Eldon Hitchens is a young man from Illinois who travels to Tennessee to inform his father's family of his death. In Tennessee he kills a slave owner who is trying to steal a horse from him while he slept. He takes the man's slave, sixteen year old Rachel and they travel to Oregon Territory in a Conestoga wagon on the Oregon trail. They befriend several people along the way and are among the first to settle in the Willamette Valley.
