Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  The plan failed. The Senate approved the $700,000 but the House did not. Senator Benton arranged a more modest measure to appropriate $200,000 for payments—which the House also rejected. He blamed “lies against Col. Frémont” spread by “notorious” partisans of General Kearny. Still the senator would not give up, writing an open letter to the people of California vowing that he would somehow have the government repay them. He next asked the Senate to pass a different appropriation for John’s railroad expedition. He patiently fielded questions from colleagues (once responding to a skeptical lawmaker with a dad joke: “In speaking of this railroad, the Senator has run off the track—has run off the track, sir”) but the House killed this measure too. Even then he would not give up. The railroad, he expected, would begin in St. Louis and confirm it as the capital of western commerce. He found three St. Louis businessmen who were willing to put up private money and equipment for an expedition to find the route.

  On this basis John departed for the fourth major expedition he had led in the West, and the first that he conducted without the support of his government. Jessie was determined to accompany him as far as she could, bringing the family along. It may have been for the children’s comfort that the family took a roundabout route, using new rail and steamboat networks much of the way: up the coast to New York, then up the Hudson River to Albany, from which railroads led along the Erie Canal to Buffalo, on the shore of Lake Erie. John was dispirited on the route; maybe the ease of the journey left him too much time to think. As a steamboat carried them along the length of Lake Erie toward the far shore in Ohio, they fell into conversation with a fellow traveler, a New Yorker named T. C. Peters, who felt that John needed Jessie’s “comforting presence. There had been no time in his whole career, when his prospects looked as gloomy as then. . . . He had nearly drained the bitter cup.” The Frémonts said they wanted nothing more in life than “to entertain their friends in their own house.” After almost seven years of marriage they had yet to call any house their own.

  From the Ohio shore the expanding rail network now led nearly to St. Louis, where they reoccupied Senator Benton’s house as John filled out his roster of men. It was familiar work for him, though many familiar faces would not surround him. Carson was not available, having returned to a new wife and a growing family at his home in New Mexico, now controlled by the United States. As John interviewed new voyageurs, he surely imagined the face of Basil Lajeunesse, his favorite companion, who had been buried under the laurel in Oregon. By way of compensation, Alex Godey would join him again, Godey who had gone all the way to California and then all the way to Washington for the court-martial. Charles Preuss, the curly-haired German mapmaker who had skipped the conquest of California to stay home with his wife, now returned to work. The artist Edward Kern signed up for another trip and brought his brother Richard. On October 3 the men boarded a steamboat, which shoved off beneath a cloud of smoke and turned westward up the Missouri. Six-year-old Lily stayed behind in St. Louis; baby Benton, not two months old, came along with his mother toward the frontier, where they would see off John’s expedition.

  They made the newspaper when the boat stopped in Jefferson City, Missouri, a riverside village that contained little more than the state capitol and a prison.

  Lieut. Col. Fremont and 35 of his men, passed up the river on board the steamer Martha last Thursday, on their way to California. Col. Fremont’s lady accompanies him as far as Westport.

  As often happened with the Frémonts, the newspaper missed the news. They had a talent for capturing the public eye without giving any hint of what was really going on in their lives. For it was around Jefferson City that baby Benton grew ill, and on October 6, as the steamboat churned the brown waters, he died. For the first time Jessie was on intimate terms with death. When her friend had lost a baby in childbirth the year before, Jessie had seemed unfeeling (“that is not an irreparable loss”); she knew that infant mortality was commonplace and that a woman must steel herself for it. But nothing could have prepared her for the moment when the loss was her own, the baby dead in her arms. “Grief was new to me,” she wrote in a letter, “and I could not bear to give him up.”

  On October 8, 1848, the steamboat crew tied up at Westport. John’s men went down the gangplank with their saddles and rifles, their packages of macaroni, their sacks of coffee. A glance at the foliage confirmed that it was later in the season than for any past expedition. John had intended to start out in the warmer months as he always had in the past, but the delays in financing the expedition and then the birth of the baby had detained him. Now the summer was gone, and his horses and mules would be kicking up snow before the men reached the Rockies. Wisdom suggested waiting to start in the spring; compassion suggested that he spend a season of grief with his wife. But he had always been slow to change course and was in no mood to do so now, while trying to escape the bitterness of his recent past. John began talking of the late start as if he had always planned it, saying that he wanted to prove that the railroad route would be passable through the Rockies in winter. The expedition broke camp to leave, and Jessie, standing by the ashes of his campfire, watched John swing into the saddle and ride off with his men.

  While awaiting the next eastbound steamboat, she arranged to stay at Westport with a federal Indian agent who represented the United States to native nations. The older man was sympathetic enough to perceive that Mrs. Frémont was troubled, and generously proposed that they take a ride in the countryside for a “pleasant change of ideas.” He had something of interest to show her. He had been on the trail of a she-wolf that was killing his sheep, and he led Jessie to the place where he had found and killed the mother’s babies.

  That evening they went to the agent’s home. It was a dogtrot house, typically two log-cabin rooms separated by a breezeway. He had added to his house until it had many rooms and many dogtrots, creating a compound that was spacious but, in Jessie’s state of mind, grotesque. The old man closed the evening complaining of a toothache, while “the creak of his wife’s rocking-chair was the only other [sound] to break the silence.” Jessie retreated to her room and went to bed. She woke to a noise—“a sound full of pain and grief, and wild rage too—a sound familiar enough to frontier people, but new to me. It was the she-wolf hunting her cubs.” Jessie, with “nerves already overstrained,” panicked. She felt she was being hunted. She woke Kitty, the maid who had come with her from the East, and made her build a fire, feeling its flames might scare off the animal—but then Jessie changed her mind, deciding the flames might attract the animal to crash through the window. Kitty silently helped Jessie to cover the windowpanes with shawls.

  At last Jessie drifted back to sleep, only to be startled awake again. She perceived “a big dark object, rough-coated, and close to me. It was a speaking wolf too.” It was John. He had come back. His men had moved only ten miles that day before making camp, so he had ridden through the night to spend one more hour with her. Kitty rose a second time to make them tea. They sat together by the fire and then, finally and for real, he was gone.

  The San Juan Mountains in winter.

  Chapter Eleven

  WE PRESSED ONWARD WITH FATAL RESOLUTION

  Two Travelers, 1848–1849

  New York, Panama, and the San Juan Mountains

  By the start of 1848, the telegraph network developed by Samuel F. B. Morse was spreading with astonishing speed. Only four years after his first experimental line carried the first message from Washington to Baltimore, lines now shot up the East Coast to New York and Boston, and westward over the Appalachians to Buffalo, Detroit, and Louisville. It was common for newspapers to contain items in a column headlined “By Electric Telegraph,” and this was how much of the nation learned of the end of the war. On February 4, the telegraph spread “rumors of peace” from Mexico, based on negotiations over a peace treaty. By February 18 the telegraph spread word that a messenger had reached New Orleans with a co
py of the treaty. Its text described the new southern border of the United States, including the new boundary of California: a line starting at the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, the town that John’s men had approached by ship and seized in mid-1846. Americans coveted its fine harbor, which was the reason Commodore Stockton had sent John to take it. His action established the farthest southern extent of American possession along the coast, and thus set the terms of the treaty negotiation: Mexicans could be told they might as well surrender that much land since United States troops had occupied it anyway and would never give it up. From San Diego the new border stretched inland, a straight line until it hit the Colorado River some 160 miles away. Land the size of an empire lay north of that line.

  California remained isolated for the moment, still thousands of miles from the nearest telegraph line, so Jessie and John were slow to learn what had taken place there as John was leaving the army and the war was nearing its conclusion: gold had been discovered in California. It was found along the American River, the same waterway that John had followed down to safety from the snowy Sierra Nevada in 1844 (“Never did a name sound more sweetly!”). Now it was the setting of a seminal American story, which involved so many people whom the Frémonts knew that they were practically first cousins to the event.

  The story started with John Sutter, who approved the construction of a gristmill that would be powered by the waters of the American. It was on land Sutter leased from Indians. In January 1848, the carpenter overseeing the mill construction discovered something glittering in a water channel. Sutter asked the mill workers to keep the news secret, but bragged about it himself. One of the first people he told was Mariano G. Vallejo, John’s onetime prisoner at Sutter’s Fort who was now refashioning his life under United States rule. In February, Sutter decided to inform the military governor of California, hoping to obtain official protection of his claim; his messenger brought a gold sample to show the governor and an aide, both of whom had met John during the war. The aide, Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, bit the gold and pounded it flat with an ax to test its properties. Gold fever spread quickly; by the time Sherman escorted the governor to inspect the area of the discovery in July, about four thousand men were spread over the land surrounding Sutter’s claim, digging holes and using water to sift the earth. They might find several thousand dollars’ worth of gold in a day; they might find nothing. “For a time it seemed as though somebody would reach solid gold,” Sherman said. The governor purchased an oyster can filled with gold at ten dollars per ounce and sent small vials of it to Washington. Thomas Larkin, the US consul, added a letter describing the find.

  Two messengers, by two different routes, raced for the East, and the one who moved faster was Edward F. Beale, a friend of the Frémonts. He was in his midtwenties, with eager, observant eyes and a fringe of beard along his chin. Beale was the young naval officer who had served with John during the war. He returned to Washington by late 1847, which was when Jessie asked him to linger long enough to testify on John’s behalf at the court-martial. Afterward her loyal friend reported to the navy’s Pacific Squadron, but had hardly arrived on station when he volunteered for the task of racing eastward again to bring the container of gold to the capital. President Polk seemed unimpressed when young Beale first showed him the gold in September 1848 (Polk, exhausted and a lame duck after declining to run for a second term, told his diary that “nothing of importance occurred” on the day of Beale’s visit), but the family of Jessie Benton Frémont knew better.

  William Carey Jones, Jessie’s brother-in-law and John’s onetime defense counsel, learned that Beale had smuggled the gold vial past bandits in a journey across war-torn Mexico, and Jones wrote it up as an adventure story for a newspaper. Other papers picked up the story, and Jessie’s friend Beale grew famous. The tale further spread news of the gold, which was capturing the country’s imagination. Even Jessie was intrigued when she returned to Washington late that fall. “Are there any flowers or plants peculiar to a gold region?” she wrote John’s botanist, apparently curious if underground riches might be located through study of the flora.

  The same letter made it clear that she was still grieving her losses. She confessed, “I have had neither the quiet nor the strength” to copy out a list of plants for the botanist. Home was not relaxing, with her mother’s condition worse, her father’s mood increasingly bitter, and her husband gone. But at least Jessie could say she would not be apart from John for long, for she planned to travel westward with Lily by her side in early 1849. “I shall go by the isthmus after the steamers commence running,” she explained. The lure of California was inspiring the creation of a new steamship line to carry passengers in comfort from New York southward to Panama, where they would cross the narrow country to catch a California-bound ship on its Pacific coast. The overland portion of Jessie’s journey would be fifty miles, compared with John’s roughly two thousand from St. Louis to San Francisco—“a much less interesting, but shorter & safer way for women & children.”

  Safety, of course, was relative. A newspaper article in early 1849 reported that of eight ships that had recently attempted to anchor on Panama’s Caribbean coast, six had run aground. Once people reached the isthmus they risked tropical diseases, and some were turned away from overcrowded ships departing from the Pacific side. But the newspapers also contained enticing tales. One ship was said to have brought twelve thousand dollars’ worth of gold to Charleston, South Carolina, and the captain of another returning ship declared that “the gold stories are not at all exaggerated, but are rather below the truth.”

  Steamers to Panama departed from New York, which Jessie reached in early 1849, days before her ship sailed. She checked into the finest of the city’s hotels, which was a fitting place to launch a journey west. Many years before, John Jacob Astor had run his western fur empire from his home on that property; now Astor’s house was replaced by the Astor House, a six-story building of white stone. Shops lined the facade, including a bookstore called Bedford and Co., which was selling a twenty-five-cent edition of Fremont’s Exploring Expedition. Steps led up to the lobby, where Jessie stood on marble floors between piles of luggage that awaited the attention of porters. Hallways to either side led to sitting areas segregated by gender and family status: parlors to one side were “devoted to the single male guests,” while the opposite corridor led to “a suite of public apartments used by ladies and married people,” decorated with “velvet, lace, satin, gilding, rich carpets and mirrors.” Jessie went for a walk in the Astor’s upscale neighborhood. She found a jeweler’s shop and showed the proprietor three emeralds that she wanted to have set in gold. John had given her the emeralds, which he had brought from the conquest of California, mysterious prizes of war. As was the case with John, anything she did now made the papers: the New York Sun wrote a story about the emeralds that was picked up by other papers across the country. The article speculated without evidence that Colonel Frémont had either obtained precious stones once owned by “Mexican and Peruvian Emperors” or discovered a secret emerald mine.

  Returning to the hotel, Jessie had experiences sure to play on her mind. She discovered relatives who were staying at the Astor, but her delight at familiar faces became dismay as they questioned her plans. “I was much in the position of a nun carried into the world for the last time before taking the veil. All the arguments, all the reasons, all the fors and againsts, had to be gone over with this set of friends; all the griefs opened up again, and the starting made harder than ever.” Hardly had she completed this inquisition when she faced a crisis involving one of her companions. Jessie was planning to travel with a maid, a young woman named Harriot, who was following her to California, less out of eagerness than a sense of duty. Harriot was engaged to a man who did not want her to go, and as Jessie later told the story, the fiancé appeared in New York and took desperate measures. “He went off,” she said, “and raised the whole force of people who were allied for rescu
ing colored people being carried off to the South against their will.” A crowd of African Americans began gathering at the hotel.

  New York’s black community knew that free black residents had been kidnapped and sold into slavery—people such as Solomon Northup, a musician lured away from Rochester, New York, in 1841 who had not been seen since. So many people had disappeared that state law provided assistance for efforts to recover them, and Jessie realized that “the cry of ‘carrying off a free colored girl against her will’ had the same effect . . . as an alarm of fire.” Protesters, or a “colored mob,” as Jessie called them, “poured into the Astor House, filling the lower halls, and raising such a commotion that Mr. Stetson,” the hotel manager, “came for us to see what could be done.” The crowd refused to trust the intentions of Jessie or her family. “It was true that we were Southerners . . . [but] not true that [Harriot] was being carried off against her will. The trouble was that she had no will; she had only affections, and these pulled her in contrary directions.” Another possibility didn’t occur to Jessie—that Harriot was pulled less by affection than by society’s expectations. She was trapped between the competing demands of two people whom she likely felt she could not refuse: her assertive white employer and a man. The protest at last decided the issue. Jessie released the maid from her obligation and sent her into her fiancé’s arms.