Promise: The Golden Hills: Helena's Stories, Volume V

The Still Family. In 1863 Thomas Still led his family and a covered wagon from Kansas to California, hoping to save the life of his seriously ill wife, and possibly their and their children's souls, by reaching the "Golden Hills" of her fever dreams. Their journey was rife with dangers and disappointments until they settled in a most unlikely place-a live-for-today gold rush boomtown where life took on new and different challenges. The Yeargin Family. Socially rejected by their slave-holding community, Alabama abolitionists John and Ellen Yeargin witnessed the horrors of chattel slaveholding and of the Civil War. Wanting to leave the broken South and its romanticized myth, they crossed the country on an immigrant train to California in 1870. There they found that life continued loaded with problems to be overcome, but with vast promise, too. Tracing the adventures of these two real, very different families, The Golden Hills-Volume Five of Helena's Stories-unfolds a saga of facing the radical changes America went through in the second half of the 1800s, and of California's promises and penalties. The Golden Hills completes the Helena's Stories series, uniting the many family lines and stories, narrowing them down to two little girls and a purple flower.