Like so many midwesterners since, Julia Daniels and Charles Scott Moseley moved to Florida in the 1880s seeking a warmer climate. This collection of Julia's letters - mainly to her husband, who made frequent business trips north, and to her close friend Eliza Slade - reveals the struggle of a cultured, urban woman adjusting to the hardship and isolation of life in pioneer Florida.

Julia (herself a published writer) selected these unedited letters and copied them for her family into a thick leather book. Like characters in a novel, the friends and relatives she describes crackle with personality: a flamboyant Russian proclaims his version of communism, a New England spinster counters with Utopian visions, and a university professor retreats from the ivory tower to agricultural experimentation.

Readers observe Julia's flair for making daily life cheerful and they meet the couple's two adored sons and Scott's children by an earlier marriage, as well as Cracker settlers, cattle runners, and assorted seekers of health or wealth.