Missouri Bound

Even though she is sad to leave her home in South Dakota, Rose has many new experiences as she and her parents and the Cooley family make their journey to Missouri.

American Chillers series.

Sgt. Jack Barlow has survived nearly 4 years of the Civil War to find his homecoming is not all that he'd hoped. The family farm is in disrepair and his father an invalid. After 2 months of hard work, his brother returns from the war and is willing to take over. Jack has decided farming life is not for him, so he sets out for the West, spurred on by a lost love, to see if it really is the promised land he'd heard so much about. He is joined by others like him, looking for something but not knowing just what that is. After trying their hand at various adventures that take them all the way to California, Jack and one partner find themselves backtracking to a newly formed Ft. Robinson in Nebraska Territory. Here, they put down roots and start a cattle ranch that prospers except that it lacks one necessary item, namely, feminine companionship. They must try to re-kindle old flames, or advertise for mail order brides.

Missouri is well-known for its German American heritage, but the story of nineteenth-century German immigrant abolitionists is often neglected in discussions of the state’s history. This collection of ten original essays (with a foreword by renowned Missouri historian Gary Kremer), relates what unfolded when idealistic Germans, many of whom were highly educated and devoted to the ideals of freedom and democracy, left their homeland and settled in a pre–Civil War slave state. Fleeing political persecution during the 1830s and 1840s, immigrants such as Friedrich Münch, Eduard Mühl, Heinrich Boernstein, and Arnold Krekel arrived in the area now known as the Missouri German Heritage Corridor in hopes of finding a land more congenial to their democratic ideals. When they witnessed the state of enslaved Blacks, many of them became abolitionist activists and fervent supporters of Abraham Lincoln and the Union in the emerging Civil War. Editor Sydney Norton and the other contributing authors to Fighting for a Free Missouri explore the Germans’ abolitionist mission, their relationships with African Americans, and their activity in the radical wing of the Republican Party.