Homesteaders - Series by Royal Fireworks Press

Driven by grinding poverty in the 1860s, the Ytterhorn family of sharecroppers in northern Norway sells the furniture to pay for a passage and the promise of a better life in North Dakota. With their scant belongings and determination against all odds, they typify the migrants' experience in a moving and vivid story. And it is a very long journey, beset by tragedy and hardship. During the sea voyage, young Ma Ytterhorn dies from childbirth fever and her husband doubts his decision to submit his family to such a perilous undertaking. He, the new baby and his other children, call upon his wife's best friend to come out and join them. They then together face the winter trek overland by wagon. Along the way they encounter plenty of helping hands and, eventually, land to cultivate, a new homestead and a new beginning.

The second volume of the Homesteaders Series traces the Ytterhorn family through its first year on the new land.  Arriving in May, they claim land, build a cabin, break sod, raise a garden, and grow wheat for bread.  They seem to be winning the race to provide sufficiently to survive the harsh winter.

In September the Olson family arrives from Norway to claim the adjoining plot of land.  They Ytterhorns immediately aid their new neighbors in their struggle to prepare for winter. A third family claims two plots of land, but they have arrived so late that their preparations are make-shift.  

Despite the uncertainties and harsh conditions, the three families develop a community, began a school and church, and seem to be thriving when disease and tragedy strike.  By spring, all has changed.

"With authenticity Peterson pulls us back to our roots."

In the third book in the Homesteaders' Series the Ytterhorn/Olson family faces another year of challenges and opportunities on the North Dakota prairie. The achievement of the year is building a frame house with windows to replace the sod houses that were their initial dwellings.  Weather, illness, new neighbors, and greed all threaten their well-being--and indeed their capacity to keep the house.  Hard work, cooperation and loyalty to one another help the family survive in very difficult circumstances.

The Ytterhorn/Olson family barely received news of Grandmother Hulda's imminent arrival before she was at the railroad station waiting to be picked up. The prairie had been good to those members of the family who survived; they had been transformed from poor tenants in Norway into prosperous farmers cultivating their own land in the Dakota Territory.

Now Hulda was arriving with her reputaiton of being mean, and worse, with her was unmarried daughter, Ingaborg, who was remembered for bossing around the young Olson children. How would the New World remake them into new people?

The book contains Grandmother Hulda's recipes: from Norwegian meatballs to sour cream biscuits and baked raccoon!

Buy the set to follow the fortunes of the Homesteaders and save $3.97