Mrs. Jacob Klein has a husband, children, and a warm and comfortable home in California. No one-not even her family-knows how she came to be out West thirteen years ago. Jacob, a kind and patient man, has promised not to ask. But if she were to tell her story, she would recount a tale of tragedy, mishaps, and unthinkable choices-yet also sacrifice, courage, and a powerful, unexpected love . . . 1846: On the outskirts of Cincinnati, wagons gather...

A pioneer father transports his beloved fruit trees and his family to Oregon in the mid-nineteenth century. Based loosely on the life of Henderson Luelling.

His life turned upside down by the deaths of his children from smallpox and desertion of his Nez Percé wife, Hudson's Bay Company trader James MacLaren joins a group of settlers headed west to Oregon in 1847.

The search for wealthy and idealistic young Englishman Simon Gaunt who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West, brings together an assortment of characters, each with his or her own purpose, including Simon's brothers Addington and Charles, their Scots-Indian guide Jerry Potts, journalist Caleb Ayto, revenge-minded Lucy Stoveall, and Civil War veteran Custis Straw.

"If you are an adventuresome young woman of high moral character and fine health, are you willing to travel to California in search of a good husband?" It's February, 1852, and all around Chicago, Maggie sees postings soliciting "eligible women" to travel to the gold mines of Goosetown. A young seamstress with a small daughter, she has nothing to lose. She joins forty-three other women and two pious reverends on the dangerous 2,000-mile journey west....