Returning to her ranch after investigating the Whitman Mission massacre, Virginia Reed receives a mysterious message from an old friend, Mary Perkins. Mary traveled west on the Oregon Trail one year before Virginia's own ill-fated journey with the Donner Party. Tragedy also befell Mary's party, the Meek Cutoff wagon train: twenty-four souls lost their lives, and several children went missing. As the wagon train wandered, lost, in the High Desert of Oregon, the elders met to decide their path, sending their children off with blue buckets to find water. The children returned not with water, but with shiny rocks. Three years later, gold was found in California. On a hunch, survivors of the Meek wagon train checked the blue buckets they had stored away. Sure enough, the shiny rocks were actually gold. But now, no one from the wagon train can remember where they were camped when the gold was found-only that shortly thereafter, the children went missing. As she sets out to help her old friend, Virginia begins to wonder if the Lost Blue Bucket Mine and the children were ever really lost... or if something far more sinister happened.