THIS is the saga of a group of fearless men who braved the wilderness to establish the fur trade in the new world. They blazed the trails that led to the opening of the West and dedicated their lives to the building of a new nation. It is particularly the story of Jedediah Smith, the pathfinder, whose quiet determination and quick thinking made him one of our outstanding mountain men.

When Jedediah Smith answered an ad for young men to join a party of beaver trappers, he knew it would be an adventurous life, but he had no realization of the dangers, the hardships, the disillusionment that go with new enterprise. It was the fur capital of the new world, and trappers were moving further into the unexplored territory between the Santa Fe Trail and the northern country opened up by Lewis and Clark.

From the time Jed volunteered to ride express over a five-hundred-mile jaunt, acting as courier and scout, he became the hero and leader of General Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company. With his Bible in his pocket and determination in his heart, Jed and his men braved the dangers of wild, primitive America. Their stiff sank, their pelts were stolen, and they pushed on to California (then Mexican territory). Here they were held prisoners by the suspicious governor who ordered them back the way they had come. But because 'Diah' (as Jed was called) wanted to see Vancouver and the Hudson Bay Company operations, he returned by the northern route, arriving in St. Louis after eight years of trap trailing with the greatest fortune in peltries ever found beyond the Rockies.

The author has woven a memorable portrait of this young explorer into a rich fabric of adventure, drama and information about early 19th Century America.

From the dust jacket