Lions of the West

Biographer (Boone: A Biography) and novelist (Gap Creek) Morgan (Kappa Alpha Professor of English, Cornell Univ.) here presents a biographically based book in which he focuses on ten men deeply involved in America's western expansion, with one chapter devoted to each figure. Beginning with President Jefferson and his Louisiana Purchase and national vision, Morgan then provides an account of the War of 1812 through the perspectives of President Andrew Jackson and "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman. Southwestern expansion occupies the remainder of the book through the lives of U.S. President James K. Polk, Sam Houston, president of the republic of Texas, frontiersmen David Crockett and Kit Carson, as well as Gen. Winfield Scott, and U.S. statesman Nicholas Trist. The epilog on President John Quincy Adams has a concise discourse on the use of western expansion by Southern interests attempting to prolong the slave-based economy and the resulting opposition from Adams, the Yankee intellectual. The villains of the subtitle are the opponents of western expansion, including Britain, Spain, and Mexico, none of which is really villainized here.