This fascinating saga is set in the 1860s Minnesota prairie and the Dakotas. When Civil War veterans Henry Morton and his son, Wilson, return to the family farm after years of combat and imprisonment in a Confederate jail, they find that Henry's wife has died and his daughter Helen has eloped. Both Wilson and Morton's younger son William are determined to leave the farm for the nearby town.Henry is unexpectedly granted 160 acres of government land two hundred miles away in Green Prairie, Minnesota. This is his last chance to begin again, but his stressful adventures as he attempts to claim his land remind him of the war. He must fight dangerous river currents and hostile Indians, to say nothing of desperadoes determined to steal his land grant.He must claim the land by a date certain and build a house with no one to help. His loneliness leads him to drink and to become involved with Agnes, a very young barmaid in the local saloon.Filled with shifting landscapes and graphic action, the novel's suspense-filled pace never slows. Its final scene celebrates the survival of the human spirit, a testimony as valid today as it was a century ago - testimony perhaps even more welcome in our time.