Home-Founding
- We look in on a guy named Hans Olsa, who is part of the original settler team that Per Hansa was looking for in Chapter 1. Hans Olsa is laying down turf to make a sod house (a house made of grass and soil) for himself and his wife Sörine while they settle the American prairie. It looks like they've found the place where they want to settle down.
- Hans Olsa keeps glancing toward the horizon, hoping that at any moment, Per Hans and his family will show up. While he's waiting with his wife, a neighbor named Tönseten shows up. He delivers the good news that he's had Per Hansa and his family within sight for nearly an hour. The family is just coming over one of the hills and will be with them in no time. To celebrate, they crack open a bottle of booze.
- When Per Hansa and his family pull up to the settlement, there's a nice welcoming party waiting for them. Everyone is happy about the arrival except for Beret, who wishes she'd never left Norway to begin with.
- The group sits down to a great feast. They talk and celebrate right through to the evening. Before Per Hansa and his family leave, they decide with the others which strip of farmland will be theirs. Per Hansa is overjoyed at how much land there is just for the taking. He doesn't really count the local Native Americans as owners of the land.
- When Per Hansa goes to check out his new plot of land, he finds an old Native American grave and realizes that he's about to start farming on land where people are buried. Ugh, that's definitely bad luck. He, Tönseten, and Olsa decide to keep this fact to themselves for the time being. They've heard stories about Native American massacres of white people and they don't want to scare anyone.
- The next day, Per Hansa sets out to the town of Sioux Falls to register his claim to his farmland. With Per Hansa gone, Beret continues to feel a deep fear of the prairie. She feels too exposed out in the open, and wishes she had something to hide behind. She thinks back on the long, long journey she took to get where they are. Her parents cried bitterly when she left Norway with Per Hansa, but her husband was determined to move to the American frontier and build a future for himself.
- While Beret walks around her sod house and thinks, Ole and Store-Hans come in with Native American arrowheads that they've found. The arrowheads scare Beret because it means that their settlement lies along one of the Native Americans' migration routes.
- Per Hansa eventually returns and praises Beret for all the work she's done getting the house ready while he's been gone. He has a deed to his land and is overjoyed to think of how easy it was.
- Rather than building a new house, Per Hansa decides he's going to borrow Hans Olsa's plough and start breaking his land right away. The narrator mentions that Beret is pregnant with another child, but Per Hansa figures that Beret will do all the baby work. He won't have to take any time away from the stuff he wants to do.
- The next day, Per Hansa does more work than most people do in their whole lives. The dude just loves to work; especially knowing that the land he's plowing belongs to him. That night, he goes to work on building a sod house.
- Per Hansa is a competitive man, which means that he wants to have a bigger house than his neighbors. When Tönseten sees what Hansa is building, though, he thinks the man is a fool because there's no way he'll be able to build a roof for such a huge structure. For starters, there are no trees or other building supplies in the area for this purpose. But Hansa laughs away all Tönseten's objections. It sounds like he has something up his sleeve.
- The truth is that Per Hansa is planning to build his house and his barn under a single roof, and that's why his house looks so huge.
- One day, Per Hansa gets ready to go on a journey in search of supplies for his house/barn. He asks his younger son Store-Hans to go with him while leaving Ole in charge of the house. But Ole is overcome with disappointment over not being chosen to go on what is clearly an awesome adventure.
- After three days, Per Hansa and Store-Hans return carrying a load so big their oxen can barely walk. They're hauling all kinds of lumber for the house and fresh trees for planting. They also bring a bunch of food that the family enjoys that night.