Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Thomas Moran, George Catlin and Albert Bierstadt. A Swedish homesteader dies leaving debt and unbroken ground, and his daughter, against the advice of every brother she has, mortgages what is left in order to buy more of it. Cather was taken to the Nebraska prairie at nine and heard these families out in their own kitchens; she said this was the first book she wrote to please herself rather than an editor. The land comes good. The reckoning arrives late, and from a quarter nobody was watching. Sixty plates of frontier painting by Bierstadt, Sharp and others, from the Sioux villages to the buffalo hunt, give the prairie and its people the scale Cather's prose earns.