She was the daughter of powerful Missouri politician Thomas Hart Benton and was a savvy political operator who played confidante and advisor to the inner circle of the highest political powers in the country. He was a key figure in western exploration and California's first senator, and became the first presidential candidate for the Republican Party--and the first candidate to challenge slavery. Both shaped their times and were far ahead of it, but...

This novel is based on the experience of American explorer John Fremont and his attempt to find a railway route to the West along the 38th parallel, when he becomes trapped in the snowbound Colorado mountains and must fight his way out.

A biography of the nineteenth-century soldier, politician, and explorer whose many expeditions helped open up the western territories to settlers.

"Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple John Frémont grew up amid family tragedy and shame. Born out of wedlock in 1813, he went to work at age thirteen to help support his family in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a nobody. Yet, by the 1840s, he rose to...