Turpentine — Spring Warren

A young man's misadventures from privileged Connecticut to the Wild West and back make for “an entertaining romp through the American 1870s” (Publishers Weekly).
 
Sick and restless, Edward Turrentine Bayard III leaves his Connecticut home in 1871 to recover in a private sanitarium out west. But when his destination proves to be nothing more than a rickety outpost on the Nebraskan plains, he becomes a buffalo skinner instead. After returning East, Ned teams up with a lady cigar-roller named Phaegin, and Curly, a fourteen-year-old coal miner. But soon enough, the newfound trio is wrongly accused of triggering a bomb at a labor rally, and they must flee.
 
With a Pinkerton agent following their every move, the winsome ne'er-do-wells embark on a circuitous escape through northern outposts into Indian country, past the slums of Chicago, and into the boundless Great Plains. En route they become witness to the transformation and growing pains of a burgeoning nation in this comic, picaresque, and prescient look at the growth of an individual and a country.
 
“Warren knows how to spin a tale.” -- Booklist