Orphaned at age thirteen, pioneer Joshua Sims joins a survey crew helping to build the Michigan Road in order to pay for his family's northern Indiana homestead. When the surveyors' ink supply is accidentally lost in the Tippecanoe River, Sims is ordered to travel alone to Detroit, Michigan, to obtain more.
In Alone: The Journey of the Boy Sims, a historical novel for children and young adults, author Alan K. Garinger imaginatively retells the story of the boy known in the survey crew's official journal only as "the boy Sims."
Traveling by foot, boat, and horseback, Sims meets runaway slaves, Native Americans, canal builders, and other frontier figures as he journeys to Fort Wayne, across Lake Erie, and along the Sauk Trail in Michigan. Sims's encounters force him to re-evaluate his beliefs about the people in the rapidly changing land he now calls home.
A past recipient of the Indiana Outstanding Young Educator and Indiana Outstanding Community Educator awards, Garinger is also the author of the Jeremiah Stokely series. His novel Torch in the Darkness: The Tale of a Boy Artist in the Renaissance, published in 2000 by Guild Press of Indiana, was a Young Hoosier Reader Award nominee.
Alone: The Journey of the Boy Sims costs $15.95 for hardback and $7.95 for paperback and is available from the Society's Basile History Market. To order, call (800) 447-1830 or order online at the History Market.
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