- A singer and her husband leave their home in their frontier town for Pioneer life in the West but realize that life in the west is hard on their marriage and her dreams.
- Young Abbie McKenzie (Nancy McKeon) and Will Deal (Adrian Pasdar) grew up together in Blackhawk, Iowa, a small, crude farm town on the edge of the frontier, where Abbie teaches school and dreams of going to New York to study opera and cultivate her beautiful voice. She has her chance in Ed Matthews (Adam Storke), the son of the wealthy local doctor, who offers to marry her and take her with him when he goes East to Medical School, never mind that she doesn't love him, that can come later. But she breaks her engagement with Ed and marries Will, just back from the Civil War, the man she knows she really loves. She rides off to homestead in the empty Nebraska Prairie, feeling, she says, like "Ruth, in the alien corn, having followed a man instead of her dream."
On their trip to Nebraska, a wagon tips when doing a river crossing but Abbie is able to save her pearls and music encased in a wooded box. Together Abbie and Will struggle against the hardships of the wilderness and build a "soddie". The box and it's contents are especially helpful the first time the Pawnee Indians appear at their door where Abbie soothes them with her singing. During this time, Abbie realizes she is pregnant. When Will is away buying a stove, the time comes for Addie to give birth. She hikes to the neighbor's property in a bitter cold storm to give birth to their first son John.
Over the next decade, the Deals start farming and grow their family. With the few neighbors who share their journey into the Great Plain, they found the town of Buffalo Wallow, Nebraska. An outbreak of "fever" hits and widower Ed Matthews is the only doctor to answer the town's advertisement for a resident physician. When he comes on to Abbie, it arouses Will's jealousy. Will wants a farm that stretches as far as the eye can see to leave to his son John. When neighboring land with the water rights which irrigate their property becomes available, Will cannot get a loan because of his existing debt and market conditions for his crops. The owner of the land always admired Abbie's pearls. Abbie surrenders them for the project despite her wish to give them to her daughter on her wedding day. Abbie tells her husband his happiness is paramount.
When their child is ill, Ed Matthew makes a house call to Will and Abbie's home. Abbie delivers some preserves to Ed and draw out his true intentions in accepting the doctor position in their county, that he has come back for Abbie. Abbie tells his that he is in love with who she used to be. Later, when she asks Will, if he still loved her, Will says that he knew Ed had come back for her and it was something she had to sort out for himself. However, if she had left, he would have laid down and died.
Abbie teaches her daughter Isobelle (Lucy Deakins) to play the piano and to sing, hoping Isobelle will choose the dream that Abbie walked away from. But young John (Jeremy London), as time goes by, shows more interest in the local bank that has sprung up, and disappoints his father by choosing it as a career. Isobelle announces her engagement to Erland Reinmuller (Tim Simek), but indulges her mother and travels to New York to see the Julliard School. Will sees how unhappy Abbie was with the announcement and leaves for a week in the city. He returns with the pearl necklace he traded for land years earlier. Isobelle stays in New York for a while but hurries right back to marry the boy she loves and be a farmer's wife in Buffalo Wallow. Abbie and Will take solace in their love for each other, which has sustained them through all the difficult years and sustains them even now when a stubborn drought nearly costs them all they have worked for. Just as John secures the loan for his father to save his land, Will dies suddenly, in his prime. On the day of the burial, Abbie's children encourage her to give up the farm for an easier life, but she insists on staying put. "I buried my husband on this land. I want to lie beside him some far off day after I've seen my grandchildren grown.
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