Lone Cone Library

Eleven-year-old Michael Patrick Kelly from New York City is sent to a foster home, a Missouri farm with a sadistic owner, a bullying son, and a number of secrets, one of which may be murder.

"Lily Chalmers wanted only two things from life -- a farm of her own, and to find the sisters she hadn't seen since they were all little girls heading West on the orphan train.... She certainly had no desire for a husband. Yet proud, innocent Lily had no idea what desire meant until she met Major Caleb Halliday, a man who could ignite her very being with a single touch...a glance...a whisper. Sheltered in his arms, Lily rode the crest of a wild, helpless...

Hiring the former Confederate raider, Guthrie Hayes, to rescue her fiance, Seaton Flynn, from the hangman's noose, bold Wyoming schoolmistress Caroline gets more than she bargains for when she falls for the dashing Hayes.

In 1863, eleven-year-old Peg Kelly is drawn into the dangerous activities of a mysterious young woman who takes refuge with the Kelly family in Missouri after fleeing the attack on Lawrence, Kansas, by William Quantrill and his Confederate raiders.

Nineteen-year-old Frances Mary Kelly, herself an orphan train rider six years before, returns to New York and agrees to escort a group of orphans west to find new homes.

A clumsy and unattractive twelve-year-old, Aggie is sure no one will want to adopt her when she rides the orphan train out west, but when she meets the eccentric Bradon family she begins to have some hope. Includes historical information about orphan trains and the woman's suffrage movement.

After eleven-year-old orphan-train rider David Howard settles with a strict Missouri farm family, his best friend, an ex-slave, is threatened by the growing presence of the Ku-Klux Klan.

Sent away on an orphan train by his self-centered father Jessie, Will keeps hoping Jessie will return to claim him, even though the people he lives with care for him far more.

In Wyoming in 1874, Mary, Johnny, and Lizzie Marston, along with 60 other children, line the platform at the Cheyenne train station as Dan and Clara Forbes and other locals contemplate taking one child home to a new life. Will they be separated? Will they be wanted? Will the West offer a better life than the one they left behind?

Young Dane Weston's dream is to become a doctor. But it will take more than just determination to realize his goal, once his family is murdered and he ends up in a colony of street waifs begging for food. Then he ends up mistaken for a murderer himself and sentenced to life in prison. Now what will become of his friendship with the pretty orphan girl, Tharyn, who wanted to enter the medical profession herself? Does she feel he is anything more than...