The best homesteading books

For most of her life, sixteen-year-old Hattie Brooks has been shuttled from one distant relative to another. Tired of being Hattie Here-and-There, she summons the courage to leave Iowa and move all by herself to Vida, Montana, to prove up on her late uncle’s homestead claim. Under the big sky, Hattie braves hard weather, hard times, a cantankerous cow, and her own hopeless hand at the cookstove. 

This young pioneer's story is lovingly stitched together from Kirby Larson’s own family history and the sights, sounds, and scents of homesteading life.

A fictional version of a real event—the little-known mission of retired General George Sharpe to track down Europeans and fugitive Confederates who may have aided Booth in the assassination of Lincoln. I add three fictional characters to Sharpe’s team and send them on a manhunt to Canada, England, Rome, and Paris. The manhunt soon turns into a woman-hunt as well, as the mysterious Sarah Slater becomes an obsession for Sharpe. She too was a real person, probably Booth’s lover, possibly an accomplice. The climactic chapters take place in Paris, against the backdrop of the famous International Exposition of 1867. 

The Wall Street Journal called it “elegant storytelling.” The New York Times said it “will delight any Civil War buff.”

Follow a boy’s life growing up in an isolated, wilderness, gold rush town in northern Canada. Constant adventure and harrowing escapades were the norm. Hunting, fishing, trapping, exploring abandoned gold mines, and mushing a dog team were common. Living without running water, swear, or TV was barely noticed This book is as much a memoir as it is a love story about the town and the people who all helped raise the author. Read about an inclusive community that had to work together to survive and even thrive in an unforgiving landscape, a community where volunteerism was learned at an early age and practiced by everyone. Dogs, large and small, are featured prominently as they were in the author's early life.

Sixteen-year-old Lon Pearce has lost both parents at the hands of local business owner, Carl Teverence. Grief-stricken, he heads into town, half-cocked and ready to take vengeance—only things don’t work out as planned. Teverence and his men see him coming and turn the tables on him. Lucky to escape with his life, alone and hunted, Lon takes to a long and lonely trail. Now known only as Shawnee, he embarks on a journey to learn the skills needed to exact his revenge. Along the way, he lends a hand to those in need—even when it forces him further outside the law.

During her first bleak winter at the settlement of Baldoon, amidst staggering loss and hardship, fourteen-year-old Flora has a chance encounter with the son of a Chippewa chief. What begins by chance soon manifests into a furtive friendship. In his company, amid the privation of her struggling settlement and within the shelter of his forested camp, Flora's dark view of the new world undergoes a rebirth as she awakens to the truth of her own spirit. With the threat of discovery looming over every encounter, truth will come at a high price.

Some 20 years ago, Charles Wohlforth, a life-long Alaskan, was on hand with traditional Inupiat whalers on the sea ice north of Alaska as they first came to grips with how climate change was melting the world their ancestors had taught them to subsist upon. Wohlforth describes a whale-hunting party racing to shore, their comrades trapped on a floe drifting out to sea on ice that should be solid. Elsewhere, a team of scientists transverses the tundra, sleeping in tents, surviving on frozen chocolate, and measuring the snow every ten kilometers in a quest to understand the same phenomenon of change. Wohlforth lives with both groups, portrays their hopes and conflicts, and shows the radically different ways they perceive the shifting landscape and its profound changes.

The hard-to-believe but true story of a once-in-a-lifetime mind-blowing trip. Driving 19,865 miles through 12 countries of Europe for 10 weeks with the son of the richest man in the world in 1968 brought us many adventures that you're sure to enjoy.

He turned a ship around in the middle of the ocean, we dined with Kings and Queens in Belgium, we gambled with the Shah of Iran in Monte Carlo, and I was even rescued out of handcuffs by Shirley Temple Black during the Russian invasion of Checkeslovokia, and Brigitte Bardot even asked me to dance. That doesn't even scratch the surface of our adventures, and when you read it, you'll come to realize that this story must be true because nobody could make this story up, “Nobody!”

Often overlooked, disregarded, or hidden from historical accounts due to its racy connotations, the prostitution industry was one of the most important factors in the development of the American West. The “oldest profession” fueled the economies of camps, towns, and cities as they grew. Prostitutes in the old west defied social norms to make sure their hometowns, and they themselves, were successful. Their reasons for entering life varied, from women who could find no other way to make money to those who desired independence and wealth. In return, they were ostracized, criticized, and subject to fines, jail, disease, drug addiction, violence, and unwanted pregnancies. While their success stories are many, others failed in their endeavors, their names buried with them when they died.

Twelve-year-old Daphne is sent to stay with her estranged father, a recovering alcoholic who helps her rediscover their shared passion for skateboarding. But Daphne can’t overcome her fears—and trust her dad again—until she learns what really happened when he didn’t show up for her at a skatepark years ago. The way Daphne’s dad tells it, skating is all about accepting failure and moving on. But can Daphne really let go of her dad’s past mistakes? Either way life is a lot like skating: it’s all about getting back up after you fall. 

This account of women’s fight for the vote was meant to be a pamphlet... until I discovered just how much was involved, and how much the Shetland women’s suffrage society was part of the worldwide fight. Women wanted the vote to force male MPs to legislate against abusive husbands, uncaring magistrates and negligent employers. They wanted to keep their own earnings and property; they wanted to be guardians of their children. They wanted education at school level and further... and when war came they proved that they could work in front-line hospitals and drive ambulances under fire. Discover the story of the struggle as it affected “ordinary” women, seen through the lens of one remote community.