The Making of Major

Published originally in 1913 by David C. Cook Publishing Co., in Elgin, Illinois, The Making of Major is an exciting, delightful, deeply satisfying novel about a family of West Michiganders—three orphans and their aunt—who decide to emigrate to Kansas in the 1880s to take advantage of the Homestead Act.  Their adventures and misadventures while “proving up” on their homestead claim are written with special concentration on the youngest of the children, thirteen-year-old Major, whose character and courage are tested and not found wanting.  In fact, the family’s difficulties in Kansas only seem to make him stronger, honing his character instead of weakening it.  Hence the title.

Mrs. Frank Lee—born Mary Chappell Skeel—is probably the greatest writer the average reader never heard of.  The style and moral messages of her novels will remind the reader of Horatio Alger or George Alfred Henty, both contemporaries of hers... and her writing does not suffer by the comparison.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.