Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains

"An excellent introduction to the challenges and opportunities of agricultural life in a difficult region for farming . . . elegantly written." —Jeff Bremer, The Annals of Iowa

Prairie busting is central to the lore of westward expansion, but how was it actually accomplished with little more than animal and human power? In Sod Busting, David B. Danbom challenges students to think about the many practicalities of surviving on the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century by providing a det...