Samuel and Liza homestead the hills

The narrator introduces his own family, depending on "hearsay, on old photographs, on stories told". Samuel Hamilton comes from the north of Ireland about thirty years before the turn of the century, bringing Liza, "a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken" with a dour Presbyterian mind. All the good land is taken, so Samuel homesteads the barren hills east of King City, adding a quarter-section for each of the nine children until the ranch runs to 1,760 dry acres. He builds the house, barn and blacksmith shop himself, invents a well-boring rig and a threshing machine, delivers his own babies, and never learns to collect a debt, so the Hamiltons stay poor. Men gather at his forge to hear him talk of poetry and philosophy. The chapter widens into the land-greed of the western settlers, then narrows again: some arrived with money and bought good bottom land. "Such a man was Adam Trask."

The Hamiltons are established as the poor, talkative side of the book: land that cannot pay, a man whose inventions make other people rich, a wife who distrusts pleasure on principle. The chapter also sets out the settlement economics of the valley, which is what lets the closing line introduce Adam Trask as the opposite kind of arrival.