Experience the terror of the fighting and the determination to endure as you stake a claim alongside the women caught in the bloody conflicts of Kansas in the 1850s. Follow the widowed Margaret Ralston Kennedy (a relative of the author) in this second book of the Trail of Thread series, as she travels with eight of her thirteen children from Ohio to the Territory of Kansas in 1855. Thousands of American headed west in the decade before the Civil War, but those who settled in Kansas suffered through the frequent clashes between proslavery and free-state fractions that gripped the territory. Margaret was dedicated to the cause of the North, and while the male members of her family were away fighting for a free state, she valiantly defended t heir homestead and held their families together through the savage years of Bleeding Kansas. Told through her letters, Thimble of Soil describes the prevalent hardships and infrequent joys experienced by the hardy pioneer women of Kansas, who struggled to protect their families from terrorist raids while building new homes and new lives on the vast unbroken prairie. Watch for the twelve quilt patterns mentioned in the letters.