Tom Nelson’s father cannot pay off the mortgage on the family farm, so the plucky sixteen-year-old raises a stake and sets out for the California goldfields. On the way he meets a smooth swindler in Pittsburgh, a false charge of picking pockets, a steamboat trip down the Ohio and the long overland crossing of the plains, with outlaws and hostile Indians along the route.
Brisk Alger adventure for young readers, with the frontier attitudes toward Native Americans of the 1870s. Download the free EPUB.