50+ Homesteading Books (Fiction and Non-Fiction Suggestions)

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Big list of Homesteading Books or Books About Homesteading and Written By Homesteaders for encouragement and ideas for your own homesteading journey!

Big list of Homesteading Books or Books About Homesteading and Written By Homesteaders for encouragement and ideas for your own homesteading journey! #books #read #homesteading #homesteaders

Table of Contents

Homesteading Books

Have some extra time on your hands this winter with the days being shorter and the inability to work outdoors? (I almost never find time for “extras” but there is the occasional day!) A while ago on our facebook page we had an excellent question posted by a Little House Living reader….

Books Quote

And oh my did you all have some excellent suggestions of homesteading books! With so many answers I was afraid the books might get lost on our page so I took the most suggested books and made this post. Some of these books are fiction, some are non-fiction, some are letters, and more!

I also included a few notes on my favorite homestead books. All of these books would be wonderful to request from the library or to build your own homestead library!

Homesteading Memoirs and Fiction

The first part of this list contains books that were written by homesteaders or are memoirs or fictional accounts of homesteaders. If you are looking for something to read that will truly put you in the shoes of those who have gone before, check out this list!

Scroll down further for the list of books I recommend for modern homesteading.

Woman Homesteader

Letters of a Woman Homesteader – Elinore Stewart

As a young widow with a small child, Elinore Pruitt left Denver in 1909 and set out for Wyoming, where she hoped to buy a ranch. Determined to prove that a lone woman could survive the hardships of homesteading, she initially worked as a housekeeper and hired hand for a neighbor — a kind but taciturn Scottish bachelor whom she eventually married.
Spring and summers were hard, she concedes and were taken up with branding, farming, doctoring cattle, and other chores. But with the arrival of fall, Pruitt found time to take her young daughter on camping trips and serve her neighbors as a midwife, doctor, teacher, Santa Claus, and friend. She provides a candid portrait of these and other experiences in twenty-six letters written to a friend back in Denver.

Get the book here.

Elk Hunt

Letters on an Elk Hunt – Elinore Stewart

A follow-up book to Letters of a Woman Homesteader posted above. This book is in the public domain so it’s free to read online or on Kindle.

Get the book here.

Love Comes Softly

Love Comes Softly Series – Janette Oke

Love Comes Softly introduced the characters of Marty and Clark Davis, whose tragic circumstances brought them to a “marriage of convenience” on the frontier prairies during the mid 1800s. The story of how Clark’s patient, caring love mirrored that of the heavenly Father, drawing Marty to faith and to love, has captured the hearts and imaginations of over one million readers on Book One alone!

Get the book here.

My Words

These is My Words – Nancy Turner

A moving, exciting, and heartfelt American saga inspired by the author’s own family memoirs, these words belong to Sarah Prine, a woman of spirit and fire who forges a full and remarkable existence in a harsh, unfamiliar frontier. Scrupulously recording her steps down the path Providence has set her upon—from child to determined young adult to loving mother—she shares the turbulent events, both joyous and tragic, that molded her, and recalls the enduring love with cavalry officer Captain Jack Elliot that gave her strength and purpose.

Get the book here.

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Sarah Plain and Tall – Patricia McLaughlin

Set in the late nineteenth century and told from young Anna’s point of view, Sarah, Plain and Tall tells the story of how Sarah Elisabeth Wheaton comes from Maine to the prairie to answer Papa’s advertisement for a wife and mother. Before Sarah arrives, Anna and her younger brother Caleb wait and wonder. Will Sarah be nice? Will she sing? Will she stay? This children’s literature classic is perfect for fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books, historical fiction, and timeless stories using rich and beautiful language.

Get the book here.

o pioneers my antonia

Oh Pioneers & My Antonia – Willa Cather

O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. Alexandra, inherits the family farm when her father dies, and she devotes her life to making the farm a viable enterprise at a time when other immigrant families are giving up and leaving the prairie.

Set in rural Nebraska, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is both the story of an enduring friendship and a brilliant portrayal of the lives of rural pioneers in the late-nineteenth century. Ántonia and her family are from Bohemia and they must endure real hardship and loss to establish a new home in America. But Ántonia is never broken by adversity, and her strength and love of life stays with her childhood friend Jim for years to come, even as he leaves home to study and pursue his career. Told through Jim’s eyes, My Ántonia is a rich and beautiful novel about childhood and growing up, different cultures and the lure of home.

Get the book here.

A Lantern in Her Hand

A Lantern in Her Hand – Bess Aldrich

The classic story of Abbie and Will Deal—pioneers who left everything behind for a new life on America’s frontier. Abbie Mackenzie dreamed of becoming a fine lady like her aristocratic grandmother, devoting herself to music and art. But at eighteen Abbie found a different dream, turning away from the promise of a comfortable life as a doctor’s wife to marry handsome, quiet Will Deal. Together, they eagerly accepted the challenge of homesteading in Nebraska territory, where the prairies stretched as far as the eye could see, and only the strongest survived for long.

Get the book here.

Ruffles on My Longjohns

Ruffles on my Longjohns – Isabel Edwards

An autobiographical account of a young couple’s adventures homesteading in the Canadian wilderness.

Get the book here.

Look to the Mountain

Look to the Mountain – LeGrand Cannon, Jr.

Look to the Mountain is one of the most popular and enduring American novels of the past century. Published first in 1942, it has remained in print―appearing in seven different editions with two dozen reprints―and has sold over a million copies. The book’s history testifies to the continuing appeal of the novel. It is an enthralling epic of the men and women who settled the New England wilderness.

Get the book here.

Diary of Mattie Spencer

The Diary of Mattie Spencer – Sandra Dallas

Dramatic and suspenseful, joyful and heartbreaking The Diary of Mattie Spenser is the story of an unforgettable American Woman. No one is more surprised than Mattie Spenser herself when Luke Spenser, considered the great catch of their small Iowa town, asks her to marry him. Less than a month later, they are off in a covered wagon to build a home on the Colorado frontier. Mattie’s only company is a slightly mysterious husband and her private journal, where she records the joys and frustrations not just of frontier life, but also of a new marriage to a handsome but distant stranger. As she and Luke make life together on the harsh and beautiful plains, Mattie learns some bitter truths about her husband and the girl he left behind and finds love where she least expects it. This is an unforgettable story of hardship, friendship, and survival.

Get the book here.

wilderness wife

Wilderness Wife – Bradford and Vena Angier

A former city dweller describes her difficult, sometimes dangerous, yet satisfying life with her husband in the British Columbia wilderness.

Get the book here.

A Place of Interest

A Place of Interest – Carolyn Van Loh

Seventy-five years after the Ingalls family of Little House on the Prairie fame moved to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, John and Betty Van Loh settled down on a farm near neighboring Westbrook. Like the Ingalls family, the Van Lohs wanted a place to put down roots. Unlike the Ingalls clan, who stayed in the area only a few years, the Van Loh roots began to grow in 1948 and have sunk deeply into the soil of southwestern Minnesota for more than sixty years. This book tells the story of a Minnesota farm family, as recalled through Betty Van Loh’s diaries and her children’s memories. Betty and John set an example of a strong faith and work ethic for their children. The four children learned through experience how to grow crops, drive a tractor, take care of animals, clean the house, cook meals, tend a garden, preserve food for the winter months, and lend a hand to anyone in need. The Golden Rule was not just taught in the Van Loh household; it was lived out every day. Overarching everything John and Betty did was their strong faith in God-a faith that carried them through times both happy and sad.

Get the book here.

Pioneer Women

Pioneer Women: The Lives of the Women on the Frontier – Linda Peavy & Ursula Smith

Pioneer Women provides a rare look at frontier life through the eyes of the pioneer women who settled the American West. Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith vividly describe the hardships such women endured journeying west and making homes and communities on the frontier. Their hopes and fears and, most of all, their courage in the face of adversity are revealed in excerpts from journals, letters, and oral histories. Illustrated with a fascinating collection of seldom-seen photographs, Pioneer Women reveals the faces as well as the voices of women who lived on the frontier.

Get the book here.

acrosstheplains

Across the Plains in 1844 – Catherine Sager

Catherine Sager’s story is among the most gripping firsthand accounts of life in the American west ever written. This enhanced version of her original manuscript adds explanatory notes, photos, maps, drawings, and 3d visualizations. The bonus material adds a layer of context to make Sager’s fascinating account even more vivid.

Get the book here.

Hearts West

Hearts West: True Stories of Mail Order Brides – Chris Enss

Complete with actual advertisements from both women seeking husbands and males seeking brides, New York Times bestselling book Hearts West includes twelve stories of courageous mail order brides and their exploits. Some were fortunate enough to marry good men and live happily ever after; still others found themselves in desperate situations that robbed them of their youth and sometimes their lives.

Get the book here.

 

Brides of Culdee Creek Series

The Brides of Culdee Creek Series – Kathleen Morgan

These classic historical romance novels are getting a new look for the next generation of readers. But the wonderful stories remain the same, as touching and fresh as they were when first published.

Get the book here.

coveredwagonwomen

Covered Wagon Women – Kenneth L. Holmes

The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.

Get the book here.

young pioneers Free Land

Young Pioneers & Free Land – Rose Wilder

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.

Get the book here.

Schoolteacher

A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska – Jane Jacobs

When Hannah Breece came to Alaska in 1904, it was a remote lawless wilderness of prospectors, murderous bootleggers, tribal chiefs, and Russian priests. She spent fourteen years educating Athabascans, Aleuts, Inuits, and Russians with the stubborn generosity of a born teacher and the clarity of an original and independent mind. Jane Jacobs, Hannah’s great-niece, here offers an historical context to Breece’s remarkable eyewitness account, filling in the narrative gaps, but always allowing the original words to ring clearly. It is more than an adventure story:  it is a powerful work of women’s history that provides important–and, at times, unsettling–insights into the unexamined assumptions and attitudes that governed white settler’s behavior toward native communities at the turn of the century.

Get the book here.

Red River of the North Series

The Red River of the North Series – Lauraine Snelling

The dream of their own farmstead and a good life in America brought Roald and Ingeborg Bjorklund across the Atlantic to pioneer the virgin prairie of Dakota Territory. But Roald’s tragic disappearance in a winter storm had turned Ingeborg’s dreams into a living nightmare. Against nearly impossible circumstances and overwhelming grief, she struggles to keep the farm and her family together. When spring appears, Roald’s distant cousin Haaken arrives to help with the heavy field work, and Ingeborg is able to once again concentrate her efforts on home and children. After the bleak winter, she cannot ignore the joy that Haaken brings to their lives or the attraction she begins to feel toward him. When Roald’s brother from Norway also arrives to help the family, things become very complicated around the simple prairie dwelling…

Get the book here.

averysmallfarm

A Very Small Farm – William Winchester

In the tradition of Thoreau’s Walden, William Paul Winchester offers a chronicle of everyday life on Southwind, his farm of twenty acres. As a subsistence farmer, he builds his own house and barn, puts in a garden and an orchard, acquires a milk cow, and takes up beekeeping. In these pages, we hear his thoughts on such subjects as the weather, seasonal changes, machinery repair, the flora and fauna of the region, and vegetarian cooking. His philosophy, like his lifestyle, is simple, yet profoundly wise.

Get the book here.

the egg and I

The Egg and I – Betty MacDonald

When Betty MacDonald married a marine and moved to a small chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, she was largely unprepared for the rigors of life in the wild. With no running water, no electricity, a house in need of constant repair, and days that ran from four in the morning to nine at night, the MacDonalds had barely a moment to put their feet up and relax. And then came the children. Yet through every trial and pitfall—through chaos and catastrophe—this indomitable family somehow, mercifully, never lost its sense of humor. A beloved literary treasure for more than half a century, Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I is a heartwarming and uproarious account of adventure and survival on an American frontier.

Get the book here.

sod and stubble

Sod and Stubble – John Ise

Ushering us through a dynamic period of pioneering history, from the 1870s to the turn of the century, Sod and Stubble abound with the events and issues—fires and droughts, parties and picnics, insect infestations and bumper crops, prosperity and poverty, divisiveness and generosity, births and deaths—that shaped the lives and destinies of Henry and Rosa Ise, their family, and their community.

Get the book here.

Butter in the Well

Butter in the Well – Linda Hubalek

The account of Kajsa Svensson Runeberg, an emigrant wife who recounts, through her diary, how she and her family built up a farm on the unsettled Kansas prairie. This historical fiction is based on the Swedish woman who homesteaded the author’s childhood home.

Get the book here.

Letters from the Dust Bowl

Letters From the Dust Bowl – Caroline Henderson

In May 1936 Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace wrote to Caroline Henderson to praise her contributions to American “understanding of some of our farm problems.” His comments reflected the national attention aroused by Henderson’s articles, which had been published in Atlantic Monthly since 1931. Even today, Henderson’s articles are frequently cited for her vivid descriptions of the dust storms that ravaged the Plains.

Get the book here.

The Trees The Town The Fields

The Trees, The Fields, The Town – Conrad Richter

The Trees began the story of Worth and Jary, a wild and woods faring family who lived a roaming life, pushing ever westward as the frontier advanced and as new settlements threatened their isolation. How young Sayward and her family, facing the realization that the forests had become fields and settlements, took up the arduous task of tilling the Ohio soil was the story continued in The Fields. But The Town is a much bigger book in every way than its predecessors; it is in fact a major literary event and with them comprises a great American epic.

Get the book here.

Little House in the Ozarks

Little House in the Ozarks, The Rediscovered Writings

Newspaper articles written between 1911 and 1925 describe the author’s life in the years following those covered in her series of eight children’s books.

Get the book here.

Giants in the Earth

Giants in the Earth – Ole Rolvaag

Giants in the Earth follows a Norwegian pioneer family’s struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America. The book is based partly on Rølvaag’s personal experiences as a settler, and on the experiences of his wife’s family who had been immigrant homesteaders. The novel depicts snow storms, locusts, poverty, hunger, loneliness, homesickness, the difficulty of fitting into a new culture, and the estrangement of immigrant children who grow up in a new land.

Get the book here.

40 Acres and No Mule

40 Acres and No Mule – Janice Holt Giles

In the late 1940s, Janice and Henry Giles moved from Louisville, Kentucky, back to the Appalachian hill country where Henry had grown up and where his family had lived since the time of the Revolution. With their savings, the couple bought a ramshackle house and forty acres of land on a ridge top and set out to be farmers like Henry’s forebears. To this personal account of the trials of a city woman trying to learn the ways of the country and of her neighbors, Janice Holt Giles brings the same warmth, humor, and powers of observation that characterize her novels. Enlightening and evocative, personal and universally pertinent, this description of a year of “backaches, fun, low ebbs, and high tides, and above all a year of eminent satisfaction” will be welcomed by Janice Holt Giles’s many readers, old and new.

Get the book here.


Best Homesteading Books (Modern Homesteading)

While the books above will provide you will the perspective of real pioneers and homesteaders that once lived and farm the land, the books below are more practical hands-on guides for modern homesteading.

If you are in the process of creating an off grid homestead or maybe even just a backyard homestead, these books should be able to help.

These books contain info on everything from food preservation and pressure canning to medicinal herbs and tinctures.

Backyard Homestead by Carleen Madigan

This comprehensive guide to homesteading provides all the information you need to grow and preserve a sustainable harvest of grains and vegetables; raise animals for meat, eggs, and dairy; and keep honey bees for your sweeter days. With easy-to-follow instructions on canning, drying, and pickling, you’ll enjoy your backyard bounty all winter long. This book is perfect for backyard farming on a quarter acre or more.

Get the book here.

Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery

With its origins in the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s, Carla Emery’s landmark book has grown into a comprehensive guide to living a self-sustaining lifestyle. Learn how to live independently in this comprehensive guide, including how to:

* Can, dry, and preserve food
* Plan your garden
* Grow your own food
* Make 20-minute cheese
* Make your own natural skincare products
* Bake bread
* Cook on a wood stove
* Learn beekeeping
* Raise chickens, goats, and pigs
* Create natural skincare products
* Make organic bug spray
* Treat your family with homemade remedies
* Make fruit leather
* Forage for wild food
* Spin wool into yarn
* Mill your own flour
*Build chicken coops
* Tap a maple tree
*Make compost
And more!

Basic, thorough, and reliable, this book deserves a place in urban and rural homes alike.

Get the book here.

Household Discoveries

Household Discoveries – Sidney Morse

Household Discoveries is an encyclopedia of practical recipes and processes.

Get the book here.

Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills (Back to Basics Guides)

Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills—the kind employed by our forefathers—and adapt them for a better life in the twenty-first century need look no further than this eminently useful, full-color guide.

Countless readers have turned to Back to Basics for inspiration and instruction, escaping to an era before power saws and fast-food restaurants and rediscovering the pleasures and challenges of a healthier, greener, and more self-sufficient lifestyle.

Now newly updated, the hundreds of projects, basic skills, step-by-step sequences, photographs, charts, and illustrations in Back to Basics will help you dye your own wool with plant pigments, graft trees, raise chickens, craft a hutch table with hand tools, and make treats such as blueberry peach jam and cheddar cheese. The truly ambitious will find instructions on how to build a log cabin or an adobe brick homestead.

More than just practical advice, this is also a book for dreamers—even if you live in a city apartment, you will find your imagination sparked, and there’s no reason why you can’t, for example, make a loom and weave a rag rug. Complete with tips for old-fashioned fun (square dancing calls, homemade toys, and kayaking tips), this may be the most thorough book on voluntary simplicity available.

Get the book here.

Storey’s Guide’s to Raising….

There is a large number of books in the Storey’s Guides series and if you are serious about homesteading or raising farm animals, these are some great books to get. Some of the topics are:

Raising Meat Goats
Raising Chickens and Poultry
Keeping Honey Bees
Raising Dairy Goats
Raising Sheep
And many more…

Get the books here.

The Resilient Farm and Homestead by Ben Falk

The Resilient Farm and Homestead is more than just a book of tricks and theories for regenerative site development. It offers actual working results from a complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the “great thinkers” in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with “unlikely” farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what’s possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.

Get the book here.

**My favorite methods book!

Root Cellaring – Mike Bubel

Get the book here.

**My favorite reference book!

The Organic Gardener’s Handbook – Frank Tozer

The Organic Gardeners Handbook is a great resource that covers every aspect of creating, managing and working in the organic vegetable garden. There are chapters on climate, site selection, soil science, fertility, bed preparation, composting, cover crops, planning, raising seedlings, direct sowing, watering, harvesting, weeding, pests, seed saving, harvesting, storage, season extension, greenhouses and more! It covers both the art and science of gardening with sufficient depth to have been used as a textbook in college horticulture classes, yet it explains everything in an easily understood and even entertaining manner. Whether you are a complete novice, or a veteran gardener, you will want to keep this book out in the garden shed with your tools. It is intended to be used in conjunction with its companion book, The New Vegetable Growers Handbook, which covers the cultivation of individual crops.

Get the book here.

**My favorite garden book!

Simple and Natural Soapmaking  – Jan Berry

With this new comprehensive guide, herbalist Jan Berry offers everything the modern-day enthusiast needs to make incredible botanical soaps. Beginners can join in the sudsy fun with detailed tutorials and step-by-step photographs for making traditional cold-process soap and the more modern hot-process method with a slow cooker. Jan presents 50 easy, unique soap recipes with ingredients and scents inspired by the herb garden, veggie garden, farm, forest and more. Sample soap recipes you won’t want to miss are Lavender Milk Bath Bars, Sweet Honey & Shea Layers Soap, Creamy Avocado Soap, Citrus Breeze Brine Bars, Mountain Man Beard & Body Bars and Classic Cedarwood & Coconut Milk Shave Soap. Featured resources are Jan’s handy guides to common soapmaking essential oils and their properties, oil and milk infusions with healing herbs and easy decoration techniques. The book also contains Jan’s highly anticipated natural colorants gallery showcasing more than 50 soaps that span the rainbow. Soap crafters of all levels will enjoy referencing this book for years to come.

Get the book here.

Little House Living

Little House Living: The Make Your Own Guide to a Frugal, Simple, and Self-Sufficient Life – Merissa Alink

Shortly after getting married, Merissa Alink and her husband found themselves with nothing in their pantry but a package of spaghetti and some breadcrumbs. Their life had seemingly hit rock bottom, and it was only after a touching act of charity that they were able to get back on their feet again.

Inspired by this gesture of kindness as well as the beloved Little House on the Prairie books, Merissa was determined to live an entirely made-from-scratch life, and as a result, she rescued her household budget—saving thousands of dollars a year. Now, she reveals the powerful and moving lessons she’s learned after years of homesteading, homemaking, and cooking from scratch.

Filled with charm, practical advice, and gorgeous full-color photographs, Merissa shares everything from tips on budgeting to natural, easy-to-make delicious recipes for taco seasoning mix, sunscreen, lemon poppy hand scrub, furniture polish, and much more. Inviting and charming, Little House Living is the epitome of heartland warmth and prairie inspiration.

Get the book here.


 

Of course, there are many more homesteading books out there written through the eyes of a homesteader and that can help you with the homesteading lifestyle…share your favorites in the comments section!

I have even more books in my Favorite Books list.

Have you read any of these books? What’s your favorite Homesteading Book?

merissabio

This post on Homesteading Books was originally published on Little House Living in April 2014. It has been updated as of January 2023.

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33 Comments

  1. we have the Love ComesSoftly DVD set. wonderful!! can’t wait to read some of these suggested readings.

  2. I would like to see these Homesteaders’ stories made into movies. Maybe Hallmark movies. Maybe theater movies. They would give us something wholesome and fresh to watch up against the trash and violence they put out today in movies and on tv.

    1. They made the Love Comes softly series into movies. The movies are very good but do not follow the books. The movies leave out people and their strong love of the Lord. It took watching the first one a few times for me just to forget it was based on my favorite series.

      1. Yes but the movies do not follow the books. Freat movies but disappointed that they did not follow the entire series

  3. Merissa, Thank you for posting all that you do. I am a 56 year old woman who is just now enjoying more of little house living. Thanks to you I made most of my Christmas gifts and I am on my way to buy a sewing machine (used). I want to teach my grandchildren these skills as I learn them. I was one of those women who bought into the quality vs quantity time with my family. I have worked outside my home since I was 16. I was wrong and I would give anything if I could redo those years with my children. I am thrilled to see young women now interested in making home a wonderful place to be for their families. No greater calling in my humble opinion. I can’t go back but I am sure looking forward to the next thirty years of little house living. Again thank you young lady.

  4. This is more from a boy’s perspective, but when I was growing up I loved reading the Little Britches stories by Ralph Moody. Absolutely loved them!

  5. Thanks for the list. “These is my words” by Nancy Turner is my favorite book! “Sarah’s Quilt” is also good, and there’s one more in the series that’s good as well. Since I enjoyed these so much I downloaded a couple others from this list as well. Always excited for a new book. 🙂

  6. I have a story written by my eldest half-uncle about his family going to New Mexico in a covered wagon from Texas when he was 10 yrs old. I love it. Would anyone be interested I it?

  7. Time On My Hands is one that I read last year. It is about a Nebraska homesteader and quilter. Awesome biography and a nice hefty read.

  8. The pioneer women book I have read over and over… Such great interesting things to learn! The pictures are so captivating too! Linda hubalek’s books from the trail of thread series to butter in the well are written in a fictional letter type way but are about her actual relatives that came to kansas. Living not to far away from where quantrills raids were I could actually see her relatives out working their land and hiding out along the wakarusa as raids were going on. I learned so much from those books. I have talked to Linda several times and actually went and walked on a few of the farmsteads that these pioneers lived on. It gave me goosebumps!!! My first ever homesteading books were of course Little house books then love comes softly series. Then it was delving into the true stories of the pioneer women. Thanks Merissa for listing out many more book suggestions. I will be reading several of them this winter to get more ideas from them. 🙂

  9. “The Egg and I”… was that made into a Ma and Pa Kettle movie? Or are Ma and Pa Kettle based on the book? I loved that movie when I was a kid. Wouldn’t mind owning it… the hilarity of country life 🙂

    1. Yes The Egg and I was actually made into a movie first then was made for tv. She lived in Puyallup, WA then on Whidbey Is., Wa. The author also wrote the Amelia Badelia series. The Egg and I is one of my favorite books.

  10. Great list! I have read some of these but think the majority wouldn’t be available where I live. A very good book I read was “Life in the Clearings” and “Roughing it in the Bush” by Susanna Moodie, they are about settling in Canada in the early 1800s and also a very good (true) story was “Tisha”, about a lady who went to a very remote school to teach in Alaska in the early 1900s. I don’t remember who wrote it unfortunately.

  11. Thanks for listing my book “Butter in the Well” Marissa, and thanks to one of my #1 fans Charessa for her comments too! My books were just made into audiobooks is anyone is interested in listening to them. (Check on Audible or iTunes and put in my name in the search.)
    I’m working on my next series, the Kansas Quilter now about my great grandmother and her quilts.

  12. I really enjoyed Elk Hunt by a Woman Homesteader, Elinore Pruitt Stewart. I downloaded the Kindle version for free

  13. another great book about honesteading is “Nothing Daunted” by Dorothy Wickenden. Two young debutantes in the US choose a different life, and free to do so, unlike their contemporaries in Downton Abbey. They move west to teach school in a very remote western area.

  14. Bess Streeter Aldrich wrote many fabulous books, many taking place in Nebraska at its founding. I am blessed with old original copies of one’s like Song of Years, White Bird Flying, Lantern in her Hand, several others. Some of my favorites!

  15. You should look into the book called Caroline if you haven’t already. I loved it, it was basically the same stories Laura Ingalls Wilders writes but from the perspective of her mother. It’s basically covers the second book in the LHOTP series. But it’s neat to read it from an adults perspective. The author also had it approved by the Laura Ingalls wilder Historical trust, so it is pretty accurate to how things would have went.

  16. A really interesting story about a French couple and permaculture… Miraculous Abundance. I’m really captivated by the idea of permaculture at the moment and how to implement on a small scale, growing each year.

  17. This is a great list, thank you! I’m happy to say I have already read many of these. I also enjoy the books (and magazine) by Mary Jane Butters.