Jessie Benton was seventeen when she met the handsome Lieutenant Fremont. She was the brilliant and beautiful daughter of the great Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Fremont was a military explorer who won her heart despite her father's rage and went on to open the American West. In time Benton became his staunchest supporter in the Congress. In 1844 Fremont set out to map the Oregon Trail, hitherto an unmarked route that only a skilled mountain man could follow, and opened it as the main road of the west-bound immigrant wagon trains that would become a central metaphor for the West. During the Mexican War his small exploring detachment seized California and brought it into the Union.

Such brilliant successes made powerful enemies. Fremont, always with Jessie's ardent support, was court-martialed, left the army in a fury, embarked on a winter crossing of the Rockies that failed amid charges of cannibalism. Yet while he suffered in the snow the ranch he'd acquired in California proved to be in the heart of the gold rush and made him immensely wealthy. He became California's first senator and was the new Republican Party's first presidential candidate, paving the way for Lincoln. Less successful as a Union general in the Civil War, after the war he lost his fortune in railroad ventures. Fremont led a long, gallant and always romantic and dashing life. As one of the most dramatic, articulate and effective women of the 19th Century, Jessie suffered through all the triumphs and all the perils and pains that made their lives such a compelling story. She was a profoundly modern woman.

This is the novel that set me on the trail of my ambitious series of novels, The American Story, bringing alive the fixing and growth of democracy and the opening of the West. The Fremonts were central in both dramas and as a loving couple they sweep themselves into your heart.

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