In the 1880s, thirteen-year-old Thomas moves west from the aristocratic Virginia home of his grandparents to a poor Kansas farm to live with a father he barely remembers and his new stepfamily.
While digging a hole in his back yard, an eleven-year-old Kansas boy finds the fossilized remains of a gigantic prehistoric animal, a discovery that brings both fame and controversy.
In two parallel stories, a Quaker family in Kansas in the late 1850s operates a station on the Underground Railroad, while almost 150 years later twelve-year-old Dana moves into the same house and finds the skeleton of a black woman who helped the Quakers.
Plain, independent Lidie Harkness, impatient with the restrictions placed on women in mid-nineteenth century Illinois, jumps at the chance to marry New England abolitionist Thomas Newton and travel with him to the Kansas Territory where they embark on a dangerous quest to stop the spread of slavery.
The townspeople in St. Clere, Kansas, are sure it will never work out when the neat and orderly spinster, Minnie McGranahan, takes her nine orphaned nieces and nephews into her home in 1920.
Meg records in her diary the events from July to November of 1856, when her family is reunited and must face challenges from fires to pro-slavery border ruffians who are trying to take over Kansas Territory.
An illustrated introduction to Kansas that covers the geography, climate, weather, plants, animals, history, people, cities, transportation, natural resources, industry, sports, and entertainment of the state.
Meg continues to write in her diary about her family's adventures in the Kansas prairie in 1856 as they try to return to a more normal life after surviving a cholera epidemic, separation, and invading Border Ruffians.
After the death of his brother, eight-year-old Bill Cody and his family set out from Iowa to make a new home for themselves in the volatile Kansas Territory.
