Looking back over forty years to 1862, when the young American nation was wracked by the turmoil of the Civil War, Ben Butterfield recalls the extraordinary odyssey that took him from Arkansas, across Missouri and Illinois to Bright Star, Indiana. Young Ben's mission is to transport two camels back to the Bright Star home of a Yankee officer who has claimed this strange livestock as the spoils of war.
With warring Rebs and Yankees at every turn, and with the constant threat of shysters, thieves and all-round mean-spirited folk, the journey is hazardous in the extreme. Ben's adventures, in the company of his friend and mentor, Johnny Hawkes, and of a young woman nicknamed Princess who joins them along the way, are a fine slice of life from the Old West, a magnificent tour of the American heartland at the very time of its coming of age.
