Orphan Hero

An epic tale of tragedy and adventure based on the experiences of the author's great-grandfather as he made his way across America during the Civil War. Told by his stepmother that he alone had been responsible for the death of his mother, abandoned by his father's earlier departure for Gold Rush California, and threatened with being locked in a cage with his psychotic step-uncle, eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin "B.F." Windes decides to abandon home and trail his father's westward path. Thus begins months of constant struggle with disease, severe weather, hardship, Indian attack, and death on his lone journey across much of what is now the United States. B.F. spends the next eleven years in gold rush towns in California—first as a barber, then as a physician's assistant—before departing for the Caribbean at age nineteen, where he becomes a blockade-runner during the American Civil War. At war's end, he discovers that the men he had...