A year in the life of two young girls growing up on the Wisconsin frontier, as they help their mother with the daily chores, enjoy their father's stories and singing, and share special occasions when they get together with relatives or neighbors.

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.

Their magic tree house takes Jack and Annie back to the Wild West, where they experience excitement and danger and try to solve a riddle.

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!

Laura has her first experiences as a teacher, and is courted by Almanzo Wilder. 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.

At the end of the nineteenth century, nine-year-old Almanzo lives with his family on a big farm in New York State where he raises his own two calves, helps cut ice and shear sheep, and longs for the day he can have his own colt.

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.

When John Hale's parents moved from Chicago to a farm in the Dakota Territory in the late 1880s, he was not happy (too hot in summer, too cold in winter, and that is just the beginning); but after a year, and now eleven, he has settled in and made some friends at school--but when a sunny day in January 1888 turns abruptly into a deadly blizzard he will need all his strength and courage to survive what became known to history as The Children's Blizzard....

A little pioneer girl and her family, living in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, make their first trip into town to visit the general store.

From his 1776 Pennsylvania homestead, thirteen-year-old Samuel, who is a highly-skilled woodsman, sets out toward New York City to rescue his parents from the band of British soldiers and Indians who kidnapped them after slaughtering most of their community. Includes historical notes.