The name Michael O'Hara has become synonymous with law enforcement. There have been three generations of Michael O'Haras and all have been exemplary policemen. When Michael O'Hara III's child was born he was told that they would not be able to have any more children, and there has always been a Michael O'Hara, so he named his child Michael O'Hara IV despite the fact that she is a girl. Now Mike has a tendency to get involved with police matters and not always with good results, which annoys her father. And despite being told repeatedly to stay out of it, she continues her amateurish detective activities.

Uprooted from their comfortable home in Pennsylvania, James and Kate Tanner, along with their sons, Virgil and Andy, journey to the wild country of 1890s Wyoming to become farmers. Soon, they come face-to-face with tornadoes, bears and wolves. But through the hardships their love for each other endures, even when a local rancher sees the newcomers as "squatters" on his land, and will stop at nothing – including murder – to drive them out.

In the turn-of-the century Texas town of Cottonwood Springs, marshal Frank Patch is an old-style lawman in a town determined to become modern. When he kills drunken Luke Mills in self-defense, the town leaders decide it's time for a change. That ask for Patch's resignation, but he refuses on the basis that the town, on hiring him, had promised him the job for as long as he wanted it. Afraid for the town's future and even more afraid of the fact that Marshal Patch knows all the town's dark secrets, the city fathers decide that old-style violence is the only way to rid themselves of the unwanted lawman.