Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star by Florence Carpenter Dieudonné

A bizarre and exuberant work of pure imagination, Rondah, or, Thirty-Three Years in a Star tells the story of a ragtag group of space explorers who—aided by a shuttle set off by clockwork explosives in the Adirondack mountains—find themselves stranded on alien planet. Their adventures will test the limits of their frayed and tenuous bonds as they seek to colonize the planet, take claim of its resources, and rule over the bizarre alien lifeforms who inhabit it. Utterly strange and bursting at the seams with idea and incident, Florence Carpenter Dieudonne’s novel has since been cited as one of the first works of early speculative fiction to create a truly alien world inhabited by extraterrestrial life. - Summary by ChuckW