A Mountain Boyhood

A dozen strangers sit silent around a campfire while Joe Mills’s slight, fiercely determined mother storms their circle to reclaim her stolen kettle.

On the Kansas frontier, stories of gold-rush trails, buffalo herds and mountain passes fill young Joe’s imagination. His parents have known the hazards of the West firsthand, but their tales only sharpen his longing to escape the settled farm and find the Rocky Mountains for himself. At last, with twenty dollars and a canvas bag, Joe boards a train toward the peaks he has dreamed of since childhood. The journey soon tests his independence: the stage fare is beyond his means, the road climbs and plunges through steep country, and darkness closes in among the trees. What will the mountains ask of a boy who has come alone to meet them?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.