Frank Carlson Library

Deeply unhappy about the separation of her family because of poverty, twelve-year-old Megan gradually finds contentment and purpose in her new home on the Kansas prairie with a kind and loving adopted family.

A young pioneer boy must adjust to settled frontier life when his father leaves him with relatives and returns to the woods.

"In 1873 the people of Labette County in Kansas made a grisly discovery. Buried on a homestead seven miles south of the town of Cherryvale, in a bloodied cellar and under frost-covered soil, were countless bodies in varying states of decay. The discovery sent the local community and national newspapers into a frenzy that continued for over two decades, and the land on which the crimes took place became known as 'Hells Half-Acre.' When it emerged that...

In 1630 frontiersman Sackett sets out to find two girls, one his kinsman, and one a reputed witch. Both were abducted from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

When a novel like Huckleberry Finn, or The Yearling, comes along it defies customary adjectives because of the intensity of the respouse it evokes in the reader. Such a book, we submit, is Old Yeller; to read this eloquently simple story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country is an unforgettable and deeply moving experience. Set in the rough wilderness of early frontier Texas, "Old Yeller" is a timeless coming-of-age tale. Travis is left to...

"1838: James and Sadie Goodenough have settled where their wagon got stuck--in the muddy, stagnant swamps of northwest Ohio. They and their five children work relentlessly to tame their patch of land, buying saplings from a local tree man known as John Appleseed so they can cultivate the fifty apple trees required to stake their claim on the property. But the orchard they plant sows the seeds of a long battle. James loves the apples, reminders of...

"Samuel Parker is traveling through the mountains hoping to find a place to settle his two children before lung fever kills him when they help an injured man whom Samuel fears may be an outlaw. As the man heals, he directs Samuel to Absaroka Valley where they are drawn into the center of a land fight"--

Pretty new schoolteacher Marcail Donovan finds herself in the center of a small-town scandal when she is forced by a snowstorm to spend the night at the home of young Dr. Alexander Montgomery.

During their first four years of marriage, Laura and Almanzo Wilder have a child and fight a losing battle in their attempts to succeed at farming on the South Dakota prairie.

President of the Western Writers of America, Cotton Smith is critically lauded for his resurrection of the classic Western. A bit long in the tooth, Bass Tillman has given up the guns and gone respectable. But then his son and daughter-in-law are murdered in cold blood, and he swears on their graves he will bring their killers to justice.