Campmates: A Story of the Plains

A young boy leaves his small hometown to travel west with an engineer and encounters a sequence of episodic frontier adventures: river ferries and railroad towns, work with an engineer corps, buffalo hunts, stagecoach and ranch dangers, capture by Native Americans and a daring escape, deadly weather and swift floods, desert thirst, mountain snow-storms and icy lakes, and southwestern mining and village scenes. The narrative emphasizes practical skills, bravery, friendship, and self-reliance as the boy confronts varied natural hazards and human conflicts while maturing through each test.