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.

"Eddie wants to be a cowboy. And who better to learn from but cowboys-- Uncle Hank, Uncle Charlie, and the other cowboys on the Bar W Ranch."

Recounts events of an 1877 cattle drive from southern Texas to Ogallala, Nebraska, through the letters and journals of two boys and an older member of the crew, a "combination of rich factual background and fictional story."

Things start looking up for Emily and Jackson when Emily's inheritance clears and Aunt Hilda becomes her legal guardian and offers to become Jackson's, as well, but Uncle Victor reappears, willing to do anything to steal Emily's fortune.

Joseph Johnson has lost just about everyone he's ever loved. He lost his pa in an accident. He lost his ma and his little sister to sickness. And now, he's lost his pony -- fast, fierce, beautiful Sarah, taken away by a man who had no right to take her. Joseph can sure enough get her back, though. The odds are stacked against him, but he isn't about to give up. He will face down deadly animals, dangerous men, and the fury of nature itself on his quest...

In 1851 twelve-year-old Sarah is a free Black, happy living with her parents, grandparents, and brother on their own farm in Iowa; but her father has been bitten by the gold bug and wants to take the trail west to California, and after some argument it is decided that the grandparents will stay on the farm, but the rest of the family will go; the journey will be difficult and dangerous, but if they survive extreme weather, difficult terrain, illness,...

In 1885, a lonely illegitimate American boy and a lonely Chinese American boy develop an unlikely friendship in the midst of prejudices and racial tension in their coal mining town of Rock Springs, Wyoming.

When his father disappears near the Mexican border at the end of the Civil War, twelve-year-old Tyler decides to go after him and bring him home, acquiring on the journey a strange dog which he names Bigger.