A few evenings later the men of the expedition had settled around their fires when they “caught the faint sound of horses’ feet.” The men waited quietly, listening, hands near their guns. “There emerged from the darkness—into the circle of the firelight—two horsemen, riding slowly as though horse and man were fatigued by long traveling.” John was surprised to recognize both men—two California settlers, including his former subordinate Samuel Neal. They said they were the vanguard of a small party that had been looking for John, escorting a messenger from the United States. In the morning Neal and Frémont rode back down the trail to meet the messenger, accompanied by ten chosen men including Carson and Basil Lajeunesse and a few Delawares. Late that day they found him, a white man accompanied by a black servant and two more California settlers. The messenger and his servant had come all the way from Washington, D.C., which he had departed the previous autumn.
It was too late in the day to ride back to the main force. John decided to spend the night in a cedar grove, where the messenger told his story by the fire. His name was Archibald H. Gillespie, and his servant was Benjamin Harrison. Gillespie was a marine lieutenant traveling undercover in civilian clothes. He was thirty-three, the same age as John; the firelight showed a man who was lean and weary, with a distinguished-looking Vandyke beard. He was a man of the world. In 1845, having finished two years on a navy vessel that circled the globe, Gillespie asked for an easy shore assignment that would restore his health, but was chosen for the mission to California; the government prized his fluency in Spanish. The exhaustion he felt from sea duty was overcome by the thrill of the new assignment. He visited Washington to receive instructions from Secretary of State Buchanan as well as President Polk. He caught a ship bound for Mexico, then traveled overland across the center of the country, boldly making observations about Mexico’s preparations for war and mailing letters back to Washington. He told Mexican customs officers and anyone else who inquired that he was a businessman traveling for his health, and offered papers to back up this cover story. He had other, more incriminating papers that he memorized and burned, intending to write them out again once he reached California.
At Mexico’s Pacific port of Mazatlán, he caught up with a visiting US Navy ship, whose captain obligingly welcomed him on board and set sail for Monterey as if on a regular patrol. On arrival, the traveling American paid his respects to the American consul Thomas Larkin. Revealing his true identity, he delivered a letter that he had since restored to written form—a letter from Secretary of State Buchanan. It informed Larkin that he had been appointed to a new position as a “confidential agent” of President Polk, authorized to conduct certain covert operations and paid six dollars per day. Larkin was to use his influence to conciliate Californians to the United States, peacefully preparing the way for eventual American rule. “The future Destiny of that Country,” Buchanan said, “is a subject of anxious solicitude for the Government and People of the United States.” The letter specifically said that the United States should not take California by compulsion. But President Polk “could not view with indifference the transfer of California to Great Britain or any other European power.” Polk was betting that if Europeans could be kept away, California would fall peacefully into American hands.
Seeking Frémont next, Gillespie slipped out of Monterey with Benjamin Harrison and a guide. The American settlers in the Sacramento Valley welcomed their countryman and organized the party that brought him onward to Oregon. Now, sitting by the fire, Gillespie produced more correspondence—letters addressed to Captain Frémont. There was a note from Jessie, the first words he had seen from his wife in almost a year. There was also a letter from Senator Benton. And there was an official letter from Secretary of State Buchanan, though it was merely a greeting and gave John no particular instructions. Gillespie verbally repeated the instructions he had delivered to Larkin—that the consul was to ensure warm relations with Californians and keep European powers out.
The exact nature of John’s instructions would prompt generations of controversy. Was he secretly told to conquer California? Neither Gillespie nor Frémont ever said so, though John asserted that he was given a message in a kind of elaborate code. He combined Buchanan’s seemingly innocuous letter with Gillespie’s words, then mixed in hints and suggestions from Senator Benton’s letter, along with John’s own memory of past conversations about California in the Benton home. Weaving it all together, John C. Frémont alone understood that he was being given a mission: “The information through Gillespie had absolved me from my duty as an explorer, and I was left to my duty as an officer of the American Army with the further authoritative knowledge that the Government intended to take California. . . . It was with thorough satisfaction I now found myself required to do what I could to promote this object of the President.” So he said long afterward. Benton, also years after the fact, asserted nearly the same.
Their assertions were not quite true, according to the only shred of contemporaneous evidence that suggests what really happened. Although the letters John received did not survive, he wrote a note soon afterward to Senator Benton: “Your letter led me to expect some communication from [Secretary of State Buchanan], but I received nothing.” In other words, Senator Benton really did offer his son-in-law a hint that Buchanan’s letter would tell him something—but the secretary of state’s letter had to complete the thought, and the cautious James Buchanan didn’t. Buchanan, the only one who actually held a responsible post in President Polk’s administration, either did not want to order John on a covert mission or did not want his fingerprints on it. The attempt to send a signal was botched. It would be easy to imagine Buchanan in the Benton home, assuring his friend that he would of course write a letter with instructions for his son-in-law, and just as easy to imagine that Buchanan thought better of it afterward.
The one unmistakable sign John did have was Gillespie’s presence: the Vandyke beard at his campfire was enough to show that John was part of the grand design, whatever it was. Gillespie had come directly from the president, who had given clear enough instructions to Larkin and apparently wanted John to know them so he could assist the consul if needed. John momentarily lost track of himself that night as he considered the prospects. He did not organize the camp as he normally would. He forgot to post guards overnight, and failed to turn in to sleep at a sensible hour. By eleven o’clock that evening the camp had settled down, the men rolling into their blankets while John alone remained awake. “I sat by the fire in fancied security,” he said, “going over the home letters. I had about thought out the situation when I was startled by a sudden movement among the animals.”
The animals had been left near the lakeshore a hundred yards away from the fires. The captain rose and walked in that direction. He had acquired an innovative new weapon known as a revolver, which would fire several shots without the need to reload; he now drew this weapon and crept through the cedars to look around. Finding nothing amiss, he returned to the fire and resumed his reverie. He resolved that he would halt his exploration of Oregon and plant himself on California soil, even if he was not sure what to do there. The captain at last fell asleep under a cedar.
He was awakened by Kit Carson’s voice: “What’s the matter over there?” No answer came back. And then Carson shouted, “Indians!” He had been stirred by a noise in the darkness, a sickening sound from within the camp, the sound of an ax chopping.
* * *
THE MEN HAD TAKEN at least one security precaution. Most slept shielded by darkness, just outside the circles of light from the embers of the fires. Now, alerted by warning cries, they rolled to their guns and watched for targets. Some draped their blankets over tree branches to block flying arrows. When Klamath men ran into the firelight, Carson and several others fired. Their leader went down. The other Klamaths silently withdrew; they used axes, tomahawks, and arrows and never fired a gun. John’s men stayed alert the rest of the night, listening to every
sound in the bushes, but the Klamaths never returned.
At daylight the captain looked upon the remains of Basil Lajeunesse. The Frenchman had been the first to die; it was the sound of an ax blow to his head that had alerted Kit Carson to the attack. Basil had been John’s best companion through three expeditions, a man with whom he had spent much more time than he’d spent with his wife the past four years. A Delaware named Crane was also dead, along with a mixed-race Delaware named Denny, while one more Delaware was injured. The dead Klamath leader still lay near the fires, with an English ax tied to his wrist. Frémont watched as Kit Carson “seized [the ax] and knocked his head to pieces with it, and one of the Delawares, Sagundai, scalped him.” Both Carson and Frémont later described this act of rage, destroying the Klamath’s head the way that Basil’s had been destroyed, which was the only way either man hinted at the emotions they felt.
The survivors draped their comrades’ remains over mules and started north to meet the main force, pausing to bury the bodies in a laurel thicket. “With our knives we dug a shallow grave,” John said, “and wrapping their blankets round them, left them among the laurels. There are men above whom the laurels bloom who did not better deserve them than my brave Delaware and Basil. I left Denny’s name on the creek where he died.” Generations later there is still a Denny Creek on the map near Klamath Lake. When the men reached the main camp, the Delawares there blackened their faces and went into mourning. John sat next to a Delaware man who put his hand on his heart and said, “Very sick here.” John replied that they would have vengeance, which white men including Carson wanted too. The work of reprisal began the following morning, when the expedition struck camp and moved out. At Sagundai’s suggestion, the surviving Delawares stayed behind in hiding—then ambushed and killed two Klamath men who arrived to inspect the vacant campsite.
Over the next two days the force circled Klamath Lake, hoping to sneak up on a Klamath village. Ten men under Carson went ahead of the main force and discovered Klamaths by a riverside. Carson was outnumbered but chose not to wait for reinforcements. He charged, sending the Klamaths fleeing in canoes across the river. His men fired from the river’s edge, then the wildly aggressive Carson led his horsemen plunging into the river to continue the chase. Too impatient to find a shallow ford, he went completely underwater with his men after him, soaking their gunpowder, which would have left them helpless on the far bank but for the timely arrival of the main force, which crossed with greater care. The Klamath people continued retreating, leaving their canoes behind. “In one of them,” said expedition member Thomas S. Martin, “we found an old Indian woman who had been shot.” The attackers burned the canoes and moved on to set fire to the Klamath village, where the houses were made of reed and willow, built beside racks hung with a bountiful harvest of fish. The huts “being dry,” Carson said, “the fire was a beautiful sight.”
That was how the attack was described by Carson and Martin, who later gave oral histories. John, with Jessie’s assistance, wrote an account that improved certain details. He did not say an old woman was killed in a canoe; he said it was a man: “His hand was still grasping the paddle. On his feet were shoes which I thought Basil wore when he was killed.” It would be hard to prove that John’s account was the false one—but his vignette of poetic justice was too perfect. It was more honorable to have killed a man than a woman, and better still if his shoes proved him to be guilty of the ambush, rather than a victim of collective punishment. This was one of several occasions on which John recorded vivid details—literary details of which he alone took note—that heightened the emotion of his account and tended to minimize, or at least explain, his men’s indiscriminate destruction.
There was a gap between Captain Frémont and his men, which was reflected in the differing stories they told. His men talked with brutal frankness; either they did not know that people outside their world might judge their acts to be wrong, or they did not care. John Frémont knew and cared. The life his men led was not quite his; it was a life he visited, knowing he would go home to his world of books and newspapers, cities and civilization. Writing and editing later, in the presence of his wife and with her influence, he sometimes gave his accounts a layer of Victorian varnish. In fairness, the violence still came through, as did John’s continuing flashes of humility: he understood that he was less skilled than his men. He recounted a moment after the torching of the Klamath village: The men were riding back to their camp when John came upon a lone Klamath man about to let loose an arrow at Kit Carson. John fired at the attacker and missed. He was no better at shooting from a horse in 1846 than he had been when failing to shoot buffalo on the plains in 1839. Fortunately for Carson, John’s horse leaped forward and trampled the man. Sagundai the Delaware chief then rode up and killed him. Carson generously credited Frémont with saving his life—or rather credited him and his horse. “I owe my life to them two,” he said.
Returning to camp, the captain gave the reins to Jacob Dodson, and left the young man to care for his horse while he walked to his tent to lie on a blanket and be alone with his thoughts. He was sharing his tent with Lieutenant Gillespie, the marine messenger. He had been with John five days, every one of them spent hunting other people or being hunted, and this was on Gillespie’s mind when he entered the tent: “By Heaven, this is rough work,” he said. “I’ll take care to let them know in Washington.” Frémont replied, “Heaven don’t come in for much about here just now,” adding that before they made it back to Washington they would have “time enough to forget about this.”
Part Three
GOLDEN STATE
Rapids captured by early Western photographer Carleton Watkins.
The Delaware leader Sagundai.
Chapter Nine
I AM NOT GOING TO LET YOU WRITE ANYTHING BUT YOUR NAME
Lieutenant Colonel and Jessie B. Frémont, May–July 1846
California and Washington, D.C.
The next morning the expedition started for California, fighting off small groups of Klamaths as they went. The men descended into the Sacramento Valley, passing the snowy bulk of Mount Shasta and settling at the same rancho from which John had written Jessie a few weeks earlier. He was well north of Sutter’s Fort and the Mexican outpost at Sonoma, so he had time to think before the California authorities learned of his presence. His thoughts were grim. Gillespie’s messages had suggested that his help was wanted in California, but it wasn’t clear what he should do. He doubted his small force could accomplish much in a country so large. He’d recently written a Californian to say that in case of war, “I shall be outnumbered ten to one and be compelled to make good my retreat.” Now he wrote to Senator Benton suggesting he did not plan to stay in California long. “I have but a faint hope that this note will reach you before I do,” he said. “I shall now proceed directly homewards [and will] arrive at the frontier . . . late in September.” He sent this letter eastward, apparently in the hands of Sagundai. The Delaware leader wanted to return home, and volunteered to carry the letter across two thousand miles of mountains and deserts alone. Yet after the horseman rode out of sight in the direction of the Sierra Nevada, John himself made no move to leave California as he had just said he would. His letter to Benton seemed instead to express his own bafflement. He told a Californian he faced “perplexing complications.” He didn’t know how to influence California or keep it out of European hands. He began a period of indecision, like the two weeks or so he’d spent wandering the Great Basin in the winter of 1844 before acknowledging he must cross the Sierra Nevada to survive. He shifted camp a bit southward, near a mountain range called Sutter Buttes, and awaited news.
A courier arrived, carrying a parcel from Thomas Larkin, the consul on the coast. The parcel did not contain what John most wanted—any information that would guide his course—though Larkin’s cover letter did include a tantalizing reference to the instructions both men had received through Lieutenant G
illespie. “You are aware,” Larkin said, “that great changes are about to take place in a country we are both acquainted with. To aid this, I am giving up business, holding myself in readiness for the times to come.” To pass the time until the change, Larkin also sent news from home. He was a collector of eastern newspapers; whenever a ship arrived, he worked his way through the crew asking after any papers the crew might have, no matter how out of date. Now he shared with the army captain: “I have been keeping some . . . papers . . . but cannot resist the opportunity of sending them to you,” he wrote. One contained a “pretty” article that might be suitable for “your published Books of Travels.” This may have been an inspiring biographical sketch of Captain Frémont, written by an anonymous author, which had been spreading from newspaper to newspaper across the country. The story said John was “a native of South Carolina, the son of a widow, and the architect of his own fortunes.” He had risen to fame from a hardscrabble youth. He was married to a senator’s daughter, but succeeded through his own exertions. He was “light and slender in his person, very youthful in appearance, and wholly different from what would be looked for in the leader of such extended and adventurous expeditions . . . a modest looking youth, almost feminine in the delicacy of his person and features.” The writer could have been someone who consulted Jessie for information or even Jessie herself; it had been written in Washington, where Jessie was.
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