"That was the year we had no food." It's the spring of 1864, and times are hard in Washington County, Arkansas, especially for thirteen-year-old Travis Ford. He hasn't heard from his father, a sergeant in the Second Arkansas Cavalry, in months. His mother is struggling to make ends meet on the family farm and abandoned sawmill near Poison Spring. All Travis really wants to do is to follow his passion-make up adventure stories in the style of Alexandre...

Tormented by Southern partisans, Missouri farm boy Caleb Cole joins the Union's Eighteenth Missouri. About the same time, down on the Texas coast, violin-playing Ryan McCalla, from a well-to-do family, enlists in the Confederacy's Second Texas-mainly in the spirit of adventure-with some friends. The two teenagers are about to grow up quickly. Fate will bring the two together-along with a teenage girl from Corinth, Mississippi, when the Confederate...

Johnny D. Boggs turns the battlefield itself into a character in this historical retelling of Custer's Last Stand, when George Custer led most of his command to annihilation at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana in 1876. More than forty first-person narratives are used-Indian and white, military and civilian, men and women-to paint a panorama of the battle itself. Boggs brings the events and personalities of the Battle of the Little...

"In this tale set during the War for Independence, two intriguing stories emerge. One is of a black freedman, Stuart Brodie. On his return from the war, he finds his brother lynched and his tavern in the backcountry of South Carolina burnt to the ground. Knowing that the guilty party was allied with the Colonial Patriots, he joins the British Army to exact his revenge. The other story is of an abused wife, Marty, who is raped by her husband and his...

"Setting up shop in rip-roaring Spanish Fort, Texas, in the early 1870s, Big Eddie Hager outfitted many cowboys in boots as they headed up the Chisholm Trail. Hager's fame and his company grew with the years, turning Hager Boots & Company, Incorporated, into a global legend. But when a Dallas newspaper reporter arrives in what's left of Spanish Fort, an old-timer sets the record straight by telling the true story of the man behind the Hager legend-the...