Central Kansas Library System

After his mother dies and his drunken stepfather tries to cut his ear off, fourteen-year-old Augustus Pelletier decides it's time to get out of Missouri. And the lure of adventure with Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery is too tempting to resist. Captains Lewis and Clark are being sent by President Thomas Jefferson to find a water route to the Pacific and explore the uncharted West. Gus sets off just behind the Corps of Discovery, shadowing them...

In the mid-1870s, young teenage scout Thad Longsworth, blood brother to the Sioux visionary Black Elk, finds his destiny linked with that of three rival teams of paleontologists searching for dinosaur bones, as the Great Plains Indians prepare to go to war against the white man.