Early pioneers on the American frontier, are armed with self-reliance, courage, and daring-just like North Carolinian, Abraham Rallemore. He learns at the Battle of New Orleans that the mettle of a man is what he does, not the color of his skin; fights the slave system on his tobacco plantation; confronts dangers traveling west; and is stunned as a nation is ripped apart by civil war. He struggles with the evils of slavery and the many dangers that crisscross his lifelong path-tornadoes, Indians, cutthroats, wildfire, and Hooker, the slaver. Whetting his appetite for new adventures is Big Jen, a frontiersman scout for General Andrew Jackson and the first white man to settle in southern Missouri in the land called Six Bulls.