Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past.

The Ingalls family packs up their covered wagon and travels from the big woods of Wisconsin to a new home in Kansas Territory, where wide open land stretches as far as the eye can see. On the prairie, they build a house, meet neighboring Indians, build a well, and fight a prairie fire.