The explosive true saga of the legendary adventurer Jedediah Smith and the Mountain Men who explored the American frontier.
It is the early 19th century, and the land recently purchased by President Thomas Jefferson stretches west for thousands of miles. Who inhabits this vast new garden of Eden? What strange beasts and natural formations can be found? Thus was the birth of Manifest Destiny and the resulting bloody battles with Indigenous tribes encountered by white explorers. Also in this volatile mix are the grizzled fur trappers and mountain men, waging war against the Native American tribes whose lands they traverse.
This is the setting of Throne of Grace, and the guide to this epic narrative is arguably America's greatest yet most unsung pathfinder, Jedediah Smith. His explorations into the forested frontiers on both sides of the Rocky Mountains and all the way to the West Coast would become the stuff of legend. Thanks to painstaking research and riveting writing, the story of the making of modern America is told through the eyes of both the ordinary and memorable men and women, settlers and Indigenous, who witnessed it. But it's Smith who drives the narrative with his trailblazing path through the unexplored terrain of the American West.
“Throne of Grace” is a gripping yarn that drops the reader into the center of an underreported era and introduces one of the great explorers in American history.
As soon as listeners hear Johnny Heller's easy Western drawl, they'll know they're in for a story about the Old West. This engrossing account begins in 1822 when bright, strapping, historically neglected Jedediah Smith joined 100 "Enterprising Young Men" to open trade routes and explore the vast Rocky Mountains in a race to expand a young nation's opportunities and boundaries. Heller's folksy into
