With a secretive widow, a love-struck cowboy and a suspicious rancher standing in her way, Cassie Lockwood struggles to fulfill her father's dream of starting a horse ranch among the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Laura and her family are moving west again, this time to Dakota Territory. Laura really likes their frontier home until the night she and Carrie take a walk and come face to face with a huge prairie wolf!
Pa's homestead thrives, Laura gets her first job in town, blackbirds eat the corn and oats crops, Mary goes to college, and Laura gets into trouble at school, but becomes a certified school teacher.
During their first four years of marriage, Laura and Almanzo Wilder have a child and fight a losing battle in their attempts to succeed at farming on the South Dakota prairie.
Fifteen-year-old Laura learns that living away from home and teaching school can be a bit frightening when most of the students are taller than she is, but every week Almanzo Wilder arrives to take her to her family for the weekend.
After an October blizzard, Laura's family moves from the claim shanty into town for the winter, a winter that an Indian has predicted will be seven months of bad weather.
A family travels from the big woods of Wisconsin to a new home on the prairie, where they build a house, meet neighboring Indians, build a well, and fight a prairie fire.