This imaginative story of Sarah Royce and her gold rush journey to California brings depth and passion to a woman hitherto known only through her journal, "A Frontier Lady." Robert Hine, historian of the American West, probes Sarah's stern piety to reveal her moral and physical struggles. Travel across desert and mountains by covered wagon was especially arduous for the Royce family because they were determined to observe the Sabbath, slowing their progress to the West. The harsh physical realities of poverty, disease, fire, flood, and childbirth are enlivened with passionate love, a mysterious murder, and a vicious lynching. "Robert Hine has imagined his way into the world of nineteenth-century westering Americans in a story deepened by his extensive and sensitive understanding of the complexities of Western history. . . . The settings, in particular, are brilliantly done. . . . Moreover, we have a very vivid sense of how people actually lived and died in their bodies."--Virginia Scharff, author of "Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the American West"