This was the end of John’s westward journey, and as with the first expedition, the conclusion was an anticlimax. British traders welcomed Lieutenant Frémont and gave him a place to spend the night; they commonly offered shelter to Americans on the way to “their land of promise,” the broad and fertile Willamette Valley just across the Columbia. John never had a look at the Willamette Valley, and didn’t even get a chance to float the last hundred miles down to the Pacific. Those miles were already mapped, and it was so late in the season that he couldn’t justify spending the time. Within two days he was in a boat being rowed back upriver to his men.
They regrouped in late November at The Dalles, a rocky bend in the Columbia, site of a Methodist mission to Indians. A man asked to join them there, a nineteen-year-old named William, who wanted to see the white man’s world. (Misidentified by the missionaries and others as Chinook, he would become known as Billy Chinook, although he was believed to have come from the related Wasco tribe.) John agreed to take him east and help him find a way home. The travelers bought fresh horses and culled their equipment, giving away the wagons and carts, stripping down because they planned a route home that followed no known trail. John meant to strike out southward from the emigrant route before turning east again, discovering some new way through the mountains. That was the hope when they set out on November 25.
In a quiet moment as they left the Columbia River behind, he might have recalled sending a message to Jessie, promising that he would be home in January. John would probably miss that deadline even if he stuck to the emigrant trail. Now that he was deviating from it, he was sure to miss it by months.
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UNTIL HE LEFT THE TRAIL FOR OREGON’S MOUNTAINS, John had never experienced winter in the West. As a southerner who’d grown up in coastal cities he had little experience with winter at all. Still he should have realized that attempting a winter crossing of high mountains, at high latitudes, was close to insane. Doing so on an unknown path was even closer. Had the men returned on the emigrant trail, they would at least have traveled a well-worn route, with an occasional fur-trading post where they might find help. (Jessie understood this as she agonized over his fate, and assumed her husband understood too, reasoning that he must be safely spending the winter at a post with “every comfort that fire food and shelter could give.”)
Instead John was starting into a region where the map was mostly blank. Unknown lands held “a charm for me,” he said. “It would have been dull work if it had been to plod over a safe country and here and there to correct some old error.” It may have seemed reasonable to assume his wilderness veterans were a match for nature, and apparently his men agreed, because they followed him into the unknown, even those like Kit Carson, whose experience would have warned them of the risks. The mapmaker Charles Preuss did record dismay in the privacy of his diary. “God only knows what we shall still have to go through on this winter journey,” he wrote on December 1. “We still have two thousand miles back to the States.” He had time to write while dismounted from his mule, sitting on a fallen fir tree in the snow, because he was waiting on the remainder of the caravan to catch up. Even after discarding every other wheeled vehicle, John insisted on keeping the heavy howitzer. “Unless he presents it to someone as he did the wagon, we shall move ahead slowly.”
No feature of the landscape was quite so distinctive as the immensity of it. Forests covered thousands of square miles. Between mountains lay mysterious plateaus, as flat as a coastal plain but at elevations higher than most of the Appalachians in the East. One day they stood on the shore of Klamath Lake, which was the size of an inland sea with mountains lining the far shore. The next day they rode on without any idea what lay ahead. Days became weeks. The party could not locate a clear way eastward. They traveled through woods so thick that they struggled to maintain a straight line; and at sunrise on December 13, Lieutenant Frémont managed to get his stiff fingers around a pencil to record a temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit. On other days the temperature climbed into the 30s, but that could be worse than extreme cold: the sun softened the crust of snow, causing the feet of horses and mules to sink. On December 16, the horses were thrashing through three feet of snow and ice that cut their feet, while “the air was dark with falling snow, which every where weighed down the trees,” John said. Around midday, “the forest looked clear ahead, appearing to terminate; and beyond a certain point we could see no trees. Riding rapidly ahead . . . we found ourselves on the verge of a vertical and rocky wall . . . At our feet—more than a thousand feet below—we looked into a green prairie country.” A lake lay in that green valley, so much lower in altitude that it seemed to be summer down there rather than winter.
It was “a magic view from above,” Preuss told his diary, but there were “great difficulties to get into the promised land.” They had to pick their way down the slope, and then a mule lost its footing and rolled downhill some five hundred feet before standing up. The howitzer was stuck on the slope and had to be manhandled the rest of the way. Reaching the waters of what John named Summer Lake, the men luxuriated in the higher temperatures—52 degrees Fahrenheit at sunset the next day—and passed thousands of rabbits clustered on the shore. But this was a brief respite, not relief. A forbidding landscape lay to the east, and the look of it told John not to go there. He led the expedition farther south. Two more weeks of effort found them back in snowy mountains on the far western edge of the Great Basin, having traveled 571 miles since the Columbia River, but most of it southward rather than eastward, meaning they were effectively going sideways and not much nearer home. They had drifted out of the Oregon country into Mexico—east of the Sierra Nevada, in an area toward the western side of modern-day Nevada.
Around New Year’s Day 1844, John ordered the men to dismount from their exhausted horses and walk. On January 5, when they woke to a temperature of 12 degrees, the mapmaker Preuss wrote that the party had lost momentum: “We have been sitting here for three days, wrapped in fog, on a miserable plateau surrounded by bare hills. The animals are dying, one after the other. Very little grass, snow instead of water.” Aside from the dead animals, some horses and mules had gone missing—stolen, the men believed, by Indians watching the party from places unseen. It was becoming apparent that the men could no longer make it home as planned. If they turned eastward, the next location where they could be sure to find safety and supplies was Bent’s Fort, a trading post on the Arkansas River—across the deserts of the Great Basin, over the snow-covered Rockies, and roughly eleven hundred miles away.
Survival demanded that they find fresh animals and supplies—but where? They could have tried to retreat northwestward to Oregon, but that would force them to retrace the hundreds of miles that had nearly killed them. They knew nothing inviting about the land to the south. The remaining choice was to turn westward. Moving that way would take them even farther from home, and force them to confront the snow-choked Sierra Nevada, of which there was no recorded crossing in winter. But if the men could thrash over a mountain pass they would descend into the warm central valley of Mexican-controlled Alta California. Many miles back in this journey, the men had spent the night beside a train of emigrants bound for that valley, their wagons loaded with “furniture and farming utensils” as well as “an entire set of machinery for a mill,” which they intended to set up near the Sacramento River. Kit Carson had been to California fifteen years ago, and recalled “plenty to eat” and “grass in abundance” where the rivers flowed into San Francisco Bay. So they knew shelter lay that way, though it was an excruciating decision to change course. As early as January 5, the men grasped that they “probably” would have to turn westward to survive, but their leader delayed giving the order for nearly two more weeks. Giving up the eastward crossing would be admitting failure. John’s strength was his persistence—but it also took strength to confront defeat, and at first he could not summon it. By the time he relented on January 18, his men were more than
ready to change course: “My decision was heard with joy by the people, and diffused new life through the camp.”
Scouting for a route to California, they discovered that someone was scouting them. Members of the Washoe tribe watched warily from a distance before inviting the strangers to their nearby village. They were a humble people, wearing clothes woven out of bulrushes and cloaks made of furs. They lived on fish, rabbits, and pine nuts, and they offered nuts to the hungry visitors. Lacking any common language, the two groups had to communicate through gestures and pantomime, which was how John asked for help. He said he would give them “scarlet cloth” if they would provide a guide to lead them over the mountains to “the country of the whites” to the west. The Washoe men were troubled. They “pointed to the snow on the mountain, and drew their hands across their necks, and raised them above their heads, to show the depth; and signified that it was impossible for them to get through.” Any passable route must be farther south. Lieutenant Frémont moved on after trading for more pine nuts to supplement the expedition’s “now scanty provisions”—the mules were carrying the last of their peas, flour, rice, and sugar, though the coffee supply was holding out.
Another band of Indians urged the travelers not to cross the mountains until spring, but when John declined to wait, one young Indian agreed to serve as the explorers’ guide. They called him Mélo, a word they had heard the Indians use, which appeared to mean “friend.” “He was thinly clad,” John said, “and nearly barefoot; his moccasins being about worn out.” They gave Mélo animal skins so that he could make a new pair, and spent time mending their own clothes. They at last abandoned the howitzer, burying the gun in hopes that no one hostile would find it. They had the heartiest meal they could manage, slaughtering, among other things, one of the dogs that had been traveling with them for months. And then, just before they started, snow began to fall. They moved out in blinding weather, feeling their way. “We still do not know where we really are,” wrote Preuss on January 26.
High on the slopes, the snow was so deep that some horses and mules thrashed about half-buried. The men had to make a road. Walking on improvised snowshoes, one would beat down snow with a maul until he was exhausted, then fall back to let another take the lead. Behind the maul, other men laid down branches to provide traction. Kit Carson said the snow at one point was “six feet deep on the level for a distance of three leagues,” or about ten miles. Behind the road crew waited animals that Carson found in a desperate state. “Driven by hunger, they had eaten one another’s tails and the leather of the pack saddles, in fact everything they could lay hold of. . . . We would frequently kill one to keep it from dying, then use the meat for food.” Needing a campsite while the road was being cleared, the men set immense bonfires: two “old tall, thick fir trunks were set afire,” as Preuss recorded, “and the eight-foot-deep snow soon melted all around. Two snow-free holes are now our living quarters and our kitchen.” The challenge was keeping the kitchen supplied. Another dog, named Clammet, was slaughtered to supplement the horses and mules.
The travelers discovered people in the mountains. They lived in huts so nearly buried in snow that the passing men almost overlooked them. Some residents came out to talk; one Indian traded them for a block of salt, which the men needed to help choke down the animals they were eating. Two Indians approached Lieutenant Frémont one night as the men camped beneath an enormous tree. “One of them, an old man, immediately began to harangue us,” warning that they would never make it over the mountains. By now the travelers had begun to understand a few words of the local language, and between words and gestures they grasped the man’s message: “Rock upon rock—snow upon snow,” he said, adding that even if the men survived the snow, their horses would slip on the narrow trails ahead, tumbling over precipices. Billy Chinook, the youth from Oregon, covered his head with a blanket and wept. He said he had been curious to see white people, not die among them. John studied his companions. “Seated around the tree, [with] the fire illuminating the rocks and the . . . pines round about, and the old Indian haranguing us, we presented a group of very serious faces.”
The thermometer that night read 10 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the end of an unproductive day. John was marking the distance traveled each day, which in earlier parts of the journey was typically between ten and thirty miles—but on this day, February 4, the men had traveled three miles. On February 8 they made one mile. Later, during a period of road building, came a full week with no recorded progress at all. On February 16, John and Jacob Dodson scouted the route ahead, one black man and one white man in the vastness of the mountains in the snow. Crossing through a gap in the mountains, they were relieved to discover a stream that flowed in a westerly direction toward the Pacific: they had made it over the divide. But they were still far from safety. That night, he recorded, “was clear and very long. We heard the cries of some wild animals, which had been attracted by our fire, and a flock of geese passed over during the night. Even these strange sounds had something pleasant to our senses in this region of silence and desolation.”
The main party did not make it over the divide until February 20, working through the snow beneath looming rock walls and evergreen trees. As men and animals staggered through that gap, their commander paused for a scientific ritual. He lit a fire. He brought water to a boil and dipped in a thermometer, knowing that the boiling point dropped as altitude increased. He calculated that they were 9,338 feet above sea level. (As precise as he made his number seem, it was a rough calculation; the elevation would later be measured at 8,574 feet.) The next morning they spied several ridgelines, purple in the morning light, and beyond them lower, snow-free ground that seemed to be California’s central valley. In the valley was the zigzag line of a river. But for the moment the view merely tantalized them.
A week later, they were still in the mountains. “We had with us a large kettle; and a mule being killed here, his head was boiled in it for several hours, and made a passable soup for famished people.” Some men seemed to be losing their minds from hunger and exhaustion; one “became light-headed, wandering off into the woods without knowing where he was going.” Jacob Dodson followed, found him, and brought him back, but a few days later, having “not yet recovered his mind,” the man leaped into a cold mountain stream and swam “as if it were summer.” Some of the men may have thought John himself was slightly deranged as he continued to pause for random observations: “On a bench of the hill near by, was a field of fresh green grass, six inches long in some of the tufts which I had the curiosity to measure.”
At the start of March, John rode ahead with Jacob Dodson and a few others. In the warmer air of a lower altitude, they encountered a waterway that a local Indian identified for them as the Rio de los Americanos, the American River. “Never did a name sound more sweetly!” the American explorer declared. The Indian told them in Spanish, “I am a vaquero,” or cowboy, “in the service of Captain Sutter.” John Sutter was a European who had established a settlement east of San Francisco Bay. “He is a very rich man,” said the vaquero, informing the travelers that they were already within Sutter’s empire. Catching his horse, he led the men over a hill to Sutter’s two-story house, made of thick adobe walls. Here they met the man himself—short, solid, balding, and mustached, seemingly in command of all he surveyed. He welcomed Frémont and his men to spend the night “under his hospitable roof.” It was March 6, 1844, nearly three and a half months and 1,142 meandering miles since they had ridden away from the Columbia River.
In the morning John rode back uphill to find the rest of his men, who “were all on foot—each man, weak and emaciated—leading a horse or mule as weak and emaciated as themselves.” They were arriving in the valley in a season when the daytime temperatures regularly exceeded 60 degrees Fahrenheit and once even hit 75. Reaching Sutter’s land, they turned out their animals to graze, and pitched their tents, and ate Sutter’s food, and slept.
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bsp; IN THE TWO AND A HALF WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, John bought supplies from Sutter, negotiating a price for 130 horses, 30 head of cattle, and items such as a “silver plated bridle.” He paid with drafts, or checks, which he hoped the United States government would honor. He paid on his own account for new clothes, including “buck-skin pantaloons & moccasins” for Jacob Dodson. While doing business and dining with Sutter he learned a little of his host’s past, although Sutter apparently kept the story vague. He said he was a Swiss man, who was known as Captain Sutter because he had served in the Swiss militia. He apparently did not mention that he was on the run from Switzerland. While operating a dry-goods store there, Sutter had lost so much money that he fled to avoid debtors’ prison, leaving his wife and children behind. Catching a ship to New York, he spent several years moving westward in search of opportunities—to St. Louis, then Santa Fe, then Oregon, then Hawaii before turning back eastward to Alta California.
He arrived in California with his own workforce—eight Hawaiians, known as kanakas, contract laborers who were rented out to him. They accompanied him inland when the Mexican authorities granted him 48,400 acres to develop, and he supplemented the Hawaiians by putting California natives to work. The natives tended his wheat fields. They built his ranch house. They made sun-dried bricks and stacked them to make the walls of a fort for defense against less cooperative Indians. Frémont learned that for all their work, the Indians received “a very moderate compensation—principally in shirts, blankets, and other articles of clothing.” Sutter was often given these laborers by Indian chiefs as payment for his help in battling rival tribes, and he had forced them into serfdom. Once he rented thirty Indians to another landowner, saying in a letter that he would “take payment in dried meat,” and that the laborers were “innocent” and must be kept isolated so they would remain that way. Frémont noticed that from the chief of a nearby village, Sutter “obtains as many boys and girls as he has any use for.” He probably did not know of a rumor that Sutter sexually abused the girls he employed, but Sutter was open about using children for labor. Girls at the fort were in training to be put to work in a planned wool factory. He apparently obtained some of the children after killing their parents in war.
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