Ellis P. Bean was a callow youth of seventeen about to embark on a grand odyssey. Philip Nolan, a dashing soldier of fortune invited the young man to join him on an expedition to capture wild mustangs in Texas. Nolan promised Ellis a few months of thrilling excitement, to be capped off by a small fortune in gold coins. The expedition didn't realize until it was too late that they were being stalked by Spanish squadrons of veteran cavalry, for the Spanish rulers of Texas feared Nolan was leading an invading force. After a brief battle, Nolan was killed and the surviving members of the hunting party were taken prisoner. Ellis Bean's real adventure had just begun; an adventure far different from the one he had been promised. Ellis endured nearly a decade of imprisonment in Mexican jails-in Nacogdoches, San Antonio, and Acapulco-much of the time in painful shackle or in solitary confinement. After many failed escape attempts, Ellis was finally released from prison-on the condition that he fight with the Spanish to put down the insurrection of Padre Hidago and General Morelos. He promptly deserted, joining up with the freedom fighters. Soon he was counted among the leaders of the Mexican independence movement against Spain. But after years of fighting, of victories and reversals, the revolution finally seemed on the verge of collapse...and Morelos begged Ellis to return to the States to raise an army to invade Texas. Ellis Bean was finally home-but would he return as promised, to the cause of freedom? Once home, could he force himself to return? Based on actual events and filled with meticulous details, the story of Ellis P. Bean is an unparalleled adventure from the pages of America's frontier history.

He was the son of Pawnee Killer, the last in a line of mystic warriors of the Great American Plains Indian tribes. When his father fled to Canada with Sitting Bull, after the battle of Little Big Horn, after the best and the strongest of the Sioux were gone, Running Elk stood unwittingly at the crossroads of history. Running Elk tried to run away from the reservation to find his father-but he didn't get far. He'd hardly begun his journey when the Indian Police came for him to ship him off to school in the white man's world with 33 other boys and girls. They were taken by wagon, then by riverboat, and finally by train, to the abandoned army barracks of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. On the train, many of the children thought they were being taken to the moon hanging over the tracks. They might as well have been. At the Indian school, they were disciplined, their hair was cut short, they were taken to church, and they were taught to live like the despised Wasicun. They would be taught to work leather and wood. Their names were changed...Running Elk became William. Billy gazed at the distant hills and the open stretches of prairie grass on every side. The land seemed much vaster and the sky bluer than he had remembered. He should never have elft this land. Once he belonged here, now he belonged nowhere. The whites hated him for being too Indian, the Indians hated him for being too much white. When Ghost Dances began and the tribes started to follow the new prophet, Wovoka, Billy wondered which way he would turn. Would he follow the road paved for him by his white education...or would he join his father and fight like the warrior he was mean to be.