Known also for his powerful fiction ( Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies), Morgan uses his skill at characterization to give life to the personalities of these ten Americans without whom the United States might well have ended at the Arkansas border. Their stories'¬ ;and those of the nameless thousands who risked their lives to settle on the frontier, displacing thousands of Native Americans'¬ ;form an extraordinary chapter in American history that led directly to the cataclysm of the Civil War. With illustrations, portraits, maps, battle plans, appendixes, notes, and time lines, Lions of the West is a richly authoritative biography of America as compelling as a grand novel.