The Bone Wars depicts a multitude of diverse characters, many of them familiar types known to Saturday-afternoon devotees of the Western film: Indian warriors, cavalrymen, dance-hall girls, cattlemen, gold-miners, railroad men, river boat gamblers, and scouts. Into this familiar mixture come less familiar but equally realistic characters: the scientists of the dinosaur expeditions.

The two main characters are Julian DeMott and Thad Longsworth, both teen-agers. Black Elk, a thirteen-yearold Sioux medicine man and warrior who befriends Thad, is also an important, although not principal, character.

Julian is a young English aristocrat under the thumb of his domineering father, but who is surprisingly open to a less-stratified society when he encounters the freedom of the open plains of the West. Thad is a young scout and hunter, an orphan whose father is unknown and whose mother is a deceased prostitute. As backgrounds go, the two...