Life of a Pioneer: Being the Autobiography of James S. Brown

This is the unforgettable memoir of a man who lived at the edge of American history. James S. Brown was born in North Carolina in the 1820s, grew up in frontier Illinois, and at nineteen enlisted in the Mormon Battalion, the only religious unit in U.S. military history. He marched across the Southwest, was present when gold was discovered in California, and spent decades as a missionary in the South Pacific, converting Polynesians while surviving threats most men would have fled. His is a story of extraordinary physical courage and spiritual stubbornness: a boy who learned to track and fight on the Illinois prairie, who walked thousands of miles through hostile territory, who watched the American West transform from wilderness to nation. Brown writes without artifice, and that's what makes him compelling. He doesn't mythologize himself. He simply recounts what he saw and did, and the reader is left understanding why his descendants considered him immortal. This book endures because it's one of the few direct accounts of 19th-century Mormon pioneer life from someone who was there for its most dramatic chapters...