Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion

The bestselling historian and biographer of Boone turns his storytelling genius to the lives of ten American legends, each caught in the act of securing America’s past. From Thomas Jefferson’s birth in 1743 to the California gold rush in 1849, America’s Manifest Destiny comes to life in the skilled hands of a writer fascinated by the way individual lives collectively impact history. Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the continent; from ocean to ocean. The account of how that dream became reality unfolds in the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans-Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams whose adventurous spirits pushed the westward boundaries. Their tenacity was matched only by that of their enemies: the Mexican army under Santa Anna at the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself. Known also for his powerful fiction, Morgan uses his skill at characterization to give life to the personalities of ten Americans who inspired their countrymen and without whom the United States might well have stopped at Arkansas. With illustrations, portraits, maps, battle plans, chronological and contextual appendixes, notes, and time lines, Lions of the West is a richly authoritative biography of America-its ideals, its promise, its romance, and its destiny.