pioneers

Have you read every book Laura Ingalls Wilder has ever written? Did you watch every season of Little House on the Prairie over and over again and can you hear Melissa Gilbert cry “Pa!” just as clear as can be?  Did you even read Roger Lea MacBride's spinoff series about Laura’s daughter, Rose? Perhaps you’ve visited all the museums and still have documentation stating you belong to a LHOTP fan club you joined as a child. If you're nodding your head yes to everything I've asked you should pull out your calico bonnet and curl up in your distressed rocking chair with Caroline. Caroline is a

Mattie and Luke Spenser hardly know each other when they marry. Soon after marrying they take off from Fort Madison, Iowa in a covered wagon across the Great Plains to establish a homestead in Colorado Territory. Lacking any close friends or family nearby, Mattie confides in her journal and writes of the trials they face on the prairie and her loneliness and frustrations as she learns about her new husband and her role as his wife.  When a girl Luke left behind in Fort Madison threatens to destroy their marriage, Luke and Mattie learn to work as a team and build a home and a life together on

In 1904, 25-year-old Carrine Gafkjen traveled to bleak, blustery North Dakota to stake out a 160-acre homestead. After living alone for 6 months, barring her door against coyotes and walking 10 miles weekly for drinking water, she meets the conditions of the Homestead Act, and the land is hers. This is just the beginning of a remarkable true story of pioneering courage.

Later, despite harsh winters, crop failures, illness, and backbreaking sunup-to-sundown work, Carrine and her homesteader husband raise 6 children (and all 6, at her insistence, attend school and college: no small feat, often