Young southern Wisconsin wife Mazy Bacon is perfectly content with her life until her husband decides they must head west, and the journey connects her to eleven other women in a way they never would have dreamed; based on an actual 1852 Oregon Trail incident.

Continuing the Tender Ties Historical Series, Every Fixed Star brings readers more of the dramatic, fictionalized account of Marie Dorion: the real-life woman who was the first mother to cross the Rocky Mountains and remain in the Northwest. In Book Two of the series, Marie learns the value of a tender heart, the faith of distant friends, and the act of holding life’s circumstances in open hands.
Following the family tragedy, the...

""If you are an adventuresome young woman of high moral character and fine health, are you willing to travel to California in search of a good husband?" It's February, 1852, and all around Chicago, Maggie sees the postings soliciting "eligible women" to travel to the gold mines of Goosetown. A young seamstress with a small daughter and several painful secrets, she has nothing to lose. So she joins forty-three other women and two pious reverends on...

Follows a wagon trail to California in 1848 as hundreds of pioneers endure great hardships while traveling 2,000 miles of wilderness.

Tells you what it was like to be a pioneer and travel west to Oregon in the 1840s.

Douglas Deeds, a fifteen-year-old orphan, keeps a journal of his travels by wagon train as a member of the ill-fated Donner Party, which became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-47.

Traveling with his owners from Missouri to Oregon in 1848, Koda, an energetic two-year-old quarter horse, finds the long journey increasingly tedious and tiring until his young owner goes missing on the trail and he must use all his skills to find her.

"It's 1850, and you are continuing on the treacherous Oregon Trail. In this second book of four, you need to get to Devil's Gate, the halfway mark on your 2,000-mile journey West. Keep watch! Danger awaits you on your way to those eerie cliffs. Which path will you choose in the face of danger? With more than twenty possible endings, choose wrong and you'll never make it to Devil's Gate. Choose right and blaze a trail that gets you closer to Oregon...

Excerpts from the diary of a fourteen-year-old girl tell of her family's journey along the Oregon-California Trail during 1849-1850. Includes sidebars, activities, and a timeline related to the era.