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So begins this story of one woman's restoration from personal grief to the meaning of community. Based on the life of German-American Emma Wagner Giesy, the only woman sent to the Oregon Territory in the 1850s to help found a communal society, award-winning author Jane Kirkpatrick shows how landscape, relationships, spirituality and artistry poignantly reflect a woman's desire to weave a unique and meaningful legacy from the threads of an ordinary life.

Emma Giesy is married and the mother of two. She's strong-willed and smart. Despite the odds, she and her husband branch off from a religious community of the 1850s to work and live independently in the remote coastal forest of the Washington Territory, surrounded by her husband's family rather than the influence of the autocratic German leader who has taken the main colony into Oregon. When she finds herself alone she wonders if God has abandoned her.

In 1850s Missouri, the religious Bethel colony is resolved to remain pure in the midst of a tainted and sinful country. However, Emma Wagner, young and independent, is at odds with the community's submissive society. Learning to overcome adversity, Emma discovers that she can use her passion to inspire the other downtrodden townspeople.

In Texas, every man has his price. For a young man of seventeen, Wilkie John Liquorish has lived one sorry life. From his ill-fated stint in the U.S. Army to a back-breaking job as a gravedigger, Wilkie just can't seem to catch a break. His latest gig-working a cattle drive from Mobeetie, Texas, to Fort Worth-is no exception. The food-poisoning death of a chuckwagon cook has everyone spooked, and the fear spreads like a disease. Wilkie barely makes it out alive.

Life for former gunfighter Johnny Fierro has never been straightforward or easy. He and Lady Luck don't always see eye-to-eye. Some days he thinks she likes to turn the cards and stack the deck against him. Although Fierro's returned to the Sinclair ranch, he still feels like an outsider. He doesn't believe this new life can last, or that he's found a place that he can finally call home. And, even as he struggles to settle into a normal life and build relationships with the various members of his once-estranged family, his past comes back to haunt him.

Gunfighter Johnny Fierro is trying to settle into a new life as a rancher in New Mexico's Cimarron Valley, but his past just won't let go. Whether it's gunfighters looking to settle old scores, or bushwhackers aiming a bullet at his back, someone is always out to get Johnny. Neighbors - and maybe his father, too - want him gone or dead, until lawless drifters bering trouble to Caimarron. Then they want to hire him. And when the drifters attack a woman in town, Johnny know he's the only one who can stop them - but at what cost?

William Tell Sackett finds strength in the Sackett clan who've come from near and far to settle the score with the "Lazy A" boys, out for Sackett's life in the canyon country of Arizona.

In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn again and again, in this story of friendships and passion, to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.

Garrett McKettrick likes fast politics, fast women, and fast cars. But when scandal sends him home, Garrett learns to appreciate Julie Remington, his former high school nemesis.

Horse breeder Tobin McMurray doesn't venture too far from his homestead. But when a Texas senator offers Tobin handsome compensation to deliver a horse to his daughter and teach her how to ride, he grudgingly agrees. Soon Tobin finds himself falling in love with the beautiful woman--but their budding romance is headed straight for danger.