Central Kansas Library System

"The year is 1876. Warring Indian tribes still populate America's western territories even as lawless gold-rush towns begin to mark the landscape. In much of the country, it is still illegal to espouse evolution. Against this backdrop, two monomaniacal paleontologists pillage the Wild West, hunting for dinosaur fossils while surveilling, deceiving, and sabotaging each other in a rivalry that will come to be known as the Bone Wars. Into this treacherous...

Hank the Cowdog, Head of Ranch Security, matches wits with an escaped circus monkey.

"In 1850, three lone wagons on the California Trail become trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by a sudden snowstorm. Stuck in tight quarters with others forces Cynthia Copper to question her engagement to a near stranger and to reconsider her dreams for marriage alongside her responsibility to care for her mother"--

Fanny Kelly's memoir, first published in 1872, is an intelligent and thoughtful narrative. Kelly spent five months as a prisoner of Ogalalla Sioux in 1864 when she was nineteen years old. A woman of her time, there was no reason she should feel sympathy toward her captors, but the introduction points out examples of expressed favor toward the Sioux, however unconscious. This narrative is a valuable part of literature not only for its historical importance...

"In 1911, Carrie Strahorn wrote a memoir entitled Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, which shared some of the most exciting events of 25 years of traveling and shaping the American West with her husband, Robert Strahorn, a railroad promoter, investor, and writer. That is all fact. Everything She Didn't Say imagines Carrie nearly ten years later as she decides to write down what was really on her mind during those adventurous nomadic years. Certain that...

While traveling to her aunt's home in Redbud by train and stagecoach, quiet young Emily and her turtle, Rufus, team up with Jackson, fellow orphan and troublemaker extraordinaire, to outsmart mean Uncle Victor, who is after Emily's inheritance.

The Oregon Trail is the gripping account of Francis Parkman's journey west across North America in 1846. After crossing the Allegheny Mountains by coach and continuing by boat and wagon to Westport, Missouri, he set out with three companions on a horseback journey that would ultimately take him over two thousand miles. Map.

"With the end of the Civil War, the nation recommenced its expansion onto traditional Indian tribal lands, setting off a wide-ranging conflict that would last more than three decades. In an exploration of the wars and negotiations that destroyed tribal ways of life even as they made possible the emergence of the modern United States, Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the encroachment...

A need for speedy mail delivery from the East to the West led to one of the most famous mail services in history. The Pony Express covers the riders, dangers, and successes that led to the service's fame. "A need for speedy mail delivery from the East to the West led to one of the most famous mail services in history. The Pony Express covers the riders, dangers, and successes that led to the service's fame."--Publisher's website.

"Women played an essential role in the development of the West. Women of the American West takes a look at the daring, inventive, and determined women that helped shape the nation."--Publisher's website.