The patriarch Gerhardt Praeger, a farmer of some education and experience, understands the mixture of hard work, ingenuity, ethic, grace, and sturdiness of spirit required to settle the hard territory of the Dakotas. He, along with his wife and seven sons, must constantly face natural disasters and manmade challenges to carve out their holdings in an unforgiving land that has defeated so many of their neighbors, sending them home to their families back East. Praeger believes God will provide sufficiently, if not in abundance, to those who can resist the twin challenges of pride and greedy over-reaching. But his exasperating new neighbor, the bold Beidermann, stirs both his envy and curiosity to test Praeger's moral imperatives. His remarkable journal entries chronicle the increasingly tense events between them and are bridged by a compelling narrative that moves their entire universe toward calamity. The result is an almost biblical story of self-revelation, of a man striving to guide his family and to civilize his own impulses as they contend with the wild land.