son, William. By 1920, Charles and Anna had built a blended household together in Eagle. William, born of Anna's first marriage, was raised as a Cooper and known as Bill. The household gathered here in 1920 included Charles and Anna and their children. Among them was Gladys May Cooper, born in North Dakota in 1914, still a young girl of about six during the family's Eagle years. Also under the same roof were William Perry Cooper, Eva Rose Rosecello Cooper, and George Thomas Cooper — the children of a marriage that joined two people who had each started over. Life in Eagle was rooted in the land and the rhythms of a rural farming community, the ordinary daily work of a family with young children in a quiet township far from any city. The Coopers' time in North Dakota did not last a great deal longer. By the late 1920s, Charles moved the family on to Minnesota, eventually settling in Bemidji, where he lived out the rest of his days until his death in 1948. For Gladys, North Dakota was the state of her birth and her earliest years. Her life would carry her onward — to Minnesota, where she met and married Robert Petrie, and later to Spokane in 1937. But Eagle, Richland County, was where the Cooper family stood together in 1920, a starting point on a prairie that shaped the beginnings of the next generation.