When her husband dies after a long illness in 1881, newly pregnant Jane Weber must choose between fading to obscurity under the wing of her parents or forging a new life for herself in the Dakota Territories. Arriving in Flats Junction, Jane meets her employer, Doctor Kinney, to whom she is to be housekeeper and cook and is greeted by the engimatic Widow Hawks, her Sioux landlady. While trying to organize her new life and surroundings, Jane endeavors to establish a friendship with Kate, the town's half-breed grocer, and to understand the underlying and escalating violence toward the Native American Sioux. Life on the prairie is both simple and difficult, and tries Jane's character in more ways than simply learning to survive in the pioneer west.