The Sea of Grass is a 1936 novel by Conrad Richter. It is set in New Mexico in the late 19th century, and concerns the clash between rich ranchers, whose cattle run freely on government-owned land, a prairie "sea of grass", and the homesteaders or "nesters", who build fences and try to cultivate the soil for subsistence farming. It is an epic portrayal of the end of the cowboy era in the American Southwest on the Great Plains.