Sackett’s Land

Barnabas Sackett, an Elizabethan fenlander who finds Roman gold in a drained field, makes an enemy of a powerful man, and takes ship for the Carolina coast — the opening volume of the multi-generational Sackett saga that L’Amour used to run a single family from sixteenth-century England across the American continent. It sits in a curriculum of this kind as accessible frontier fiction with an explicit thesis: the people who settled the country were ordinary, landless and looking for room.

Context: Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) wrote over a hundred books and received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1983 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. Sackett’s Land was published in 1974; the list flags it as the first of seventeen Sackett novels.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Historical Fiction.
• Louis L’Amour — the author.
• Frontier — the setting, and the thing being tested.