Albert is a fourteen-year-old orphan and narrator of the story. His parents died when he was an infant, but his aunt and uncle do their best to raise him on the edge of the frontier in 1840's Missouri. Aunt Carrie dies suddenly along with the baby she is birthing. It was to be their first-born child. Albert is left to face a resentful Uncle Joe who turns to the bottle as a means of coping with his loss.

It seems Albert will forever remain stuck in the muddy streets and dilapidated structures of Independence, doomed to become another insignificant local watching thousands of more fortunate families move west, having subscribed to the ideology of Manifest Destiny. But then he meets Levinah Murphy by chance while leaving the Mercantile. At first he believes he is being confronted by the mother of Virgina Reed, the young Irish beauty he has been following through town, placing him at the Mercantile in the first place. She happens to be traveling to California with her family, accompanied by the Donner family, both leaving behind their farms in Illinois for the prospect of a better life with countless opportunities.