Homestead, Idaho Territory, 1880, is the kind of place where families gather together for church picnics and barn dances, where neighbors help each other through good and bad, the kind of place where a woman with no home and no kin, like spinster Addie Sherwood, could make a fresh start. Within days of her arrival to become the town's first schoolteacher, Addie receives a marriage proposal from rancher Will Rider.
