THE SEA OF GRASS – By Conrad Richter

He simply tells how he thinks things were for both Indians and whites, in a hard time of violence and danger and change on a raw frontier. He was an American novelist, whose lyrical work is concerned largely with life on the American frontier in various periods. Conrad Michael Richter, as a child, he lived with his family in several small central Pennsylvania mining towns, where he encountered descendants of pioneers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who shared family stories. These inspired him later to write historical fiction set on changing American frontiers. During the early 1930s, Richter had numerous stories published in pulp magazines.

Some books are simple, light, breezy, and while enjoyable, are like eating cotton candy. Others, like The Sea of Grass, are deeper, darker, serious, and more akin to eating a good steak. Published in 1936, this novel presents in epic scope the conflicts in the settling of the American Southwest. Set in New Mexico (in the late 19th century), the novel concerns the often violent clashes between the pioneering ranchers, whose cattle range freely through the vast sea of grass, and the farmers who build fences and turn the sod. Against this background is set the triangle of rancher Colonel Jim Brewton, his unstable Eastern wife Lutie, and the ambitious Brice Chamberlain. Richter casts the story in Homeric terms, with the children caught up in the conflicts of their parents.

https://www.amazon.com/Sea-Grass-Conrad-Richter/dp/0821410261