BORN TO ADVENTURE

A wordy account of John Charles Fremont's contributions to westward expansion. A rigorous blue pencil would have helped point up some of the interesting and exciting source material. Fremont worked on surveying the northern and southern routes through mountains and deserts; he took part in the struggle for California. There is some material on the free versus slave state controversy, but any high school reader coming to this biography would require a fair background in American history before he could use the supplementary material to be found in this verbose account.