The First to Go West: A Guest Post by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

From the authors of Blood and Treasure comes a sweeping portrait of the American West, including its ambition, violence and the people who lived through its making. Read on for an exclusive essay from Bob Drury and Tom Clavin on writing The First to Go West.

Daniel Boone and Jim Bridger. Davy Crockett and Kit Carson. All frontiersmen that we have chronicled in the pages of our bestselling books. And along the way it was our good fortune to encounter perhaps the greatest, if most obscure, pathfinder of them all in the person of Jedediah Strong Smith, in The First to Go West.

There are myriad reasons why Jed Smith’s incredible exploits were lost to popular history. The foremost is that Smith died young; barely 32-years-old when he was killed in a violent clash with a Comanche war party in 1831. Smith’s premature death closed the book, so to speak, for the contemporary biographers and newspapermen, for the hagiographers and dime-store novelists who elevated the likes of Boone and Crockett into the pantheon of frontier explorers. It was left to us to fill that void in The First to Go West, which chronicles and celebrates the heretofore untold achievements of Jed Smith, the man who can be said without exaggeration to have shaped the contours of modern America.

Allow us to backtrack a bit. Over a decade ago our book The Heart of Everything That Is told the story of the Lakota Sioux plains warrior Red Cloud and his eponymous conflict against the United States government across the mid-Nineteenth Century. The success of that narrative – the book spent months on bestseller lists – led us to return to the frontier several years ago with Blood and Treasure, the tale of Daniel Boone’s derring-do as America was transforming from a colonial backwater into a unified nation. The similar success of that book led us to the realization that there was a historical gap in the timeline between Boone’s heyday and Red Cloud’s War.

This was the period beginning with President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which added thousands of square miles to the United States. It also begged several questions. Who, if anyone, inhabited this vast new Garden of Eden? What natural wonders and, not incidentally, untold riches might be found therein? The Lewis and Clark expedition had merely scratched the surface in answering those questions. If the larger story of western exploration was to be told, it would take a protagonist whose trailblazing expeditions ranged from the peaks of the Rocky Mountains to the fertile valleys of California, from the arid southwestern deserts to the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. And that man was Jedediah Smith, the titular First to Go West.

Our extensive research, including access to Smith’s own diaries, allowed us to tell the story of the making of modern America through the eyes of both the ordinary and memorable people who lived and witnessed it, from mountain men and fur trappers to intrepid settlers and Native American tribes. But Jed Smith is center stage:

• He was the first American to pass through the unknown gap in the Rocky Mountains known as South Pass that became the gateway to the west and allowed for the opening of the famed Oregon Trail.
• Smith was the first American to range along the western edge of the continent’s high cordilleras from South Pass to North Pass discovered by Lewis and Clark.
• He was the first American to circumnavigate the west’s largest inland sea known today as Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
• Smith was the first American to cross the man-killing Mojave Desert and enter California from the east.
• He was the first American to travel up the West Coast from San Diego to the Canadian border.
• Smith was the first American to traverse the continent’s waterless Great Basin and live to tell the tale.

We believe that Barnes & Noble customers will find The First to Go West to be a gripping yarn that drops the reader into the middle of an era constituting the stuff of legend and introduces one of the great explorers in American history.

The next book by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, The Phantom: The Untold Story of the American Marine the Nazis Could Not Kill, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in October.