Romance and revulsion, distance and determination frame a story that spans the continent in the late 1800s. McClain Reardon had saved ten-year-old Rya's life when the fugitive John Wilkes Booth held her at gunpoint in Virginia. Reuniting with McClain years later on the wagon trail to California, lovely Rya falls in love with her lifelong hero, and they plan to get married. But there is one dark shadow on this bright future: a sore old suitor's merciless...

Based on true events, this compelling survival story by award-winning novelist Jane Kirkpatrick is full of grit and endurance. Beset by storms, bad timing, and desperate decisions, 8 women, 17 children, and one man must outlast winter in the middle of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1844. 1844. The Stevens-Murphy company left Missouri to be the first wagons into California through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Mostly Irish Catholics, the party sought...

"For fans of Ian McGuire's The North Water and Michael Punke's The Revenant, Child in the Valley by Gordy Sauer is a coming-of-age story set in the harsh landscape of Gold Rush America, centering on a orphan's journey to California in a wagon train of ruthless 49ers. Seventeen-year-old Joshua Gaines is suddenly orphaned in 1849, and after discovering that his foster father has left him deeply in debt, he flees his St. Louis home for Independence,...

In the turbulent mid-1800s, Charity Morgan is a beautiful, businesslike young woman whose devout religious community is losing its Pennsylvania homestead to the economic recession. To survive and stay together, she and the other members make plans to form a wagon train to Oregon, where free land is plentiful. There's just one catch. No wagon master is better equipped to lead them safely west than inmate Casey Tremayne and his ragtag band of felons....

Douglas Deeds, a fifteen-year-old orphan, keeps a journal of his travels by wagon train as a member of the ill-fated Donner Party, which became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-47.

"When sixteen-year-old Matt Logan and his friend Danny Dugan ran away from an orphanage, they went west. There, they met Jim Bridger, among other mountain men, and became fur trappers. But the market for beaver plews died out, and the two friends took on jobs as wagon train guides. They eventually separated, hoping to meet again. One of the trains Matt picks up in Independence began its journey in St. Louis, led by widower Cody McNair. Cody was a...

As the Civil War rages across the land, two courageous young women embark on separate perilous missions ...Heading west on the Oregon Trail with he family's with her Thoroughbreds and a ragtag band of freed slaves, Jesselynn Highwood and her companions are forced to separate from their wagon train and begin a new journey fraught with hardship and peril. Back East, while smuggling medical supplies, her sister Louisa and brother Zachary are captured...

A pioneer heads west on the Oregon Trail in search of gold, in a book where the reader's choices determine the outcome of the expedition.