Central Kansas Library System

Toby Holt, a wounded Civil War veteran, moves West to claim a homestead in Washington, disastrously marries a scheming woman, and encounters profiteers eager to steal his land.

Living with seven brothers and her father, who thinks girls are useless, a thirteen-year-old Finnish American farm girl is determined to prove her worth when a enterprising gentleman tries to purchase their cash-strapped family settlement in Washington State in 1900.

Synopsis:In the late 1870s, twelve-year-old Hildy Bacom and her family leave Pennsylvania and head West, to New Tacoma on Commencement Bay in Washington Territory, a community that is barely four years old and with a population of approximately one hundred and fifty. Compared to Pennsylvania, everything in New Tacoma is different. The streets are muddy, there are few buildings, and some people live in hollowed-out cedar tree trunks. There are two...