Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Traveling with her family from Boston to a new life in Oklahoma, Summer Steadman lived a woman's worst nightmare. Fate slammed her dream shut in Gaeddert, Kansas when typhoid fever claimed not only the life of her husband, but all four of her children. Wanting to remain near the graves of her family she sought work-- finding little in the way of employment from the small tightly bound Mennonite community. Hope came in the form of widower Peter Ollenberger,...

After his graduation from college, Thomas Ollenburger is filled with big dreams and many questions. What will he do for a career? Should he marry? Where will he call home? Torn between his Mennonite roots on the Kansas prairie and his love for the big city of Boston, as well as his affection for a girl in each location, Thomas is unsure of his place in the world. He has always sought God's leading in his decision-making, but now it seems as if God...

With their eldest son about to be drafted into military service, Reinhardt and Lillian Vogt decide to immigrate to America with their three sons and Reinhardt's adopted brother. After tragedy strikes during the voyage, their hopeful dreams turn to dust. Can they maintain the faith of their fathers in a new land?

"Dowryless and desperate, Tressa Neill applies to the inaugural class of Wyatt Herdsman School in Barnett, Kansas, in 1888. The school's one-of-a-kind program teaches young women from the East the skills needed to become a rancher - or the wife of one. Shy and small for her twenty-two years, Tressa is convinced she'll never have what it takes to survive Hattie Wyatt's hands-on instruction in skills such as milking a cow, branding a calf, riding a...

New schoolteacher Edythe Amsel has a small 1880s Nebraska town up in arms over her newfangled teaching methods, and when she takes her pupils to hear Miss Susan Anthony speak, it may be the final straw.

Fed up with the poor quality of life in 1880 New York, Tarsie Raines encourages her friends Joss and Mary Brubacher to move with their two children to Drayton Valley, Kansas, a booming town hailed in the guidebook as the land of opportunity. She offers to help with expenses and to care for Mary and the children as they travel west by wagon train. But when tragedy strikes on the trip across the prairie, Tarsie is thrown into an arrangement with Joss...