Jed and Celia are a young Mormon couple, traveling with other Latter-Day Saints from Winter Quarters, Missouri, to the Salt Lake Valley in Utah, where they hope to make a home they will never be forced to leave. Upon arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, the saints discover that it is little more than a desert, and not the green and fertile "promised valley" they had expected! Jed and the other able-bodied men of the group are conscripted by Major Broderick to serve in the United States Army in California to help make it part of the states, and Jed leaves his beloved wife before she has a chance to tell him that she is pregnant. When the men of the Mormon Battalion return to the Salt Lake Valley, their wives, mothers, and children have begun to raise crops, but all their hard work is threatened by a plague of crickets!