Molly and David are a young newlywed couple, setting out from Minnesota to the Dakota Territory to homestead on fifty acres. They have a team of horses, a wagon, and little else with which to start their new life together and it is not much longer before Molly is pregnant. It's pretty isolated where they have set up house in a small dugout, but Molly is certain she can have the baby with only her husband to assist.
She has a pretty rough time giving birth, a lot rougher than either she or David expected, but she has a strapping baby boy and David gets the fields plowed and planted. Their fifty acres has a creek so water is plentiful and easy to get and there is plenty of slough hay to cut and store for the horses. They make friends with there nearest neighbors, the Svensons, who speak very little English, but, out there on the prairie, the isolation brings them together.
The wheat crop is healthy and promises to fill their pockets with cash, so David takes the rash step of buying items on credit, including lumber and windows to build them a little house instead of living in the dugout. Molly is thrilled at the prospects of a real house, but their dreams come crashing down when a plague of grasshoppers moves in and destroys not only the crops, but the seedling trees they had planted and all the grass for miles around. The young couple find themselves deep in debt with no way to pay. Everyone in the area is suffering too and there are no jobs to be found. David decides the only thing he can do is to go back east and get work there and save up some money. Molly is to stay behind and move in with the Svensons and keep their land from being stolen by claim jumpers.
Seems like David has it all under control until he breaks his leg and gets stuck in Iowa and the Svensons decide they are fed up with the Dakota Territory and they are leaving. Molly tries to find a place in the closest town where she can stay with the baby but no one wants her. She makes the rash decision to spend the winter by herself in the dugout, just her and her baby. She will face down fierce blizzards, wolves, terrible cold temperatures and worst of all, fear and loneliness.
This was a terrific story of a young couple coping with the harsh realities of homesteading in the Dakota Territory, told mainly from the point of view of the girl, Molly. She is just seventeen when she gives birth to her baby and her husband in only three years older than she. The problems she and David face are typical of what pioneers had to deal with and many were forced to give up and move on, including the author's parents, James and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Of course, Laura Ingalls Wilder told the same stories in her own series of books about homesteaders, the LITTLE HOUSE series. That is my only quibble with Lane's book, that it is mainly just a retelling of one of her mother's stories, including the grasshoppers, the blizzards, the homestead by the slough, it is all a bit too familiar. Still I enjoyed the book a lot, although it did make me wonder how anyone managed to stick it out on the Dakota prairie. Probably should have just left it all to the Sioux.
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