In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man's world, she is perhaps the strangest member of this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics. So begins her unabating search for a place to belong and for the raw materials with which to create a home and family of her own. Yet only through time and distance does she acquire the wisdom that allows her to see the love she lived through and sometimes left behind.

By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in which to put down roots. Brimming with careful insight and written in a spare, radiant prose, her story is a heart-wrenching ode to the rough, enormous beauty of the Western landscape and the peculiar sweetness of hard labor, to finding oneself even in isolation, to a life formed by nature, and to the redemption of love, whether given or received.

Quietly profound and moving, astonishing in its honesty, in its deep familiarity with country rarely seen so clearly, and in beauties all its own, Claiming Ground is a truly singular memoir.

• We started tracking this book on November 18, 2011.
• This book was $11.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 110 times in the past 5,016 days.
• The current price of this book is $9.99 last checked one day ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past year.
• The lowest price to date was $1.99 last reached on October 2, 2016.
• This book has been $1.99 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.99 last reached on February 16, 2025.
• This book has been $14.99 2 times since we started tracking it.

• HistoryAmericasUnited StatesState & LocalWest
• HistoryAmericas
• HistoryUnited StatesState & LocalWest

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 258 Pages
• File Size: 26 KB