The family initially shelters in a shanty and Karl Oskar puts all of his energy and resources into building a more permanent house.

He begins clearing the land of the pine trees, and, with the help of Robert, Arvid, and some of their Swedish neighbors, completes a small farmhouse before winter.

Pious Lutheran neighbors attempt to persuade Kristina and Karl Oskar to shun her due to this, but they refuse.

After spending some time on his own in a small town, Robert exchanged the coins for lighter banknotes and headed back to Minnesota.

In the following years, Karl Oskar becomes an American citizen and tries to volunteer to serve in the Civil War, but he is rejected because of his limp.

Deciding to leave her fate in the hands of God, Kristina continues relations with Karl Oskar and becomes pregnant again .

The US Army puts down the uprising, and President Abraham Lincoln approves the mass execution of 38 Dakota warriors, a singular event in Mankato.

A neighbor, Axel J. Andersson, writes a letter to Karl Oskar's sister Lydia in Sweden to inform her of his death.

Included with the letter and visible to viewers is a family photograph showing Karl Oskar surrounded by his many children and grandchildren.

[3] The film was shot at Filmstaden in Stockholm, as well as in Småland and Skåne in Sweden and Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado in the United States, between February 1969 and January 1970.

[11] Writing for The New York Times, Lawrence van Gelder praised the film as "a masterly exercise in film-making", and complimented von Sydow and Ullman.

But the rendering of the settlement of the Midwest by immigrant Swedes and their dealings with the Indians and nature, is as good as anything in American literature on the subject",[14] and it was an influence on some of his later work.

[16] In his 2015 Movie Guide, Leonard Maltin gave the film three and a half stars out of four, praising it for "Superior performances, photography, many stirring scenes".

[8] Author Terrence Rafferty wrote that The New Land appears lighter than The Emigrants, but has "a more pervasive sense of danger" and "disquiet", and compared Robert and Arvid to Lennie and George in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.