Oil is king of East Texas during the darkest years of the Great Depression The Stoddard girlsresponsible Mayme whip-smart tomboy Jeanine and bookish Beaknow 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 familys 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 timesReturning 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 Jacks one true legacy a dangerous racehorse named Smoky Joe.
