Jedediah Smith- Win Blevins

Into the uncharted West came the mountain men. They were French Canadians, Blacks, and Whites who left society and conventions behind. They all wanted to see a vast, unknown landscape. An earth that roiled and bubbled and erupted even when the skies were snow-filled. Powerful rivers that sculpted the land. An ocean that was wild with promise and mystery.

The most complicated, and enigmatic, of these mountain men is Jedediah Smith.

Smith is driven by a passion: He wants to walk every step of the unexplored American West. He wants to lead the way, to go where no white man has gone before. Smith wants to map all of it and publish his maps so others can see what awaits them. He wants to walk in a world where religion and family doesn't tie him down, but he reads the Bible every day and writes home often.

His heart is filled with the call of the wild.

In this biography Win Blevins gives Jedediah's adventures the drama and passion of a novel. He uses Jedediah's own point of view to tell the story from his first venture into the west, to his discovery of the pass over the Rocky Mountains, to his crossing great deserts to reach California, to his journey to Oregon and back to the Rockies.

In the end Blevins takes the reader, breathless, to Smith's last moments.