The journey was impossible.

But they had no other choice.

At the call of their prophet, they left well-established farms and businesses to strike out yet again into the untamed wilderness. A small band of men, women, and children formed the 1879 pioneer company.

Their mission: stand as a buffer between lawlessness and civilization.

Their road: only what they created themselves, blasting out a perilous trail over slick rock and through desolate

...

Will and Liz struggle to deal with their new life in Nauvoo, Illinois as they witness important events in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Meanwhile Jeff and Abby, living in 21st century Nauvoo, face their own challenges as they learn about Jeff's ancestors.

In southeastern Utah, Mitch Westland and Edie Zimmer are among the Mormon settlers determined to make their homes amid the harshest of circumstances. Threatened by Indians, competing ranchers, and cattle rustlers, the young couple must prevail against man and nature to fulfill their dream of establishing a ranch--and a family--of their own.

Fifteen-year-old Maggie survives the trek across the plains to Utah Territory only to lose her parents, her older brother, and her baby sister. She and her sister are taken in the Aldens, but the girls know something is amiss when they find their mother's china locked in Ma Alden's trunk.

Chapters alternate between a novelization of the life of Ericksen's Danish Mormon pioneers and Ericksen's memoirs of his own life in the present day.

After fulfilling ten years of servitude to the malicious Lafayette Breaux, Maria flees to New Orleans. Rescued from rescued from drowning by Hank Shroeder, a Mormon, she joins his group and they grow closer. But the malicious Breaux will stop at nothing to reclaim Maria as his own, and relentlessly tracks her--even as she treks West with her fellow Saints. Will she be able to escape her tormentor and find peace when she reaches her promised land?

Deirdre O'Connor is forced to leave her comfortable Boston home in 1847 and journey west in search of her father. With her aunt and uncle, converts to the Mormon Church, she is thrown into the challenges and hardships that confronted the early pioneers. At the same time she must choose between Trevor Deakins, a junior naval officer with political aspirations or Josh Logan, a young Mormon schooled by the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith.

Forced to endure grueling labor in a cotton mill far from her remaining family, Susanna Thayer and her best friend, Jane, become involved with the Mormon Church and are thus dismissed from employment. Using their meager savings for travel to New York, they join a company of Saints bound for California. Yet Susanna's efforts to build a new life are marked by continued misfortune--and continued encounters with the man who abandoned her in the past....