"Follows the Ingalls family's journey through Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, back to Minnesota, and on to Dakota Territory, [examining] sixteen years of travels, unforgettable experiences, and the everyday people who became immortal through Wilder's fiction. Using additional manuscripts, letters, photographs, newspapers, and other sources, ... Wilder biographer Pamela Smith Hill adds ... context and leads readers through Wilder's growth...

In 1835 James Baldwin arrives to serve as Carolina's teacher, but of more importance, he is to court Carolina's beautiful older sister, Virginia. Will expectations--and Virginia's southern charm--elicit the hoped-for proposal? Or will James and Carolina dare to acknowledge the mutual interests and feelings growing between them?

When James Baldwin takes a new position with the B&O Railroad, he and Carolina decide to move their growing family from Baltimore to a small rural town in the Allegheny Mountains. Carolina's stepdaughter, Victoria, becomes enthralled with handsome Kiernan, an Irish railroad worker. But will the upper-class Baldwins even consider him as a suitor for their daughter? And when tensions rise among the workers, can James stop a destructive plan before it's...

"Davies offers a slender but capaciously conceived debut novel about a recently widowed mule breeder who buries his grief by departing Pennsylvania for the great frontier, where the discovery of mammoth animal bones is sparking imaginations. Alas, he leaves behind young daughter Bess to tend the farm."--