Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  Beale was in an enormous hurry—he was determined to cross the isthmus in hours, rather than weeks, to catch the next ship on the Caribbean side—but he lingered long enough to hear Jessie’s story. When he learned of John’s misfortunes, Jessie recounted, “I was not advised but ordered to go home.” Beale insisted that she gather up Lily and her baggage; he would escort her. Just as firmly, Jessie refused. She bade Beale good-bye, then made sure she had tickets for herself and for Lily on one of the steamers bound for California. After Beale departed, she paid an emotional price for her decision, suffering the pangs of rethinking a choice made in haste. The book about the Spanish conquistador returned to her mind. “In the chronicle of the conquest of Mexico there is one night of disaster and massacres which Bernal Díaz records under the head tristissima noche [the saddest night]; I had had many sad nights since leaving home, but after my old friend left I think I could name this my saddest.”

  The Pacific Mail steamship Panama raised anchor carrying more than three hundred passengers on a vessel built with berths for something closer to two hundred. Extra passengers spread blankets on deck around the funnel, beneath the ship’s three masts, and between the two huge side paddle wheels that propelled the ship. A newspaper correspondent who was among the passengers wrote that the “throng” of people with their “motley” manners and appearances were “full of picturesque interest . . . but to the comfort loving traveller, who had to hob nob with and elbow this strange crowd of varied hue, within the contracted limits of a steamboat . . . it was any thing but agreeable.” Pacific Mail ships had a design flaw that caused them to roll side to side so sharply that the paddle wheel on the high side might rise six feet out of the water, spinning uselessly in the air. Yet for all the rocking of the deck, the “equatorial heat,” and the “bilge water,” the newspaper correspondent said “it ill became us to grow querulous, when the ladies bore their part of suffering and discomfort so heroically. Mrs. Fremont, who was on her way to join her husband, showed a power of endurance that was a fit counterpart to the heroism of that adventurer.” The New York Evening Post eventually printed this description.

  The few women were allowed some separation from the mass of men; Jessie received one of the staterooms belowdecks. But within a few days at sea, she developed a cough so severe that a man in the next cabin heard her through the wall. Blaming the dank air inside the coal-fired ship, he led her up on deck and helped arrange for her to spend most of her time on the quarterdeck, the raised area toward the back of the ship that was typically occupied by its officers. The crew draped an oversize flag over a boom to form a tent, which soon became a refuge for all the females on board. Jessie, Lily, and the others had a view of other passengers as they kept up the patterns of the temporary society they had created during their delay on land. A pastor stood on the rocking deck and continued the Protestant Sunday services that had begun in Panama City; Jessie would have caught his voice when it carried over the sound of the steam engine and the creaking of the masts in the wind.

  By now she had run through all of her reading material and all that she could borrow (“Everybody had a Shakespeare and not much besides”), so she had time to study the faces of the men on the main deck below. Some were familiar. There was a sitting congressman from Georgia on board, a man she might have spied around Washington and whose presence was somewhat mysterious. (“No one knows what business has brought him here,” the New York Post correspondent said.) A former congressman from Mississippi was also on board, along with several other politicians, their business equally undefined. There were at least two military officers in the crowd, one from the army and one from the navy. The navy lieutenant proved to be useful. Late one night Jessie woke to a commotion of voices and realized in the darkness that some crisis was unfolding. Beyond the voices she heard “a low, busy, grating, whispering sound of waters—and [on the otherwise dark sea] I could see long broken lines of foamy white, which even my inexperience told me were unusual.” These were breakers—waves crashing over a shoal, on which the steamer was about to run aground. The captain did not wake when men pounded on his door, so the navy man, Cadwalader Ringgold, took charge and directed the steamer away from danger.

  Jessie rose the next morning and stood in the pure ocean air. She passed her birthday on the Pacific on May 31, 1849, with the mountains of California somewhere off to her right as the ship worked its way up the coast. She was twenty-five years old, starting a new life, shielded from the sun and rain by the colors of the flag.

  California gold miners, 1851–52.

  Chapter Twelve

  JESSIE BENTON FRÉMONT WAS THE BETTER MAN OF THE TWO

  Two Californians, 1849

  San Francisco, San Jose, and Monterey

  Jessie was on deck beneath her flag when the Panama turned eastward toward the early morning light on June 4. It steamed between rugged mountain slopes through the passage that her husband had named the Golden Gate. Ahead lay the rocky knob of Alcatraz Island and the open water of the bay. On the shoreline to the right was the presidio that John had raided by boat in 1846, and just beyond it the little town of Yerba Buena, which many were calling by a new name, San Francisco. From the deck of the Panama, she found the town to be “a bleak and meagre frontispiece to our Book of Fate. A few low houses, and many tents, such as they were, covered the base of some of the wind-swept treeless hills, over which the June fog rolled its chilling mist.” The tents held the sudden increase in population. People “swarmed” around “the mud shore of the bay,” but the waters of the harbor were eerily quiet: “Deserted ships of all sorts were swinging with the tide.” Something about the sight of the place caused many passengers to hesitate before going ashore. They lingered, ate another meal or two from the ship’s stores, and spent a last few hours in the floating society they had built. A man rowed out to the ship and offered sobering information: many men in the goldfields were working for ten dollars per day, excellent wages but hardly the fortune that was inspiring so many to make the passage, and “so hard was the work” that some discouraged men had already given up to find jobs in the shantytown that was San Francisco.

  It was too late to turn back. The passengers hoisted their “salt pork, tin kettles, tools, and India rubber contrivances,” and started finding ways ashore, and the moment they went over the side of the ship many abandoned their orderly and generous society. “The mere landing of the passengers was a problem,” Jessie said, because “the crews who took boats to shore were pretty sure not to come back.” Fortunately a San Francisco merchant sent his own boat to help pick up passengers. Once ashore, the three hundred people from the Panama had to find places to stay in a town that had no room for those already present; one of the men who arrived that summer said it was typical to sleep on a plank while fending off “the attacks of innumerable fleas,” and to be awakened before sunrise “by the sounds of building, with which the hills are all alive.” But passengers from the Panama promptly established the patterns of new lives, as the correspondent for the New York Evening Post observed: “The parson, who had each Sunday during the voyage, read to us the service, and preached against this world with its lusts, was off to the mines, with tin pan and shovel. A sober, staid, and smooth-faced man, that had conducted himself like a saint on board ship, was to be seen, much to the surprise of all, dealing cards at a faro table, at the Parker Hotel.” Amid the “wooden sheds, mud huts and streets, scattered pell mell along the gorge,” some men set up as “speculators and financiers,” even if they did not have offices and had to do business on a “tin plate.”

  Jessie was able to launch her own new life with a feeling of triumph and relief. On the way up the coast she had received glorious news: when a boat put ashore during a stop at San Diego, its crew brought back word that John was alive, and had been seen in Los Angeles, heading north. Jessie’s decision to complete her journey was vindicated, and the rest of the way up the coast she was able to imagine him ridi
ng a parallel course in the interior. But he was not yet in San Francisco when she arrived. She managed to find a place to stay in one of the best houses in town, which was unexpectedly available: the home of William Leidesdorff, the merchant and former vice-consul. The black diplomat, who had hosted John in his house at the start of 1846, had recently died short of his fortieth birthday, and the location of his “girl-like” Russian wife was unclear. Their house was now occupied by a “club of wealthy merchants,” who shared it and hired Chinese immigrants as servants. Standing on the veranda, Jessie admired the “beautiful garden kept in old-world order by a Scotch gardener.” She walked inside, studied the carpets, and noticed the English brand name Broadwood on the piano. The merchants offered her, as the only woman among them, “the one room with a fire-place,” a luxury in a town where, it was said, “there daily blows a hurricane.”

  The merchants’ house would have contained the latest issues of the San Francisco newspaper, the Alta California, which described a region near anarchy. A military governor was in charge down the coast at Monterey, but there was no fully developed civil government, and the institutions that existed were overwhelmed by the flood of population and wealth. “Every man carried his code of laws on his hip and administered it according to his own pleasure,” said one of the new arrivals. “There was no safety of life or property. . . . We were absolutely in a state of chaos.” Congress had failed to organize a territorial or state government, and an improvised California legislature was clashing with the military governor over its authority. The governor, General Bennet Riley, had proposed a solution the day before Jessie arrived: his proclamation called on Californians to elect representatives to a constitutional convention to organize a state government, which would appeal to Congress for recognition. Soon San Franciscans were announcing a mass meeting to discuss proposals for statehood. Jessie might well have attended the meeting, and was surely nearby when it was called to order at Portsmouth Square, barely a thousand feet from the house where she was staying, at three o’clock in the afternoon on June 12. The speakers included current and former lawmakers who had just arrived on the same steamer as Jessie, yet now addressed the crowd as if they were longtime California leaders. Word was spreading that the Georgia congressman Thomas Butler King was in California as a confidential agent of Zachary Taylor, the newly inaugurated president of the United States. King’s job was to bring California into the Union as a state; the two military officers who had traveled on the Panama were his aides. A witness to the mass meeting said King spoke “with his accustomed eloquence and ability.” The speakers also included the former Mississippi congressman from Jessie’s ship, William M. Gwin, a man with a chiseled face and high cheekbones and burning ambition. Each of the eastern lawmakers dreamed of returning to Congress as one of California’s first United States senators. The Post correspondent sarcastically marveled that the men could “understand the wants and necessities of California after only a few weeks’ residence in the Territory! . . . It is to be regretted, however, that they could not have found some Territory nearer home worthy of their patriotism and sacrifices.”

  If Jessie heard or read such remarks, she had to make an effort not to take them personally. Her husband had an ambition similar to that of the other new arrivals; John would have been delighted to become governor once military rule had ended. He would have an advantage over other newcomers in seeking such a post: he, at least, had a past connection to California. Jessie could see that John’s family name—their name—was visible all over. The Alta California carried advertisements that summer for tradesmen and services at a new town called Fremont, established by the Sacramento River and serving the nearby goldfields. It was in this period or soon after that San Francisco named Fremont Street. One of the new businesses in San Francisco was called the Frémont Family Hotel, which became, among other things, the location for regular drawings in “The Grand Californian Lottery.” Shortly after Jessie’s arrival, a ship arrived in San Francisco Bay from Baltimore; it was called the Colonel Fremont. (The newspaper advertised the goods it brought for sale: “whiskey, 4th proof brandy, apple brandy, cordials, champagne, wine, gin, rum, gunpowder, shot,” along with dried beef, pork, shovels, boots, and “Penn[sylvania] cheese.”) Not all of John’s publicity was favorable: the Alta California that was current when Jessie arrived included a long article on its front page detailing an old controversy over the payment for horses that John had purchased during his disputed tenure as the military governor of California. Yet even this awkward news underlined his ties to the place. He was as well positioned as anyone to rise to power, whenever he finally turned up.

  * * *

  AS JESSIE WAS ARRIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO, John was approximately two hundred miles southeast, at Tulare Lake in the Central Valley, swatting away insects. On the first of June, he sat down to write a greeting to a friend elsewhere in California. He kept it short: “The mosquitoes torment me here so much that I absolutely cannot write. You have passed them here yourself and know them by experience.” He signed the letter and handed it to Alex Godey, who was to deliver the note and ask if the friend had any horses to sell. John was short of cash, and hoped his friend would sell horses cheap and put them “on my account,” meaning on credit. Godey had already made a long ride to Monterey on the coast and had been unable to find animals that they could afford.

  John was at the head of the remnant of his expedition. Just short of twenty men had spent two months, from mid-February to mid-April, crossing the mountains and deserts to southern California. They passed near desert hot springs known as Agua Caliente, later the site of a town called Palm Springs. They reached a rancho controlled by an American outside Los Angeles. Some then broke off to seek their fortunes, while John gathered supplies from Los Angeles and continued north. Jackson Saunders, the black servant, was still with him, as was Preuss the mapmaker, although Preuss would soon find work in California. John was also traveling with a large group of people he had recently met: men, women, and children who were migrating from the Mexican state of Sonora. The Mexicans had experience working in Sonora’s gold mines, and wanted to put their skills to use in California. It may have been when John met them in the southwestern desert that he first heard of California’s gold—and he quickly understood what it could mean for him. The two groups traveled together for a time for mutual protection against Indians, and John recorded in his notes: “Some of the Sonorians decide[d] to go . . . with me to look for gold which I told them would be found [on my land].”

  His land: he was a significant landowner in California. He had been for more than two years, after obtaining property during the war. Given the central role that his interest in California real estate had played in his past actions, it should have been no surprise that while collaborating with Commodore Stockton, clashing with General Kearny, fending off the Mexican uprising in Los Angeles, assuming the governorship, and losing it, he had also found time to purchase real estate. Conducting land deals while commanding troops in a war zone created considerable risk that he could abuse his power—indeed, it seemed the definition of an abuse of power—but he did not hide his transactions: “I had always intended to make my home in the country if possible,” he explained, “and for this purpose desired a foothold in it.” He bought properties on the peninsula near the Golden Gate, anticipating the city that would grow there. In early 1847 he asked the consul Thomas O. Larkin to help him buy more land, and Larkin found an opportunity that seemed too good to refuse: an enormous land grant in the Central Valley, extending into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, near Yosemite Valley.

  The grant belonged to Juan B. Alvarado, a former governor of Alta California, although his claim might have surprised the Miwok Indians who lived there. The land was not settled by outsiders or even surveyed. It was believed to extend over ten square leagues, or 44,280 acres, more than sixty-nine square miles—an area more than three times the size of the island of Manhattan, and slightly larger than the
District of Columbia. The grant centered on Mariposa Creek, and would be known as Las Mariposas. Alvarado had received it from the Mexican government on condition that he would never sell, but with Mexican authority crumbling, he disregarded this and sold to John for three thousand dollars, less than seven cents per acre. It was pure speculation. “I had never seen the place,” John said, and he knew “nothing of its character or value.” Weeks later he was ordered eastward by General Kearny for his eventual arrest and court-martial, and he never inspected the land; later he contemplated suing Larkin to undo the sale.

  He also made plans to set up as a land baron in the manner of John Sutter. He arranged for sawmill machinery to be shipped to California by sea, along with items suitable for a country squire. William Aspinwall, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company executive who had eased Jessie’s passage across Panama, performed another favor by making arrangements to build a special traveling coach for the Frémonts. This had been sent by sea and, John hoped, was awaiting pickup at a warehouse in San Francisco.