James Goodenough, whose family had originally settled in Connecticut from England brings his family to Ohio to carve out a new life for them in the Black Swamp in 1838. As swamp fever gradually picks off their children and they wrestle daily with survival. This course will see their family engulfed in tragedy and fifteen years later we pick up with their youngest son, Robert who has been running west since the trying to escape his memories of what...

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl,...

A year in the life of two young girls growing up on the Wisconsin frontier, as they help their mother with the daily chores, enjoy their father's stories and singing, and share special occasions when they get together with relatives or neighbors.

Barbie's family sets up a backyard campsite to try living like pioneers, but when her mother needs to get an important project to work and there is too much traffic for her to get it there on time, the girls come up with a way to save the day.

When Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa, they find a small, dusty town suffering at the hands of renegade rancher Randall Bragg, a man who has so little regard for the law that he's taken supplies, horses, and women for his own and left the city marshal and one of his deputies for dead. Cole and Hitch, itinerant lawmen, are used to cleaning up after opportunistic thieves, but in Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary, one who raises...

"Not every Western hero wears a white hat or a tin star. Most of them are just fighting to survive. Some of them can be liars, cheaters, and thieves. And then there's a couple of old-time robbers named Slash and Pecos . . . After a lifetime of robbing banks and holding up trains, Jimmy "Slash" Braddock and Melvin "Pecos Kid" Baker are ready to call it quits, settle downf, , "f, , ef, , "though not completely by choice. The youngest members of their...

"Mercy Flanagan survived the Whitman Massacre as a child, and now her heart's cry is for peace between the native peoples and the white settlers inhabiting Oregon Territory. Unfortunately, most of the settlers would rather the tribes were removed from the land completely, one way or the other. At the request of family friend Eletta Browning, who is experiencing a difficult pregnancy, Mercy travels south to the Rogue River Valley to help. At the Browning...

In Dakota Territory in the 1880s, half-Chinese Hanna and her white father face racism and resistance to change as they try to make a home for themselves. Includes author's note.

Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers.

"Within ten days of stepping out of the woods afoot near the town of Moose Creek, Duval was the most popular man in the district. After all, what wasn't there to like? He was a good listener, generous with his money, a great cook and host, and a hard worker on old Dad Wilbur's place, which he bought for $1,500. He wins the admiration of Sheriff Nat Adare when he quells and befriends the often-wild Charlie Nash and pays for the damages he has caused...