This is the story of Dovie whose life spans two continents. She and her older sister, Shelagh, run away from their home in Wales to escape mistreatment by their new stepmother. The sisters, twelve and fourteen years old, board an immigrant ship where Dovie begins to see how pampered and privileged she was in her own mother's house. It is 1861, they arrive in New York City to a nation riven by Civil War. They work in the house of a rich merchant where Dovie's pride makes it hard for her to be a servant. In this household, she admires the high society she sees. On the streets she fears but sometimes sympathizes with a gang of street urchins who live on what they can steal. The sisters escape servitude but the violence of the New York Draft Riots of 1863 frightens them and they leave the city to head west. They travel to Indiana where they board with the Thompson family. Dovie helps them in their troubles and develops a bond with them. Shelagh marries a man Dovie doesn't like and goes west with him, leaving Dovie feeling alone and desolate. Dovie falls in love with a handsome, half-breed Indian gambler. She marries him in an Indian ritual with her wedding music the whir of rattlesnakes and the roll of thunder. They travel the west while her husband, Grover, works as a guide for the hunting party of an English lord. Here, Dovie discovers that titles do not necessarily confer goodness. She finds out that Grover has deceived her and prepares to leave him. After a brush with the dreaded Quantrill's Raiders, Grover is killed in an accident. Dovie is a widow at fifteen. She soon throws off mourning and marries Joe Thompson. She first knew him from reading his letters home to the Thompson family. When he returns from the Union Army after Armistice he is a gawky boy of nineteen. He is a farmer who becomes a sheriff, and the couple struggle to raise a large family and buy their own land. Dovie achieves her dream of having her own family of ten children and buying land for their home. Sheriff Joe has grown into a handsome man and important person in Turnback County, Missouri. Unsettled by his duty to hang a young boy of seventeen for murder, Joe betrays Dovie by leaving her for another woman and losing their property because of his debts. Penniless and humiliated, Dovie starts anew in Indian Territory where she sees the land as an untouched paradise. She finds a Sooner on her property before the Land Run of 1893 in which she and two of her sons take a wild ride and claim land. Sheriff Joe asks her to take him back and she accepts him. He has become a U.S. Marshal and with a posse captures the notorious Al Jennings Gang. Two of his young sons have recklessly followed the posse. Dovie goes after them and they all witness the gun battle from their hiding place. After the oil boom of 1905, Dovie witnesses oil lease auctions under the "Million Dollar Elm" and celebrates Oklahoma statehood. She becomes a tough, old woman, matriarch of a large and important family. Even though her now-wealthy sons try to discourage her, she always has a tender heart for a hard-luck story.