Jessie — Judy Alter

Strong, impulsive, and as daring as any man of her day, Jessie Benton was her father's daughter, and never so much as when she defied him. At seventeen, against Senator Thomas Benton's express wishes, she eloped with the handsome young explorer John Carles Fremont. Awaiting Jessie was a life unimagined, a boundless adventure that would take her from fever-ridden Panama to the San Francisco Gold Rush, and from the salons of European royalty to the wilds of the Arizona desert. As John Fremont fought for his bold vision of westward expansion and met his destiny first as an American hero and then as a national disgrace, it was Jessie who sustained him, passionately chronicling his snowbound Sierra expeditions, bravely following him into war, and shrewdly furthering his ambitions even when it brought her into conflict with the powerful father she adored.