The novel opens in 1861 as 16-year-old Jeff Bussey plows the fields of his family’s Kansas farm. Jeff recalls the drought that occurred a year ago, when wheat became scarce and the Bussey family and their neighbors were forced to live on corn meal. With the drought ended, the land has begun to prosper again. Jeff’s mother, Edith Bussey, grew up in Kentucky and “found the new Kansas country hard to like” (12) with its unpredictable weather, “a land famous for its cyclones, blizzards, grasshoppers, mortgages, and its violently opposed political cliques” (12). Jeff’s father, Emory Bussey, claimed that the drought was a “blessing to the new state” (12), as it drove a third of the 100,000 settlers of Kansas territory to return to where they came from. Emory, “a veteran of the Mexican-American war, was disgusted with their faintheartedness” (12).

In the “raging guerilla warfare over slavery that had divided people on the Kansas-Missouri border into free and slave factions” (12-13), Emory believes in a free state. This growing conflict presents a larger threat to the area than the drought. Unlike his mother, Jeff wholeheartedly loves Kansas, and plans to “not only live and work in it but also to go to college” (13), as the first Kansas constitution of 1855 promised the establishment of a university.