Follow the White family's adventures, hardships and rewards as each generation strives to improve themselves and their position in order to provide better opportunities for those to follow. David White and Moses Canon White, father and son, each struck out on his separate course from the east coast, one from Virginia and the other from New Jersey, struggling to find each other as they established homes and became settlers on the western frontier of the country in the Missouri Ozarks in the mid-1800s. Moses' son, Thomas, was selfish and had personal failings. He abandoned his young wife and deathly-ill child in order to go off to the Civil War in a striking new uniform. He later abandoned his four motherless young children in order to follow his second wife to Arkansas. The eldest of those four young abandoned children, John, supported his younger siblings through their childhood, finding a way to keep them in the only home they had ever known. At the age of 13 he took a job as the water boy to the Irish stone mason who built the iron smelting furnace in the valley where he lived. In taking that job he missed schooling opportunities, but when he turned 21 years old, he enrolled in first grade in order to learn to read and write. He strove to become a merchant, a farmer, a landowner and a community leader in those same Ozark hills that he called home. But then he was challenged by a corporate conglomerate utility seeking to build a dam that would create a massive lake that would serve not only as a source of electricity for St. Louis, but also as a recreational center that would make the insiders wealthy. John's home, town and farmland were slated to be inundated by lake waters. He was forced to deal with the fallout that was yet to come to his own family. He now had to start over and find them a new home. How would he keep his family together? With the same dogged determination his grandfathers before him had exerted, John found a way.