The classic story of a boy who makes his own rules and the small Missouri town where he and his friends experience the adventures of a lifetime. Filled with schoolyard pranks, buried treasures, spooky caves, secret gangs, and grave robbers, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is entertainment of the highest order. The clever schemes of its eponymous hero--from tricking his friends into completing his chores to sneaking into his own funeral--are the stuff...

Describes the seventeenth-century French adventurer's exploration of the length of the Mississippi River and and his claim of the entire Mississippi River Basin as French territory, which the United States later obtained in the Louisiana Purchase.