For more than thirty years, the mountain men explored the Great American West, opening the gates of the mountains for the wagon trains of pioneers who followed them. Win Blevins' Give Your Heart to the Hawks is a poetic tribute to their incredible adventures. Here, among many, are the stories of:
*John Colter, who, in 1808, naked and without weapons or food, escaped captivity by the Blackfeet and ran and walked 250 miles to Fort Lisa at the mouth of the Yellowstone River
*Hugh Glass, who was mauled by a grizzly in 1823, left for dead by his trapper companions, and crawled 300 miles to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri
*Kit Carson, who ran away from home at age seventeen, became a legendary mountain man in his twenties and served as scout and guide for John C. Fremont's westward explorations of the 1840s
*Jedediah Smith, a tall, gaunt, Bible-reading New Yorker, whose trapping expeditions ranged from the Rockies west to California and who was killed by Comanches on the Cimarron in 1831
