"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...

At first, the Ingalls lived in a sod house in Minnesota. Then Pa built a clean new house beside Plum Creek, buying the materials for it on credit, intending to pay for them with the fall wheat harvest. But just before the harvest, a strange glittering cloud suddenly blocked out the sun. Plunk! Something dropped on Laura's head, and fell to the ground. It was the biggest grasshopper she had ever seen. Millions of them descended over the country-side...

After getting married and settling at Wild Plum Creek, David's and Caroline's lives are turned upside down when disaster strikes and David must go east to find work for the winter.

In 1854, ten-year-old Kirsten, living with her family in Minnesota, meets a raiding party of Ojibway Indians and finds unexpected help when her dog is in danger.

Fourteen-year-old Polly Rodgers keeps a diary of her 1873 journey from England to Minnesota as part of a colony of eighty people seeking religious freedom, and of their first year struggling to make a life there, led by her father, a Baptist minister.

Newlyweds, Molly and David, head west to homestead. They work hard but disaster strikes and David must go east for the winter to find work. Molly is left alone with their new baby to face the prairie winter.

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In 1864 when his family moves to Bellfield, Minnesota, where his father will be the town minister, twelve-year-old Ben misses his friend Zack, who is now a drummer in the Union Army, but he finds a new friend in an orphan whose parents were killed during an Indian raid.

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.

Five short stories starring pioneer girl Kirsten are followed by brief actual accounts of what frontier life was like.