Free Land Free Country

From the earliest days of the British colonies in America, land was freely given to those willing to come and settle. Oftentimes, it was the only inducement that brought colonists to the New World. At first, colonists considered free land a privilege, but it soon came to be seen as a right. When that right was later withheld by Great Britain, the colonists rebelled. Exploring how economic hierarchies led to vast inequality in England, this book details the realization that America would provide opportunities for economic mobility. As colonists learned how to manage the land in the New World, they also learned how to govern themselves. This book emphasizes how the control of free land in America laid the groundwork for revolution. Although covered broadly in other histories, this is the first work dedicated to exploring land ownership as a unique and direct cause of the American Revolution.

In the 1880s, when adventure lay in the conquest of the prairies, David Beaton and his bride came to Dakota to claim three hundred acres of grassland. Rose Wilder Lane tells of their struggle to survive with such force that Free Land has become a classic frontier novel. The young couple experience cyclones, droughts, and blizzards that isolate them for days in their sod shanty and endanger their livestock. The simple pleasures of home cooking, horse trading, and socializing interrupt work, here described in its wealth of variety. In every detail, Free Land comes to life because Lane grew up in the time and place of which she writes. The book embodies her belief that "living is never easy, that all human history is a record of achievement in disaster, and that our great asset is the valor of the American spirit." Like the Beatons of this novel, Rose Wilder Lane's parents homesteaded in Dakota. Lane was a successful novelist and journalist when, in the 1930s, she encouraged and helped her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, to write the Little House on the Prairie books that were later dramatized for television.