Although he did not travel farther inland than the slopes of the Appalachians, Thomas Jefferson must take his place alongside Zebulon Pike, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and Lewis and Clark--the men who blazed the great western trails. Donald Jackson cogently recounts Jefferson's fundamental role in promoting and shaping the exploration, settlement, and development of the Trans-Mississippi West. "A first-rate piece of history and, just as important, a first-rate piece of writing. As a master documentarian, Jackson sees Jefferson as he was, not in adulation. But his portrait, and a long and absorbing one it is, gives us nonetheless an admirable and great figure, more human by far than most of the representations we have had in the past."-Savoie Lottinville, author of Rhetoric of History (OUPress) and Director Emeritus of the University of Oklahoma Press "Perhaps no one outside Jefferson himself has ever known as much about Jeffersonian Western exploration as Jackson, and this is a synthesis of that knowledge." -Dan Flores, Journal of the west