Oil is king of East Texas during the darkest years of the Great
Depression. The Stoddard girls--responsible Mayme, whip-smart tomboy
Jeanine, and bookish Bea--know no life but an itinerant one, trailing
their father from town to town as he searches for work on the pipelines
and derricks. But in a year of devastating drought and dust storms, the
family's fortunes sink further than they ever anticipated when a
questionable "accident" leaves the girls and their mother, Elizabeth,
alone to confront the cruelest hardships of these hardest of times.
Returning to their previously abandoned family farm, the resilient
Stoddard women must now place their last hopes for salvation in a
wildcat oil well that eats up what little they have left . . . and on
the back of late patriarch Jack's one true legacy, a dangerous racehorse
named Smoky Joe.