New York: Franklin Watts, 1987. dj. Hardcover first edition - This biography, based on hundreds of newly discovered letters and other unpublished sources, conveys what it was like to be gifted, ambitious, and female in nineteenth-century America. As the rebellious daughter of the powerful Missouri senator, Thomas Hart Benson, she defied her family to elope with the explorer, John Charles Fremont, explorer - for the next 60 years she devoted her talents to promoting his career and reputation: joining him in California where the mines brought them a fortune, later lost and when he became the first Republican party presidential candidate, and Union general during the Civil War. As his ghostwriter, press agent, chief of staff, as well as mother to their five children of California, she made sure that his name - and that of fellow explorer Kit Carson, were not forgotten. Frontispiece portrait, notes, bibliography, index. xii, 496 pp. ISBN: 0-531150119.