it's a place where senator thomas hart benton was from. he is a very important person to understand the rapid expansion of the west. senator benton was a very strong-willed, very articulate, somewhat megalomaniac senator from missouri who was famous for his like three-day filibusters and all sorts of, he had the best library books east and west of the mississippi river supposedly. he was a great believer in the idea of manifest destiny before it was even a term. he had read a lot of the histories of the world and he believed that all the great empires had to have commerce with china and india. and the united states would never become a great empire unless we had ports on the pacific in order to trade with china and india. in order to have ports on the pacific, we needed to have trails leading to this continent. he did not particularly want all the continents as much as he wanted the ports on the pacific. so he was writing and pontificating in the senate for years. during this period when young men like kit carson were coming up. kit carson

brian: thomas hart benton, why was he famous?oanne: he is the famous sort of manifest destiny, the person who sort of spoke about the nation spreading across the continent. he was the senior senator in point of service for quite some time. he was in the senate for a very long time. he had quite a reputation. he was definitely, even in that period, seen as one of the nation's great statesman. the narrator says that he knew his own importance, i guess is what the narrator says. he saw benton sign his signature once and pointed to it and said, "that is the signature of a very famous man." [laughter] so he knew he was significant. he had a reputation. but he was not just proslavery. in 1850, that made him controversial. brian: when did you decide that benjamin brown french was your guy? joanne: he kind of saved my life. early in the project, i had 70 fights and each could be a chapter and i could not figure out how to tell the story, and i thought, one narrative device would be a person you could hook onto at the beginning of the boo

foremost among those being the senator thomas hart benton, his father-in-law -- charismatic, a beautiful man by all accounts. the women swooned over him. but, he was as you say, in love with a vertical pronoun. [laughter] prof. sides: he was the most intelligent man in the room but the first to admit it. all those kind of things. and then you have carson, who is kind of completely the opposite. i guess sort of modern addiction counselor type people would say that they enabled each other. they are codependent. carson needed -- there was something about his personality because you want to get deep in his psychology, his father died at an early age. he was orphaned, he was perhapsced, he was looking for a father figure. he knew there was this world back east of well educated and intelligent, literate people, this society that he could never be a part of. and here comes fremont, he meets him on a steamship near st. louis. and gets a job to be a scout to go explore the american west. and fremont just won him over. a friendship -- like i said earlier, carson, once you became his friend and he