The education in real life of a 19th Century dilettante. Philip Hamilton interrupts his philosophy studies at Harvard to deliver money for his father to St. Louis, but his snobbish ways get him into trouble. He is robbed and sold for indentured labor on the frontier in wild and dangerous Indian country.

From the Publisher: Raised on a ranch in northern California, Jody is well-schooled in the hard work and demands of a rancher's life. He is used to the way of horses, too; but nothing has prepared him for the special connection he will forge with Gabilan, a hot-tempered pony his father gives him. With Billy Buck, the hired hand, Jody tends and trains his horse, restlessly anticipating the moment he will sit high upon Gabilan's saddle. But when Gabilan...

Englishman Lord Berrybender's excursion into the American frontier lands him in the custody of Mexican authorities who decide to move the group across the desert to Vera Cruz, while Berrybender's oldest daughter Tasmin, having finally made it to civilization in New Orleans, tries to decide whether she wants her husband, mountainman Jim Snow, to be part of her future.

Continues the saga of the Berrybender family--rich, aristocratic, and English--as they travel across the endless Great Plains of the West toward Santa Fe where they plan to spend the winter. Along the way they meet up with characters from the West including Kit Carson, the famous scout, and LePartezon, the fearsome Sioux war chief.

"Clint Belmet's parents were killed in a Comanche raid when he was young, but that hasn't stopped him from taking a job leading freight caravans on the old Santa Fe Trail, from Saint Louis, Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico-a route that goes right through Comanche territory. Here is the raw, primitive West of the early pioneers, great caravans of freighters rumbling across the deadly prairies, risking attack by Comanche. In this action-packed adventure...

A teenage fugitive, Melvin Parmlee flees Texas to escape a charge of murder after killing a man for shooting his dog, following a twisted trail of adventure, revenge, hardship, and danger as he grows from boy to man.

"He has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. -- Job 30:19 (NKJV) Jim Robbins is a dead man, and he knows it. He's fought Yankee and Pawnee, fought for the love of two very different women, fought for his very survival. Now, as the scenes of his life flash before him, his greatest struggle is about to begin. Wounded in a railroad explosion, Jim reviews those moments that shaped him. From the inequities of the Antebellum South,...