In the winter of 1898, a seventh-grade boy drops out of school to work with his father, the cook at Blackwater Logging Camp in Minnesota.

This volume opens in the summer of 1850 as the sailing ship Charlotta unloads its human cargo--including Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson, their children, and a party of ther Swedish emigrants from Smaland--in New York City. Their journey to a new home in Minnesota Territory takes them by river boat, steam wagon, Great Lakes steamship, and ox cart to Chisago County. There Karl Oskar and Kristina claim 160 acres and begin farming. It is a year of...

The settlers focuses on Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson as they struggle to prosper on their new farm in Chisago County, Minnesota Territory, during the 1850s. Kristina, coping with a feeling of loss for Sweden and difficulty of adapting to a new land, draws strength from a newfound spirituality. Karl Oskar brings more land under cultivation and harvests rye, wheat, and corn. Together they survive blizzards, grasshopper plagues, wildcat speculation...

"Alfred Riggs was a twenty-five year old son of a missionary who found himself helplessly intertwined in the real life actions, events, and people of a harrowing conflict in the history of Minnesota. Alfred grew up among the Dakota Indians of Minnesota and he developed a profound respect for their people and established a near kinship tie to their leader, Little Crow. When war broke out, Alfred was torn between the safety of his family and friends,...

"Minnesota, 1862: As a woman fleeing from a dark and secret past, Sarah Wakefield leaves Rhode Island quietly and quickly under cover of night for the long journey to Minnesota where she has been advised there is good work to be had. She soon finds a husband who becomes a resident physician for a Sioux town there but the political backdrop of that moment is volatile: white settlers are breaking treaties, Native American land is shrinking, and mass...

"Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by luck and chance. This is the story of one such child. As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast...

After grasshoppers ruin the crops, eight-year-old Laura Ingalls and her family leave Plum Creek and move to Burr Oak, Iowa, where they experience life in a small town and help manage a hotel.

"A young couple, planning to marry, are torn apart when the Sioux uprising erupts and throws their lives into peril and turmoil. The young man, distraught when he believes his betrothed died in the battle of New Ulm, and believing he has nothing to live for, joins the union forces which are drawn into the front lines in the monumental Civil War battle of Gettysburg where he is wounded and taken prisoner by the rebel forces. When the young woman recovers...