Maggie Reid is 18. She leaves her home and lives with Gypsies until she has the opportunity to sail to America. Once there, she lives in a boarding house in New York and makes friends with a young couple who persuade her to join a wagon train heading west. During the trip, she is swept downriver with her wagon and has to fend for herself.

Noe Nolan was born in Ireland. She has always written stories for her four children. She lives in Cornwall, England, with her husband Stephen, to whom she has been married for nearly fifty years.