Books with author Esther Allen Peterson

Driven by grinding poverty in the 1860s, the Ytterhorn family of sharecroppers in northern Norway sells the furniture to pay for a passage and the promise of a better life in North Dakota. With their scant belongings and determination against all odds, they typify the migrants' experience in a moving and vivid story. And it is a very long journey, beset by tragedy and hardship. During the sea voyage, young Ma Ytterhorn dies from childbirth fever and her husband doubts his decision to submit his family to such a perilous undertaking. He, the new baby and his other children, call upon his wife's best friend to come out and join them. They then together face the winter trek overland by wagon. Along the way they encounter plenty of helping hands and, eventually, land to cultivate, a new homestead and a new beginning.

The second volume of the Homesteaders Series traces the Ytterhorn family through its first year on the new land. Arriving in May, they claim land, build a cabin, break sod, raise a garden, and grow wheat for bread. They seem to be winning the race to provide sufficiently to survive the harsh winter. In September the Olson family arrives from Norway to claim the adjoining plot of land. The Ytterhorns immediately aid their new neighbors in their struggle to prepare for winter. A third family claims two plots of land, but they have arrived so late that their preparations are make-shift. Despite the uncertainties and harsh conditions, the three families develop a community, begin a school and church, and seem to be thriving when disease and tragedy strike. By spring, all has changed.

In the sixth novel in the Homesteaders series, five years have passed since the families left Norway. Elna and Signe are now fifteen and already qualified teachers. While Elna is ready to marry Trygve, Signe is determined to remain single and continue teaching. When smallpox comes to the community where she teaches, those who had it before can help the others prepare for it. Signe cares for both children and adults, and her hopes for the future change dramatically.

In this the fifth novel of The Homesteader series, the struggle of the combined Ytterhorn/Olson family for survival on the Dakota prairie continues with new threats and setbacks, including a prairie fire and an October blizzard. Signe and Elna go to school in McCauleyville and both are encouraged to take the test early to become teachers. Just after their fifteenth birthdays, they find themselves being vetted to become teachers in the small neighboring communities. Soon they each will have to prepare lessons, maintain a school, keep unruly children in line, and teach them to read and write and do arithmetic. And they will have to do it all alone, without anyone to help them, except, of course, for the local bachelors looking for wives. Trygve meanwhile is earning good money as a carpenter in McCauleyville, and the family's hard work on their land continues to produce an abundance that enables them to live so much better than they had in Norway just a few short years earlier.

The Ytterhorn/Olson family barely received news of Grandmother Hulda's imminent arrival before she was at the railroad station waiting to be picked up. The prairie had been good to those members of the family who survived; they had been transformed from poor tenants in Norway into prosperous farmers cultivating their own land in the Dakota Territory. Now Hulda was arriving with her reputaiton of being mean, and worse, with her was unmarried daughter, Ingaborg, who was remembered for bossing around the young Olson children. How would the New World remake them into new people? The book contains Grandmother Hulda's recipes: from Norwegian meatballs to sour cream biscuits and baked raccoon!