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.

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!

Only twelve-year-old Colleen knows that her baby sister died just after she was born and that Colleen put another baby in her place, until the baby's father shows up and makes trouble for her and her family on the South Dakota prairie in the 1860s.