Experience the terror of the fighting and the determination to endure as you stake a claim alongside the women caught in the bloody conflicts of Kansas in the 1850s. Follow the widowed Margaret Ralston Kennedy (a relative of the author) in this second book of the Trail of Thread series, as she travels with eight of her thirteen children from Ohio to the Territory of Kansas in 1855. Thousands of American headed west in the decade before the Civil War, but those who settled in Kansas suffered through the frequent clashes between proslavery and free-state fractions that gripped the territory....

Imagine surveying your farmstead on the last day of your life, reviewing the decades of joys, hardships, and changes that have taken place on the eighty acres you have called home for the past fifty years. Would you feel at peace or find remorse at the decisions that took place in your life? This third book in the Planting Dreams series portrays Charlotta Johnson as she recalls the events that shaped her family s destiny. A mixture of fact and fiction, based on the author s family, this book reviews the events that shaped this Swedish immigrants family as her children reached adulthood and...

Feel the uncertainty, doubt, and danger faced by the pioneer women of Kansas as they defend their homes and pray for their men during the Civil War. We think the Civil War took place in the South, but the plains state endured their share of battles and tragedy. Not only did Kansas and Missouri experience a resurgence in the terrorist raids that had plagued them in the years before the war, but the Confederate Army tried several times to sweep across the Great Plains and capture the West. Stitch of Courage, the third book in the Trail of Thread series, tells the story of the orphaned Maggie...

In this first book of the Trail of Thread series, in the form of letters she wrote on the journey, Deborah Pieratt describes the scenery, the everyday events on the trail, and the task of taking care of her family. Stories of humor and despair, along with her ongoing remarks about camping, cooking, and quilting, make you feel as if you pulled up stakes and are traveling with the Pieratts, too. This series is based on author Linda K. Hubalek's ancestors that traveled from Kentucky to Kansas in 1854. Besides the history of the times, Hubalek weaves quilting facts and quilt pattern sketches in...

The inevitable happens- time moves on and we grow older. Instead of our own little children surrounding us, grandchildren take their place. Each new generation lives in a new age of technology, not realizing the changes the generations before theirs has seen- and improved for them. The cycle of life has changed the prairie also. The endless waves of tall native prairie grass have been reduced to uniform rows of grain crops. The curves of the river had shifted over the decades, eroded by both man and nature. The majestic prairie has been tamed over time. In this fourth book of the Butter in...

Drought has scorched the farmland of Sweden and there is no harvest to feed families or livestock. Taxes are due and there is little money to pay them. But there is a ship sailing for America, where the government is giving land to anyone who wants to claim a homestead. So begins ta migration out of Sweden to a new life on the Great Plains of America. Can you imagine starting a journey to an unknown country, not knowing what the country would be like, where you would live, or how you would survive? Did you make the right decision to leave in the first place? This first book in the Planting...

Popular Kansas author Linda K. Hubalek continues the story of a Swedish immigrant family in Prairie Bloomin', (formerly titled Prarieblomman) the second book in the Butter in the Well series. Homesteading the Kansas prairie in 1869, Prairie Bloomin' features the diary of young Alma Swenson, as she grows up on the Kansas prairie that her parents homesteaded. Hubalek grew up in this same house, researching the land and family that lived on the farm before her.

Read the endearing account of Kajsa Svensson Runeberg, an emigrant wife who recounts, through her diary, how she and her family built up a farm on the unsettled Kansas prairie. This historical fiction is based on the Swedish woman who homesteaded the author's childhood home.

Egg Gravy is a collection of recipes the pioneer women used during their homesteading days. These recipes had been handwritten in old ledger books, on scraps of paper, in the margins of old cookbooks, and forever etched in the memories of those pioneer women's children that Linda Hubalek interviewed.

Can you imagine being isolated in the middle of treeless grassland with only a dirt roof over your head? Having to feed your children with whatever wild plants or animals you could find living on the prairie? Sweating to plow the sod, plant the seed, cultivate the crop- only to lose it all by a hailstorm right before you harvest it? This second book in the Planting Dreams series portrays Swedish immigrant Charlotta Johnson as she and her husband build a farmstead on the Kansas prairie. This family faced countless challenges as they homestead on America s Great Plains during the 1800s. Years...