A young boy and his father share the magic of climbing the "Kansas mountains."

In this second volume in Deborah Hopkinson's saga of a family's first year in Bleeding Kansas, Papa is off in Lawrence defending the town from Missouri border ruffians, and it's up to Charlie to take care of his family in their remote cabin--with a violent prairie blizzard blowing in. Illustrations. When his father decides to stay in Lawrence to defend the town from proslavery ruffians, Charlie must drive the wagon back to his family's isolated farm...

When the magic tree house whisks Jack and Annie back to the 1870's, the land on a prairie near a one-room schoolhouse. They meet a teenage schoolteacher, some cool kids, and one big, scary bully. But just when they think their mission is over, a twister sweeps across the prairie! Can Jack and Annie help their new friends? Or will the twister blow them all away?

While tension over slavery grows in Kansas Territory, causing the Underground Railroad to shut down, and Papa is away, hiding from a false arrest, Charlie and his family risk everything to hide a runaway slave girl in their cabin.

"The life of Junius G. Groves, a sharecropper in Kansas who grew a modest potato farm into a potato kingdom."--