Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

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  THE MORE THAN NINETY MEN Captain Frémont assembled in St. Louis included some reliable old hands. Theodore Talbot was with him again. Basil Lajeunesse, John’s favorite companion on two previous journeys, signed up for the third. Alex Godey, another Frenchman, joined the party as he had the last. Kit Carson would be summoned to join the expedition on its way west, and he would bring a friend, Richard Owens, who was as experienced as Carson. John thought of Godey, Owens, and Carson as the elite of his party, and his most recent report included an anecdote illustrating what he admired about them. Returning home from the previous expedition in April 1844, the men encountered a Mexican trading party that had been victimized by Indian horse thieves. Though they had no stake in the matter, Carson and Godey volunteered to track down the thieves and punish them. The two rode back into camp a day later, driving a band of recovered horses and bearing “two bloody scalps, dangling from the end of Godey’s gun.” Frémont considered this a “disinterested” act of justice performed by this diverse pair of his countrymen—“the former an American . . . the latter a Frenchman, born in St. Louis.” The mapmaker Charles Preuss witnessed the same scene and found it revolting: “The more noble Indian takes from the killed enemy only a piece of the scalp as large as a dollar. . . . These two heroes . . . brought along the entire scalp.” Preuss thought that John simply admired the men for drawing blood: “I believe he would exchange all [his scientific] observations for a scalp taken by his own hand.”

  Although Preuss’s dark commentaries would be missing on the latest expedition, the “botanical colourist” Edward M. Kern was also skilled as a topographer and could carry out both roles. John filled out the force by recruiting twelve men of the Delaware Nation, mainly as hunters, though he appreciated their skill in a fight. Two of the men were chiefs, who gave their names as Swanok and Jim Sagundai. The Delawares were dressed and equipped in a fashion similar to that of the white men; a drawing of Jim Sagundai showed a mustached man with strong features, wearing a buckskin coat. He had a knife tucked in his belt and another hooked on his chest, and a rifle at hand; the only hint of a different tradition of warfare was the spiked war club he rested comfortably on his knee as he took a seat. The presence of so many Frenchmen and Delawares ensured that English would be just one of several languages spoken on the trail.

  They were getting a late start, moving out in June rather than May, so he set them sweeping across the prairie, not taking the trouble to stop for scientific observations for the first few hundred miles. The “principal objects of the expedition,” he knew, “lay in and beyond the Rocky Mountains.” As they hurried forward, some of the men chafed under John’s command. Several quit the expedition, saying the captain was imposing conditions to which they had not agreed. Later, a group of men shot at prairie dogs for sport and accidentally shot a mule; as punishment the captain decreed that they must walk instead of ride for ten days, leading their horses. A few days later the men on foot shot a buffalo, and Captain Frémont relented, saying they could remount as a reward.

  On the high plains approaching the Rockies, the travelers “encountered a Cheyenne village which was out on a hunt. The men came to meet us on the plain, riding abreast and their drums sounding. They were in all their bravery, and the formidable line was imposing.” His men fingered their weapons. The approaching Cheyennes proved to be friendly and rode alongside the explorers for several days, but John’s men remained watchful and tense. One night a man posted as a sentry let an ember from his pipe get in his powder horn; the explosion startled the camp, and even the pipe smoker, into thinking they faced an Indian attack.

  One day an animal strayed from camp. Basil Lajeunesse took a companion to look for it, and they too vanished. A day and a night passed. Captain Frémont ordered most of the men to remain in camp and went out with a group of searchers. It was open countryside, sometimes offering vistas for miles, but not as flat as it seemed; subtle dips and rises obscured much of the landscape from view, and it emerged that Basil and his companion were only a few miles from camp. John spied the missing men and decided to play a prank. “Throwing off the greater part of our clothes we raised an Indian yell and charged. But there was no hesitation with them. They were off their horses in an instant and their levelled pieces brought us to abrupt halt and a hearty laugh.” He could have been killed by friendly fire, but so enjoyed playing Indian that he decided to try it again when returning to camp. His group charged their comrades with “the usual yell. Our charge gave them a good lesson, though it lasted but a moment. It was like charging into a beehive; there were so many men in the camp ready with their rifles that it was very unsafe to keep up our Indian character. . . . Still, like all excitements, it stirred the blood pleasantly for the moment.”

  Reaching Bent’s Fort a little east of the Rockies, he bought supplies and divided the party. Two junior officers separated from John at the head of thirty-three men, following John’s original orders to map the rivers in the area before turning back to St. Louis. On August 16, 1845, John started west again with the bulk of his force, a “well-appointed compact party of sixty; mostly experienced and self-reliant men, equal to any emergency likely to occur and willing to meet it.” He paused briefly on August 20 to read the sun and the stars. He was once again near the 38th parallel, about 1,600 miles almost due west of Washington, D.C. He was about 1,200 miles due east of Sutter’s Fort; it was just a bit farther to San Francisco Bay.

  They spent the autumn traversing little-known parts of the Great Basin, naming landmarks as they went; John had realized that a mapmaker could claim that privilege. One of the Delaware leaders, Sagundai, found a spring where they camped one evening, so John decreed it Sagundai’s Spring. Encountering a river, the captain declared it the Humboldt after the geographer who inspired his mentor Joseph Nicollet. Reaching the western lip of the Great Basin, he confronted the Sierra Nevada, and here he divided his force of sixty, sending most men and supplies well south to outflank the highest and coldest of the mountains and enter California by a comparatively safe route. The captain said he would meet them on the far side after his smaller party of fifteen pushed directly over the mountains west of Lake Tahoe. It was a gamble to cross the mountains this far north so late in the season, and it created the risk of a desperate struggle like that of 1844; but he wanted the pass to form part of his new route to Oregon, so he started upward, scanning the sky as he went. At 5,900 feet above sea level the riders passed a glittering lake, eleven miles of water tucked between rock faces and smooth as a mirror. It would someday be called Donner Lake, after the party of emigrants who took a similar late-year gamble there in 1846 and got trapped in the snow—but for John’s men in 1845, the weather held. The sky stayed clear as they crossed the divide at 7,200 feet and followed westerly streams down to John Sutter’s land near sea level. The crossing was easy—it had taken only a few days—the sort of anticlimax that tended to start John Charles Frémont looking for new chances to prove himself.

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  THE LAND THEY WERE ENTERING was a world apart. Geography had made it so: California’s great Central Valley, stretching 450 miles north to south, was deeply isolated by mountain peaks, deserts, and ocean. Although it was alluring country, temperate in all seasons and watered by the annual snowmelt from the mountains, the difficulty in reaching it meant that California had been settled by Europeans much later than other parts of the Americas. Spanish conquistadors, who controlled the Aztec empire to the south by 1521, failed to seriously penetrate California for almost two and a half centuries afterward. It was so hazy in the European mind that early maps displayed it as an island, and its great anchorage at San Francisco Bay went undiscovered for generations. All the British colonies on the Atlantic coast and all the Spanish and Portuguese dominions of South America were established before the colonization of California. Not until 1768 did the landscape meet its match, in Father Junípero Serra, a Spanish cleric who walked much of the way from the Baja C
alifornia peninsula to San Francisco Bay, founding a string of Catholic missions as he went. Clerics sought to teach the arts of Spanish Catholic civilization to the native population—several hundred thousand people who, until then, had enjoyed California’s plenty for many centuries undisturbed. Alta, or Upper, California became a department separate from the peninsula of Baja, or Lower, California.

  The northernmost of all the missions was in a valley above the Bay of San Francisco, at a settlement called Sonoma. By the time John’s men were approaching California in 1845, this mission, like the others, was closed, its adobe buildings dilapidated; the government of independent Mexico had secularized the missions, seizing the vast lands the clerics controlled. In theory the land should have reverted to the Indians, but in reality colonial administrators made immense land grants to settlers, who developed ranchos, vast farms alive with cattle. The land was worked by Indians, poorer settlers, foreign migrants, and anyone else the owners could find in their sparsely populated world. At Sonoma the largest landowner was Mariano G. Vallejo, the son of a Spanish soldier, who built an enormous house and military barracks near the mission, on Sonoma’s central square. He was called General Vallejo, for he had once commanded Alta California’s scanty armed forces. He now held a less expansive post, overseeing affairs in northern California, which gave him responsibility for dealing with American settlers as they came over the Sierra Nevada into the Central Valley. Several hundred had done so in recent years, usually following the California Trail—crossing the Rockies at South Pass, then angling southwestward across the Great Basin toward San Francisco Bay, mostly settling near the bay or at points north.

  In December 1845, a messenger arrived in front of Vallejo’s house, which had a balcony stretching the full width of the second floor, a sloping roof of red Spanish tile, and a kind of castle tower looming over one corner. The messenger pounded on the wooden door and delivered a letter to General Vallejo, who settled down to read it. He had a youthful face, with dark hair and thick sideburns that reached almost to his lips. Although not yet forty, he was known for his dignity and patience, and commanded the respect normally accorded an older man. He was tied by blood or friendship to many of California’s leading figures, as well as to some of the foreigners who settled there; American migrants to California had married two of his sisters. General Vallejo favored immigration, knowing that foreigners brought skills and boosted the population in ways that Mexico’s central government did not—Californians sometimes felt so abandoned by Mexico City that they talked of attaching themselves to Britain or France. Vallejo had been thinking that California’s destiny lay with the United States. But for the moment he had duties as a leading Mexican citizen, and when the message arrived at his house at the end of 1845, he did not like what he read. The letter came from John Sutter at his fort on the Sacramento River. It said that a small number of Americans had arrived—a US Army officer at the head of a few men. They were purchasing horses and other supplies. They seemed to have been in the country for several weeks already. Vallejo was troubled to have been notified so late, and wrote instructions on the back of the letter for his secretary.

  Charge [Sutter], in the quickest way possible, to send detailed information about the new immigrants, a thing which has always been done in similar circumstances, even in case of small parties, which he inopportunely failed to do when it was most necessary and, even, urgent.

  Everyone knew that American settlers had seized Texas in 1836, leading to fear of a repeat in California. In 1840 a few settlers had talked up a Texas-style revolution, prompting the government to temporarily deport them. With the US annexation of Texas beginning to make war seem likely in 1845, Mexican authorities tightened restrictions for migrants, insisting that new arrivals ask for passports in order to remain in California. Because the newly arrived party of men had yet to do so, they were undocumented immigrants. Vallejo wanted more information, though he also hesitated to raise a military force to hunt down the interlopers. He waited for clarity on who they were and what they intended to do.

  Frémont’s campsite near snowcapped Mount Shasta.

  Chapter Eight

  THE SPANIARDS WERE SOMEWHAT RUDE AND INHOSPITABLE

  Captain Frémont, 1845–1846

  California and Oregon

  The newcomers at Sutter’s Fort were John Frémont’s fifteen men. They soon rode away, searching for the larger party of their comrades who had taken the southerly route. They passed through groves of enormous trees. They moved alongside hundreds of elk, which at one point made “a broken band several miles in length” along the route. They didn’t find their comrades, but encountered groups of natives—“horse-thief Indians,” as John called them. These marauding bands were said to be “mission Indians,” who had been educated by the old missions in the ways of white civilization. Cut loose when the Mexican government secularized the missions and took the land—perhaps the cruelest lesson that civilization taught them about itself—many retreated into the mountains, descending to annoy the settlers who had taken from them. Indians tried to steal the expedition’s spare horses, and John’s men opened fire, killing several. John came upon one of his men facing a lone Indian. The Indian had a bow and arrow; the American shot him with a rifle.

  Returning to Sutter’s Fort without finding his men—he was confident they would turn up eventually—John decided to visit authorities in Monterey to obtain a passport. Sutter had sailboats that he used for trade on the rivers, and John caught a ride with eight men, gliding through the delta where the Sacramento River met the San Joaquin. When the boat emerged on San Francisco Bay, John thought it resembled “an interior lake of deep water, lying between parallel ridges of mountains . . . crowned by a forest of the lofty cypress.” On the water, he saw a knob of rock known as Alcatraz Island, and beyond it the misty channel that led to the Pacific. Daniel Webster had been right when he told John over dinner of the bay’s value; this harbor could become the American gateway to Asia, the seaport Senator Benton had always envisioned in Oregon. John began thinking about what to name the harbor entrance (the Mexican landscape, in his mind, was already his to name), and as a student of Roman and Greek literature he remembered the Golden Horn, the name of the harbor at Constantinople from which the ancient Roman empire conducted trade with Asia. He named the entrance to his harbor Chrysopylae, or the Golden Gate.

  Near the harbor mouth was a dilapidated Spanish presidio, or military base. Its old cannons protected a little town called Yerba Buena. Coming ashore, John found a local merchant named William Leidesdorff, who served as the American vice-consul and who welcomed John into his home, “one of the best among the few” in town, where he lived with his “girl-like” Russian wife in “a low bungalow sort of adobe house with a long piazza facing the bay for the sunny mornings, and a cheerful fire within against the fog and chill of the afternoons.” Leidesdorff was originally from the Caribbean, a man of mixed race—the son of a Danish father and a mulatto woman. He had emigrated to the United States and had become a US citizen when living in New Orleans. It was said that his appearance suggested “considerable Negro blood,” which limited his ability to pass as white; but he had found ways to escape the strict racial categorizations of his adopted country. He had managed to be appointed a ship’s captain, who made a port call in California in 1841 and then settled there when the ship was sold out from under him. In this remote location he was able to rise according to his ability. He became a merchant. He obtained thirty-five thousand acres in the countryside from the Mexican government, which was comparatively open to people of mixed race. When he accepted the job of vice-consul at Yerba Buena, he apparently became the United States’s first-ever diplomat of color. He was hired by the consul, who was based in Monterey, while the slave-owning president in far-off Washington surely did not realize his background. Now John settled by Leidesdorff’s fire. He learned that he could send a letter from California’s coast—ships regularly sailed
down the coast to Mazatlán, Mexico, from which letters were carried overland to the Gulf of Mexico and placed on boats to the United States—and it was possibly the sight of Leidesdorff’s young Russian wife that reminded John of the person he needed to write.

  What could a man say after eight months away from his wife? He tried to summarize what he had been doing. He reported crossing a new part of the Great Basin, and finding the landscape “so at variance” with previous descriptions of it that “it is fair to consider this country has been hitherto wholly unexplored, and never before visited by a white man.” He said he had been correct that no rivers escaped this interior zone: “I find the theory of our Great Basin fully confirmed.” He said he had found a better route to California, and seemed anxious to get the credit, sensitive to the criticism that he mostly explored trails that were previously discovered: “I wish this [new route] known to your father, as now, that the journey has been made, it may be said this too was already known.” In its list of accomplishments and points subtly scored, John’s letter resembled a newspaper opinion article. He probably knew that Jessie, without being asked, would arrange for a newspaper to publish it. Only toward the end did his tone grow personal.