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 bestselling author Robert Morgan. Thomas 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 others whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. 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. With illustrations, portraits, maps, battle plans, appendixes, notes, and time lines, "Lions of the West" is a richly authoritative biography of America as compelling as a grand novel.