During the Civil War, a twelve-year-old Bowery Boy from New York City joins the Union Army as a drummer, deserts during a battle in Virginia, and encounters a hostile old mountain woman.
To help her poverty-stricken family, thirteen-year-old Lupita enters California as an illegal alien and starts to work while constantly on the watch for "la migra.".
During the summer of 1916 thirteen-year-old Fayette and her brother accompany their widowed mother on a mule trip into the California mountains, where she is to establish library outposts in isolated communities.
Thirteen-year-old Jonathan accompanies his luckless miner father to the gold fields of Australia, where he learns to be his own man amidst the rough-and-ready society of nineteenth-century Victoria.
In 1881 a tomboy, her younger brother, and her pet longhorn accompany a fifteen-year-old boy searching for his father through Texas and the New Mexico and Arizona territories.
