Orphan Hero

From a former US Assistant Surgeon General comes the epic tale of a young man’s struggle to survive a journey across America during the Civil War.

Told by his stepmother that he alone had been responsible for the death of his mother, abandoned by the earlier departure of his father for the California 1849 goldfields, and threatened with being locked in a cage with his stepmother’s psychotic brother, eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin “B .F.” Windes decides to abandon home and trail his father’s path. Thus begins a trip of constant struggle with disease, severe weather, hardship, Indian attack, and death on his lone journey across much of what is now the United States.

B.F. spends the next eleven years in gold rush towns in California—first as a barber, then as a physician’s assistant—before departing for the Caribbean at age nineteen, where he becomes a blockade-runner during the American Civil War. At war’s end, he discovers that the men he had been dealing with were nothing more than common murderers and thieves—Bushwhackers.

He travels to the Missouri Ozarks where he meets the girl of his dreams. But their romance is threatened when he finds himself battling a man from his past in order to safeguard his family and his future.

Orphan Hero, based on the life of the author’s great-grandfather in the mid-nineteenth century, is a tale of courage and perseverance in the face of incredible hardship.

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John Babb is a former US Assistant Surgeon General, as well as a retired Rear Admiral in the US Public Health Service. The author’s background has allowed him to accurately portray some of the primitive medical techniques and remedies, as well as curative folklore, practiced in the 1850s. He enjoys writing about his forebears in a way that places their lives in historical context. He lives in Jackson, Tennessee with his extremely tolerant wife, Victoria.

“Retired Rear Admiral John Babb, an extraordinary leader himself, takes us on a surreal historical journey by putting us at the side of his great-grandfather as he matures and survives a tulmutuous and hazardous America during the mid-19th century. The reader will be able to feel, touch, smell and taste America as it was. Included in his great-grandfather’s story is an accurate portrayal of the level of medical care available on the frontier during this time period. Don’t miss this trip.” —Richard Carmona, MD, MPH, FACS, 17th Surgeon General of the United States