A fragile, spoiled 12-year-old attending a private school in Kansas City and her family is thrown into the bleak, dangerous world of frontier homestead farming in 1902. She and her mother, brother, and sister find and care for a newly born, seemingly magical white buffalo calf while living on an eastern Colorado homestead with her Kansas- militia, veteran, amputee father of the 1900 Philippine Insurrection. She has a strong mother who was an army nurse. In a sod house the family lives through prairie fires, cyclones and being kidnapped by renegade Kiowa Native Americans. She becomes a self-confident young lady who will survive a world of hardships through good humor and a caring family. An American young man fighting muslim natives in the southern islands of the Philippines recovers from serious war wounds and shows the will to live in a peaceful world. This is a true story about how Americans can survive the pain of foreign wars and learn to live peacefully when they have the opportunity to achieve a goal of survival. Using the actual family history with "what may have happened," the whole family is molded by adversity, intuition and compassion for each other. The author creates a fascinating plot to portray the life of frontier homesteads. The addition of an albino bison, which becomes the main characters pet and is simultaneously a sacred creature to the local native Americans and adds special " magic "to the story. The book is very successful in telling a rousing, fast-moving, and compassionate story of a real family in the not-so-distant past. There is a poignant authenticity to the events. Will Payton has survived the war and life on the homestead with an amputated leg, Rose is an extremely capable mother, Brother Brud is at the brink of manhood and their little sister, Babe learns that there is a woodpecker in her papas leg.