"Wampum! yelled Jed. "Here, boy!"
But the brave old dog still hung to the maddened hog. Jed's gun was empty, but his hunting knife was in his hand. He stepped in close and sent the knife home.
"I never heard tell of such a thing," his father said when Jed got home with Wampum in his arms. "A twelve-year-old younker killing a wild hog!"
"Not just me, Pa!" said Jed. "Me and Wampum."
That was a nine days' wonder tho his family and neighbors, but not to young Jed himself who had begun to hunt when he was only nine years old. The first wild-turkey hunt had earned him his gun—Old Grizzly he lovingly called it. And it had started him as a serious hunter, supplying meat to the family of a widowed neighbor who gave him Old Grizzly in return. But it had also taught him lessons he never forgot.
Young Jed made mistakes, but he learned by his mistakes. He loved to learn all the lore of the forest, but he also loved to learn from books. A neighbor was his teacher. Together they read Caesar in Latin. Together they pored over maps of the West. There were great blank spaces on those maps, and Jed longed to explore them all as Caesar had explored Gaul. His favorite book was an account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He knew it by heart. He felt as if he had been born in vain because he was born too late to take part in that great adventure.
The fact was, as his mother said, that young Jed had fiddle-feet. They couldn't keep still. When his family moved west from Jericho, New York, to Erie, Pennsylvania, Jed was a wildly happy little boy. Then he was just as happy after a few years to move on to Ashtabula, Ohio. Westward, ever westward, he longed to go. Oh, to see, with his own eyes, the Pacific Ocean!
He got his chance, and how he used it is history, for he became the greatest American explorer since Lewis and Clark, the greatest of the renowned and redoubtable "mountain men."
His story, written by Olive Burt of Salt Lake City, a Westerner herself and cherishing the action-crammed history of the West, is exciting and absorbing from beginning to end. It sparkles with zest. Every episode is an adventure full of suspense. And while these adventures show young Jed as a great American in the making, they show him also as all boy, likeable to the core, bold but levelheaded, quick but sweet-tempered. He is a real, live, honest-to-goodness American boy, and this book about him is a grand addition to the Childhood of Famous Americans series.
—from the dust jacket
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