Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  Jessie bid her husband and his men good-bye at the waterfront, where they caught a boat to meet their horses at the western edge of Missouri. John said he would be gone about eight months, and she said she would wait in St. Louis. She took it upon herself to open her husband’s mail there, becoming his stateside representative and gatekeeper—and also, for the first time, his defender. He had left St. Louis with a howitzer, a short-barreled cannon on wheels, which he had checked out from the nearby army arsenal. It was an odd armament for a small party in Indian country. While artillery might have some intimidating effect, Indians were unlikely to charge in a densely packed mass that could be blasted by a cannon shot. It was more likely that the howitzer would endanger the party by slowing its progress. Was John dreaming of more than exploration? He seemed to provoke such suspicions in his superior officers, who were startled when they learned what he was doing. Shortly after the expedition departed from St. Louis, a letter arrived for John, from his commander Colonel Abert in Washington:

  Sir

  . . . I fear the discretion and thought which marked your first expedition will be found much wanting in the second.

  The limit placed upon your expenditures . . . indicated the kind of expedition which the Department was willing to authorize. But if reports be true you will much exceed this amount [and will] involve yourself in serious difficulties.

  I hear also that [you obtained] a Howitzer. Now Sir what authority had you to make any such requisition, and of what use can such a piece be in the execution of your duties[?]

  Abert said John was to lead a “peaceable expedition” to gather “scientific knowledge,” and if he really believed he faced threats so grave that he needed a howitzer, then he was to “immediately desist in its further prosecution and report to this office.” In another letter he said the howitzer was so cumbersome that John would likely have to abandon it somewhere. Worse, it would make his little force seem like a “hostile expedition” to Indians, risking an “Indian war.”

  Colonel Abert’s letter to John amounted to an order—but when Jessie read it in St. Louis, she made a defiant decision: she refused to try forwarding it to John on the frontier. She suspected a political plot to break up the expedition so important to her father and her husband. It was probably too late to stop John anyway, but she did not try. She also nursed a grudge against the commander who had spoken so critically of her husband, and a few months later she had an opportunity to lash out. In the fall of 1843, a member of the expedition broke off to return home, and brought the latest news to Jessie in St. Louis. He said the expedition had encountered Sioux warriors, and John had the cannon rolled out to impress them. Jessie seized on the story—the howitzer had proven its usefulness! She wrote a letter to her father in Washington, who took the letter to the Washington Globe, the leading Democratic newspaper. The editor, Benton’s friend and ally Francis Preston Blair, printed it:

  . . . Mr. Fremont caused the famous howitzer to be drawn to the front, and his little party arranged in battle order; when the Sioux, seeing the brass piece, changed their plans, and made a peaceful salutation, leaving them unharmed. . . . A week after, [the Sioux] met a trading party, and robbed them—taking every horse they had! Tell that, with my compliments, to Colonel ****.

  . . . Your affectionate daughter,

  JESSIE ANN BENTON FREMONT

  The howitzer wasn’t “famous,” of course. Most readers could not have known what Jessie meant or who “Colonel ****” was—it was a blind item, in newspaper parlance—although Colonel Abert was sure to read Jessie’s jab, along with an added jab from the newspaper complaining that the Tyler administration had sent John westward with inadequate supplies. Jessie’s letter was reprinted in papers from Massachusetts to New Orleans. Most editors could not have fully grasped the half-told story, but were intrigued by the idea of a woman who had something biting and political to say. In Little Rock, Arkansas, one reader wrote a newspaper in protest: “The parading of a lady’s name before the public is rarely warranted; and this case is by no means an exception. The great Globe did it for political effect, and the ‘Jessie Ann Benton Fremont’ proves the why and wherefore of its publication.”

  In her new role as her husband’s spokeswoman, Jessie was sometimes cutting and other times reassuring. In mid-September she began corresponding with a Washington, D.C., woman whose son had joined the expedition. Theodore Talbot was just eighteen—and though Jessie herself was only nineteen, she offered Theodore’s mother emotional support.

  To Adelaide Talbot

  St. Louis, Sep. 16th, 1843.

  My dear Madam,

  Knowing the anxiety you must feel on account of your son, I take great pleasure in sending you the news which we received a few days since. They had gotten on very prosperously as late as the 26th of June, at which time Mr. Frémont found an opportunity to write by two Indians who brought the letter in. . . . By the middle or end of December they expect to be in this place [St. Louis] & at the New Year’s rejoicings Mr. Talbot will I hope be again with you. . . .

  Jessie B. Fremont

  The hope of a New Year’s reunion lasted deep into the fall, but then Jessie met the man who left the expedition and told her about the howitzer. Based on his information, she wrote Mrs. Talbot with updated timing: “Mr. Fremont says that early in January 1844, he will be here.” Having promised a return in January, she was obliged to write Mrs. Talbot again on February 1, 1844.

  Your letter has remained unanswered my dear Mrs. Talbot because it found me prostrated by sick headaches occasioned as you will at once conceive by “the sickness of the heart.” It made me sorry to see the note to your son for he is not here yet. . . .

  My own Mother says I am too young and too perfectly healthy to know all the miseries that attend a separation, & if I were older and in a nervous state of health this incessant disappointment would wear me out. It is very fortunate for us all that I have elastic spirits for being here I hold a very responsible place. . . .

  Mr. Fremont may come in any conveyance but a steam car & from the moment I open my eyes in the morning until I am asleep again I look for him.

  On March 3 Jessie wrote Mrs. Talbot again. Having consulted with a man who knew Oregon, she decided that John must be spending the winter somewhere west of the Rockies: “He cannot be here until the middle of April.” After the middle of April had passed, she was required to write Mrs. Talbot once more.

  . . . He will not be here until the middle of May—so you see dear Mrs. Talbot I can say nothing to comfort you—but only repeat—patience patience.

  Jessie Benton Fremont

  She wrote Mrs. Talbot a sixth time on June 15, 1844, rambling through various subjects and signing the letter before she realized that she had left out the only pertinent information, adding in a postscript that she had no information about the expedition’s whereabouts.

  “The old whaling days of Nantucket,” Jessie once observed, “have these experiences as legends among them, where absence and silence lasted for years,” and now she knew “the same unbroken silence with its fears and anxieties, and its useless hopes.” She was beginning to realize that her husband’s absence was the normal condition of her marriage.

  Part Two

  DESTINY

  The Sierra Nevada depicted by Albert Bierstadt.

  From John C. Frémont’s 1848 map of California.

  Chapter Five

  I DETERMINED TO MAKE THERE A HOME

  Jessie B. and John C. Frémont, 1843–1844

  St. Louis and the Pacific

  Jessie had one consolation during her months of waiting: she was able to witness her husband’s spreading fame. Even before he departed on his second expedition, their report of the first was generating publicity. The Frémonts themselves could not have written a more flattering description of John’s unauthorized mountain climb than one in a Pennsylvania newspaper:
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  Leaving the valleys to indulge a laudable curiosity, and to make some useful observations, [John] climbed the loftiest peak of the Rocky Mountains; until then untrodden by any known human being. . . .

  Coverage accelerated as the year went on. By September 10, the powerful New York Herald reviewed the report (“romantic and thrilling scenes of life . . . sublime scenes of the Wind River chain of the Rocky Mountains”) and reprinted a passage (“we cannot forego an excerpt or two”) and then, two weeks later, printed more. (“Considering the universal interest,” the paper explained, “which has been awakened . . . we are induced to give some further selections from the narrative of our enterprising officer.”) Multiple publishers eventually put out editions (“a little book . . . in which [Frémont] details many amusing and exciting adventures,” said a newspaper in Ohio). Jessie observed it all with delight. “It is very flattering,” she wrote in one of her letters to Mrs. Talbot, “to see him remembered and praised as he has been although I am so unreasonable I constantly want to hear more.” She alone knew the role she had played in his success.

  Americans were moved by the Frémonts’ literary style—and so were some people in the country jostling with the United States for control of Oregon. A magazine in London, The Athenaeum, published a perceptive review, noting that “the country gone over by Lieut. Fremont is certainly not the most interesting in the world, nor is it quite new; yet he is evidently not the man to travel two thousand miles without observing much which is worthy of being recorded.” His writing had “so much truth and spirit” that the West became “fresh and tempting.” Knowing that John was bound for Oregon, the reviewer predicted he would do good work there, and if British engineers could match his efforts, “we may be able to calculate, on safe grounds, the exact amount of blood and treasure which may be prudently expended in the conquest of it.”

  Senator Benton’s plan, of course, was to expend neither blood nor treasure and instead to rely on settlers. Anyone inspired to head for Oregon found in the Report on an Exploration a step-by-step template—and people were inspired, for the report was well timed. Oregon had been working its way into the national consciousness for years. In 1836, Washington Irving had followed up his Tour on the Prairies—the book that brought him to St. Louis when Jessie was a girl—with a book on Oregon. Astoria: Or, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains was based on the journals and letters of fur traders that the New York fur magnate John Jacob Astor had sent there. In 1842 a news event brought Oregon further attention. President Tyler’s administration completed talks with Britain, resolving a border dispute with British Canada—but failing to settle possession of Oregon, which remained under joint occupation. Some Americans spread suspicions that the British might snatch control, and the fear of losing Oregon triggered stronger feelings than the desire to have it. Public meetings were organized in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, and elsewhere demanding that the United States occupy Oregon. The growing public interest in Oregon both fed and was fed by the publicity for John’s travels, and it was surely not coincidental that the number of emigrants to Oregon increased.

  In the spring of 1842, before John completed his expedition, only about one hundred pioneers were believed to have hitched up their wagons and made the months-long summer journey along the Oregon Trail. Then came news of the unresolved Oregon border, and the first newspaper reports of John’s trip. In the spring of 1843, the number of emigrants increased tenfold, to about one thousand. During 1843, the Report on an Exploration spread across the country—and several thousand emigrants hitched up wagons over the next few years. In the spring of 1845, Independence, Missouri, alone was hosting about a thousand people preparing to launch two massive wagon trains; a report said “all the houses” in town were filled with emigrants, “and a large number were encamped in tents in the vicinity.” Hundreds more were staging from St. Joseph, Missouri, where their belongings filled 220 wagons. In the spring of 1846—by which time a second Frémont report was circulating—the writer Francis Parkman arrived in St. Louis to find that “the hotels were crowded” with emigrants, “and the gunsmiths and saddlers were kept constantly at work providing arms and equipments.” To see the Oregon Trail for himself, Parkman headed for the frontier on a steamboat, which was so overloaded with emigrants that “water broke alternately over her guards.” Of course the writer had with him the one essential travel book for the journey, which he put to novel use when he reached the Rocky Mountains. Invited to spend an evening with Indians, Parkman entertained them by setting off little fireworks called “squibs and serpents.” He had fashioned them out of “gunpowder and charcoal, and the leaves of ‘Fremont’s Expedition,’ rolled round a stout lead pencil.”

  Frémont’s critics later minimized his importance in spurring the Oregon migration. He had not discovered the Oregon Trail, which was used before he saw it. This was true, but it hardly slowed the growth of John’s legend. His true achievement was the thoughts of the West that he inspired in the minds of emigrants and easterners, such as Horace Greeley, who had recently founded the New York Tribune. At age thirty-two, just two years older than John, with an intense gaze and thinning hair, Greeley was making his paper an essential read, combining colorful reporting with his own memorably worded opinions. “We have generally thought of the Rocky Mountains,” his newspaper said in October 1843, “as some nearly impenetrable barrier . . . frowning at the onrushing tide of civilization.” But after reading the Frémont report with its description of the gentle slope of South Pass, “the mind is involuntarily filled with new and vast ideas”—so vast that they enlarged Greeley’s idea of America. “The nineteenth century will set open a whole continent peopled by freemen.”

  * * *

  WHERE WAS JOHN AS HIS STORY WAS SPREADING? He didn’t know without careful study. On clear days he would unsheathe his sextant and chronometer, and at a precise time measure the location of the sun. At night he might wake at three o’clock in the morning to gather information from the stars. He noted his experiences. On July 17 he was near the 38th parallel, eight hundred miles or so west of St. Louis, watching as the immense bulk of Pikes Peak faded from sight: “The clouds, which had been gathered all afternoon over the mountains, began to roll down their sides; and a storm so violent burst upon me, that it appeared I had entered the storehouse of the thunder storms.” Farther north, he took notes about deposits of coal, visible in rabbit burrows, and recorded signs of Indians and emigrants. One evening they found a cow that had strayed from an emigrant party, “and as she gave an abundance of milk, we enjoyed to-night an excellent cup of coffee.” He savored these moments of urbanity, and unlike on the last journey, he had packed enough coffee that he would never run out. At some point came the incident in which John allegedly used the howitzer to intimidate a group of Sioux, although there may have been less to the incident than it seemed. In his diary, Charles Preuss cast the howitzer in an entirely different light. “Our cannon caused unnecessary alarm” among a group of Indians, Preuss reported in August. Another diary entry contained this brief remark: “Shooting buffalo with the howitzer is a cruel but amusing sport.”

  Reaching South Pass in August, John released eleven men who wanted to return to their families for the winter, then angled southwest to explore the Great Salt Lake. His men boiled down lake water to replenish their supply of salt. They unfolded a boat made of India rubber and used it to sail across the lake to one of its islands, where John accidentally left behind “the brass cover to the object end of my spy glass, [which] will furnish matter of speculation to some future traveler.” He assumed his voyage was “the first ever attempted on the interior sea.” This was as mistaken as his assumption that he had climbed the highest of the Rocky Mountains in 1842: a fur trader had made a similar journey by canoe almost twenty years before, not to mention Indians who might have attempted it before him.

  But John was gathering material for an informative account of the Salt Lake region. Legends, an
d even some maps, suggested that rivers flowed out of the lake and all the way to the sea, but John concluded the stories were “highly exaggerated and impossible.” He grasped that much of the region between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada was a bowl—so hemmed in by mountains that no rivers found outlets to an ocean. The rivers flowed into the Great Salt Lake or sank in the desert. He gave the region a name, the Great Basin. It was so immense that the men spent weeks exploring just one corner of it before emerging on the far side. They spent a few more weeks pushing onward through Oregon, following a trail that led to the Columbia River, then riding parallel to the river. On November 1 they glimpsed snowcapped Mount Hood “glowing in the sunlight this morning.” Eventually John took to the water, leaving most of the party to rest and refit while three of his men joined him in a hired canoe with an Indian crew. “We were a motley group, but all happy,” John said. “Three unknown Indians; Jacob, a colored man; Mr. Preuss, a German; Bernier, creole French; and myself.” Drifting down the Columbia at night, when it was said the wind blew less fiercely, he encountered people his work had been enticing across the continent. “On a low broad point on the right bank of the river . . . were pitched many tents of the emigrants.” His canoe continued past them to Fort Vancouver, a British trading post on the river, which was near enough to its mouth to allow navigation from the Pacific. A sailing ship was at anchor.