In 1880's Dakota Territory, teenager Laura Ingalls struggles to earn her teaching certificate, says good-bye to her sister Mary when she leaves home to attend a school for the blind, and shyly begins a romance with Almanzo Wilder.

Laura and Almanzo Wilder have just been married. Their life on a small prairie homestead begins with high hopes. But each year seems to bring unexpected disasters--storms, sickness, fire, and unpaid debts. These first four years call for courage, strength, and a great deal of determination. Always, though, there is love, especially for the newest member of the family--baby Rose.

Cassie Lockwood's mother died when she was little, so Cassie traveled with her father's Wild West Show and became an amazingly skillful trick rider, likened by some to the famous Annie Oakley. When her father died, she continued to work with the show, having nowhere else to go.Now Cassie has discovered that "Uncle" Jason, the show's manager, has driven the show into debt, and he's absconded with what little money was left. Devastated, Cassie decides...

Follows the lives of Beret and her husband, Per Hansa, as they make their way from Nordland, Norway, to the Dakota prairie as pioneers.

Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J.B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J.B.'s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family: J.B.'s cunning and hard father, Drum; his estranged wife, Dulcinea; and his teenage sons, Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths...

"1914, Heart Junction, South Dakota: Marigold Mahoney is livid. Her father has insisted she leave his palatial home in Minneapolis to teach school in Heart Junction. Grit Truman has been farming on rented land near Heart Junction to earn enough money to buy his own farm. When Mari's father offers him a job servicing the car he's provided for his daughter and a job driving Mari wherever she wants to go, he quickly accepts Mahoney's offer. He can...

This compelling, centuries spanning novel brilliantly interweaves the lives of two women, a writer working in the heart of modern academia and a daring young Sioux Indian on an incredible journey in the eighteenth century. The result is an unforgettable story of courage in the face of the unknown.