Central Kansas Library System

Ariana loves her life-her parents, her little town, her job as the town's schoolteacher, her students. But one evening after classes are done and she prepares to hurry home before a blizzard hits, her whole life changes in an instant.

After the Civil War an army officer is sent west and becomes deeply involved in the affairs of a Sioux Indian tribe.

It was no work for a woman. That's what they told Mary Breydon when she came to manage a rundown stagecoach station on the Cherokee Trail. But Mary had no choice. Her fine Virginia home burned to ashes in the Civil War and her husband was brutally shot down on the way to Colorado. She needed to make a new beginning for herself and her young daughter on the raw frontier. Isolated in an untamed land, their life at the station was achingly hard and they...

Best known for his Civil War photographs, Alexander Gardner also documented the construction of the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division (later the Kansas Pacific Railroad), across Kansas beginning in 1867. This book presents recent photographs by John R. Charlton of the scenes Gardner recorded, paired with the Gardner originals and accompanied by James E. Sherow's discussion. Like most rephotography projects, this one provides fascinating information...

Recounts the settlement of the West from the first pioneers who crossed the Appalachians to the eventual disappearance of the frontier. This book is the most exciting and lavishly illustrated one-volume history of the West ever published. Its 384 pages sparkle with a lively text and almost 1,000 illustrations, including some of the first photographs ever taken of the West and its homesteaders. No other single book helps you to understand so well...