By Barbara Brenner
The true story of a Black family who went to Kansas for free land after the Civil War, and the three young brothers who end up walking 150 miles alone to reach their father.
After the Civil War, the Muldie family leaves Kentucky for Kansas, where the Homestead Act promises free land to any family willing to farm it. The father and his three sons, all formerly enslaved, are heading for Nicodemus, a town Black settlers built for themselves. Their mother has already died on the long road north, so it's Daddy and three boys against a whole prairie. The first winter almost ends them. The food runs out, and they live only because the Osage people nearby leave food where the family will find it, out of what little they had to spare. Come spring, Daddy goes ahead to scout better land and sends word back. Then the three brothers, the oldest just eleven and the youngest only three, pack up and walk 150 miles across open country to reach him.
Most classes never hear that thousands of Black families went west after slavery to claim land and build their own towns — the Exodusters — and here is one of those families, real and named, at a reading level your youngest independent readers can handle. It slots right into a westward-expansion unit and adds the part those units almost always leave out. It also turns around the frightened picture of Native people that the old settler stories teach: the Osage are the reason these children live through the winter. Sixty-four pages, big print, and a lot of real history packed into them.