"She ain't hard to look at, but I don't believe no woman's ever going to cross the Rocky mountains . . . Lewis and Clark wasn't wearing petticoats."

But beautiful Narcissa Whitman was—full, frilly trousseau petticoats packed back in Amity, New York, for a honeymoon that was to be hazardous as well as heavenly.

That was the year 1836 when America was in a fervor of Christian revival and missionaries were hacking the tortuous trails westward. Less than a handful of men had dared the mountains beyond St. Louis. For a woman it seemed suicidal. People said that 28-year-old Narcissa was crazy.

And she was—crazy in love with Dr. Marcus Whitman, her medical missionary husband.  Crazy, if madness meant sharing his love in a desperate adventure, and teaching Christ's love to the Indians. Crazy to leave the comfort and security of her family.

But ahead lay the dream—Oregon, with its savage population and its savage beauty and its special destiny that was to make Narcissa Whitman the first lady of the West.

She was one of two women to go westward by wagon; the first to cross into Columbia Valley. Fort Laramie welcomed her, brawling Rendezvous rubbed its bleary eyes. It didn't seem possible that a woman could survive the heat, the floods, the rage of winds and rivers—on horseback, and pregnant...

The wagon that Marcus had nursed over so many miles collapsed, and was cut into a cart. They went on by cart and when it, too, had to be abandoned they went on by will and will alone.

This is the story of a woman who was afraid of nothing but losing her man, and who, even in death, never lost him; a story of the many conflicts that hampered their honeymoon expedition into a raw new land, and of how they adjusted to them. Though the trials were many, Narcissa was grateful for the rare times when she shared a tent with her husband, and love was consummated in bleak forts along the trail.

Here is history—dangerous, adventurous, pioneering history. The Whitmans ignored the danger signals. In the wilderness outpost of Waiilatpu, range of the treacherous Cayuse Indians, they set up a mission, unaware that Heaven is not always accepted.

Narcissa Whitman never converted an Indian, but she was waiting to welcome the first pioneers through the warmth of her hearth and her heart. The smallest of her dreams didn't show its face until the spring that followed her death, when her pear tree came to blossom. But she proved a fact: History is only begun by men; women make it possible for them to see it through.

From the dust jacket