The Tide of Empire: America's March to the Pacific: Fremont and the Western Migration - Hardcover

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MICHAEL GOLAY, a popular historian, has written five books about ninteenth--century American history, including To Gettysburg and Beyond and A Ruined Land (Wiley), for which he was a finalist for the prestigious Lincoln prize. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.

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They were idealistic, scheming, and visionary. They were daring, willing to take great risks in exchange for tremendous payoffs. They were builders and, at the same time, destroyers. They were the men and women who opened up the Oregon country and California to mass settlementchanging the nation forever.

In this dramatic narrative, acclaimed writer and popular historian Michael Golay brings to life the traders, trappers, explorers, and missionaries who withstood seemingly insurmountable odds to seize a Pacific Empire for their nation. Drawing from letters, diaries, and both published and unpublished memoirs, The Tide of Empire is a colorful chronicle of indomitable characters, moral ambiguities, and the clash of Native American and European cultures.

Golay explores the consequences of westward expansion, examining the transformational powerboth creative and destructiveof American energy and ideals. Were these pioneers motives pure or tainted? It is for the reader to decide, as these early settlersblindly certain of their valuespave the way for a quarter-million men, women, and children to follow, hacking roads through mountains, rerouting rivers, cutting down lush forests, and dredging harbors, assured of their right to exploit the land. Golay deftly balances the unintended consequences of good intentions with cultural arrogance, as the Native Americans and Mexicans of the Pacific fall beneath the footsteps of the march of conquest.

Along the way, we meet the complex individuals at the heart of the story, including the aggressively entrepreneurial missionary Jason Lee; John Charles Fremont, who may have carried secret government orders to spark a revolt in California; Nathaniel Wyeth, the resourceful adventurer who, in two cross-country voyages, clearly established the Oregon Trail; and Narcissa Prentiss, who longed for the heroic life of a missionary and, along with her husband Marcus Whitman, unwittingly set in motion the destruction of the Cayuse tribes way of life.

A compellingly told, fast-paced account of exploration and adventure, The Tide of Empire will engage every reader from start to finishfrom the Euroamerican discovery of the fabled turbulent Great River of the West to the silencing of those once wild and bountiful waters . . . all in the name of progress.