Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  John’s feet grew twitchy again. In early 1853, the new president appointed as secretary of war his fellow Democrat Jefferson Davis, who organized three expeditions to explore the best possible routes for a transcontinental railroad to California. Davis gave the command of each expedition to a serving military officer, bypassing John C. Frémont, but John would not be deterred, resolving to finance his own expedition for what he said was the public good. He intended to find a route along the same line of travel that had led to his disaster in the expedition of 1848 to 1849. “Above every other consideration,” he explained to a scientific journal that took an interest in his journey, “I have a natural desire to do something in the finishing up of a great work in which I had been so long engaged.” He intended to depart from Missouri in the fall of 1853, traveling due west once again near the 38th parallel, venturing into the same mountains in the same season as before.

  The family returned to New York on a steamer called the Asia, arriving just after midnight on June 16 in a country that was celebrating its prosperity. Workers in Manhattan were completing an enormous building of glass and iron, New York’s Crystal Palace—a vast octagon, topped by a dome, with walls and roof entirely of glass plates on an iron frame. Built at Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street at the northern edge of the city, the see-through building was finished just in time to hold the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. Thousands paid the fifty-cent admission or purchased ten-dollar season tickets to study sculpture, agricultural products, and industrial machinery from Europe, the Ottoman empire, and Mexico. A writer for the New York Herald said the hundreds of products from the United States were “impossible to mistake” for those from any other country because of their “utilitarian characteristics,” and this was true; some of the most significant American items were familiar from their increasing use in everyday life. There were steam engines. There was railroad track. Railway cars and wheels made of steel. Advanced rifles and pistols. Daguerreotype cameras. Gas meters, gas lights, and gas burners. There was an exhibit of “Morse’s patent electric telegraph apparatus in operation,” which was now such a common feature that the telegraph set in the Crystal Palace was connected to the network of wires stretching as far west as New Orleans and St. Louis; the Crystal Palace was just another telegraph office. There was a “printing telegraph,” which spat out characters on paper tape. Americans saw the display as further evidence of the miracle of their country, and a writer for the New York Times observed that several European powers were at war, “while we, thanks be to the Providence that has so favored us, [are dedicating the Crystal Palace as] the divinest temple to Peace that ever shadowed American soil.”

  There were nonetheless hints of history moving in a less placid direction. When John woke in New York on August 22, that day’s Herald offered reactions from Latin America to a proposal that the United States should purchase Cuba from Spain. Southerners wanted the island for slavery. An inside page of the same paper contained the headline IS THE WHIG PARTY DEAD? There was also a revealing item in the column called “Theatrical Intelligence”: a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “still attractive at the National. How much longer it will run we could not say, as the houses now are as full as ever.”

  If John picked up the Herald that day in 1853, he left no record of it. He was absorbed with preparations for what he viewed as his own contribution to history. Preparing for his expedition, he went through the crowded streets in search of a photographer. For his 1842 journey he had bought a camera in New York, but his images never came out; now he wanted a professional. At a photo studio on Broadway he met Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who at thirty-eight was two years younger than John, with carefully coiffed hair and a fringe of beard along the bottom of his jaw. He was a son of immigrants, a Portuguese-American Jew. Like John, Carvalho had grown up in Charleston, where his father played a role in founding the first Reform Jewish synagogue in the United States. Their lives had since diverged, as Carvalho became a denizen of eastern cities with no wilderness experience. But John was unlikely to find an experienced outdoor photographer and offered Carvalho a job. “A half hour previously,” Carvalho said, “if anybody had suggested to me, the probability of my undertaking an overland journey to California . . . I should have replied there were no inducements sufficiently powerful to have tempted me.” Yet Carvalho was unable to refuse the famed explorer. “I impulsively, without even a consultation with my family, passed my word to join [the] expedition . . . with the full expectation of being exposed to the inclemencies of arctic winter. I know of no other man to whom I would have entrusted my life, under similar circumstances.” He consulted other photographers about how to make his daguerreotype camera function; the chemical processes worked best around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and Carvalho had been warned to expect temperatures ranging “from freezing point to thirty degrees below zero.” He started for the West still uncertain if the experiment would work.

  * * *

  JOHN’S MEN GATHERED THAT FALL at the regular point of departure on the western border of Missouri. The familiar plain was changing. The region west of Missouri was becoming known as Nebraska, although Congress had not formally recognized it as a territory. The Indians of the Wyandot Nation, forced to relocate from Ohio some years earlier, were building towns by the mouth of the Kansas River; they commonly dressed like white people, attended a Methodist church, had joined a Masonic lodge, and governed themselves with written laws. They were leading the movement to organize Nebraska Territory, electing one of their own as a provisional governor. In the fall of 1853 they were preparing to send a delegate to Congress to make their case for recognition, and politicians from neighboring Missouri had taken an interest. One visiting politico was a representative of Thomas Hart Benton, who favored a Nebraska free of slavery; all the Nebraska land lay north of the historic Missouri Compromise line dividing free and slave territory. Benton’s representative was opposed by men linked with Senator David Atchison, his proslavery archrival, who claimed that Benton was plotting to create a new state that would make him a senator. They were like rival colonial powers, the proslavery and antislavery Missourians, making their first moves to capture the land beyond the state’s border.

  Refusing to be distracted by this political tension, John’s expedition made its final preparations. Now that John was financing the expedition, he planned to travel with a smaller party than in the past. That party would also be easier to feed when supplies grew scarce in the snow. Twelve men—nine white Americans, one American of mixed race, and two Mexicans—formed the bulk of the group. He made arrangements for ten Delaware hunters to meet them well out on the prairie, where he would pay the Indians two dollars per day. The roster was mainly notable for who was absent: there was no Carson, no Godey, no Owens. No Preuss, no Kern, nor the voyageurs he knew best, nor the Delaware leader Sagundai, nor Jacob Dodson. Although at least one of the men had traveled previously with John, the heroes and stalwarts of his past expeditions were gone. Some were dead, some worn out. At least three had signed up with a government-sponsored railroad expedition that was, in effect, competing with his own. Others had passed into new phases of their lives, leaving John as the one who had not let go. The photographer Carvalho formed a low opinion of the men who signed up this time. When hungry they pilfered food from one another, and when thirsty they stole alcohol he had brought to use in his daguerreotype process. John himself did not seem to trust them. He told them that no one except he should talk with reporters about their work, and asked that no one keep a journal of the expedition. He was determined this time to control the public relations.

  The men were just starting west when their leader fell ill with rheumatism, an inflammation of the joints, causing pain so intense that it spread to his chest, throat, and head. It was, at age forty, the strongest sign his body had yet sent him that it would not forever endure the demands he made on it. He decided to return to St. Louis for treatment, and told his team to proceed to
their prairie rendezvous with the Delawares; he would catch up.

  At Westport he was able to send a telegram to Jessie in Washington, and she received his message in time to meet him in St. Louis. On a relay of trains and boats, she spent the time in “undefined dread,” unsure of his true condition as she watched the scenery pass. Reaching the waterfront at St. Louis, she plunged into the city, embracing her husband and consulting doctors. The first physician could do no good. A second doctor, a homeopath, “soothed the pain, uprooted the inflammation,” and though her husband was “greatly shaken,” the doctor helped him get “literally ‘on his legs.’” Jessie had been hoping he would call off the expedition; before leaving Washington, she was likely the source of a newspaper report suggesting he had already abandoned it. Instead, as he started west once again, Jessie wrote her friend Lizzie Lee, “I can’t say I am satisfied.” Although it felt “mean-spirited” to put it into words, “I would rather have Mr. Frémont at the fireside taking care of himself, writing out what he has done & enjoying the repose and happiness of our quiet home, than getting all the stupid laurels that ever grew. I think he has done enough—but he does not. If this ends well, I shall be glad for his sake that it was done for he would have always regretted it—but nothing it can ever bring can reward either of us for its cost in suffering to him & anxieties to me.”

  Two of his men were waiting at Westport to escort him back to the main party. The prairie had caught fire in his absence, filling the days with hazy smoke, and lighting the nights with “a horrid, lurid glare, all along the horizon.” The flames didn’t stop him. He had been seeing prairie fires for fifteen years now, ever since the voyageurs under Joseph Nicollet had taught him to survive by staying in burned areas. He rode onward with his escorts, evading the flames along the Kansas River until they caught up with the main party at the start of November.

  There would have been only a limited record of the expedition except that the photographer Solomon Carvalho skirted the prohibition against keeping a journal. He composed notes in the form of a series of letters to his wife, and in this way kept track of his experiences. (He occasionally slipped up while writing, and referred to his letters as “my journal.”) As an amateur in the wilderness, he noticed essential chores of daily life that were new to him—like the hour he might spend chasing down a mule that had been turned out to graze and did not care to be caught. When the men began climbing into snowy mountains, where temperatures sometimes fell to 30 degrees below zero, they faced the nightly labor of gathering enough firewood to last until dawn. One man might return to camp “with a decayed trunk on his shoulder,” while others teamed up to drag in an entire fallen tree. Conditions often made it impossible to pitch tents. Each man had two India-rubber blankets, and would lay one rubber sheet atop the snow and then wrap himself in cloth blankets on top of it, finally pulling another rubber blanket over everything. “We generally slept double [and] communicated warmth to each other. . . . During the whole journey, exposed to the most furious snow-storms, I never slept cold, although when I have been called for guard duty I often found some difficulty in rising from the weight of the snow resting on me.”

  John veered slightly north of the route that had brought him grief in 1848 and 1849. At high altitude one bitterly cold day, he pointed Carvalho toward mountains some forty miles distant and, “in a voice tremulous with emotion,” said that those were the mountains on which so many of his men had died. The photographer solemnly set up his camera and took a daguerreotype of the distant snowy range. A few days later, on December 14, they reached their objective, the Continental Divide, crossing through Cochetopa Pass, which led between snowbound peaks at an altitude of 10,160 feet. John was triumphant—on the day they crossed, he noted only four inches of snow on the ground. Nearby the men observed the stumps of recently felled trees, and a wooden cross. The pass had been used, at least in warmer months, by travelers for many years. Unbeknownst to John, it had also just been used by the United States Army; one of the three government-sponsored railroad studies had crossed this way two months earlier.

  The pass was the beginning of their trouble, as they descended into deeper wilderness with dwindling food supplies. Wild game vanished as the snow grew deeper. Men sank to their waists or even higher. The animals began to die. A butchered horse or mule produced enough meat for about six meals per man; each man was given his share and told he must make it last until the next horse died. Each dead animal also meant a man had to walk, until all were on foot and the surviving animals carried only baggage. Carvalho, suffering from a frostbitten foot that made it excruciating to move, began to fall behind the rest of the men each day. After sunset one evening, he was so far behind the others that he was left guessing which way to walk in the dark. No one came to look for him. In terror of death, he staggered forward alone until he spied the campfires around ten o’clock. John came to stand by the haggard photographer as he warmed himself by a fire, and said he had been certain that Carvalho would make it; left unsaid was the reality that so few strong men or animals remained that it would not have been easy to mount a search party. “Col. Frémont put out his hand and touched my breast, giving me a slight push; I immediately threw back my foot to keep myself from falling. Col. Frémont laughed at me and remarked that I had not ‘half given out,’ any man who could act as I did on the occasion, was good for many more miles of travel.”

  One man died in the mountains. He fell behind the others, his feet blackened with frostbite. This time John did send a search party, which brought back the man, Oliver Fuller, barely alive, but he never recovered. Given one of the dwindling supply of mules to ride, he had to be helped onto the animal and was finally found dead in his saddle. The slowly starving survivors abandoned all excess supplies, freeing enough pack animals that all the men could ride, at least until more animals died; Carvalho had to bury his daguerreotype equipment, although he escaped with the metal plates holding the images he had captured. John also preserved his instruments for celestial navigation, as well as his curiosity; one evening he announced that he expected an “occultation” that night, meaning that the moon would pass in front of a star. He wanted to see it. He engaged the photographer as his assistant, and the two men walked by lantern light to a patch of open ground, “almost up to our middle in snow,” as John made observations “for hours” until the occultation took place.

  In the morning he told Carvalho that he was certain there was a small Mormon settlement on the far side of the next snow-covered mountain range. They were in Utah Territory now, and the settlement, well south of Salt Lake City, was called Parowan. John had already sent one of the Delawares, known as Wolf, to scout the way ahead; Wolf returned with news that there was no way to ride their animals over the mountains, so steep was the slope and so deep was the snow. “That is not the point,” John replied; “we must cross, the question is . . . how we can do it.” They did it on foot, leading their animals by the reins. Though many of the men no longer had proper shoes, they wrapped their feet in rawhide and climbed over rocks and snow. Within a few days they staggered down the far side of the range and into the Utah settlement, which was exactly where John had promised them it would be. It was February 8, 1854. Since crossing the Continental Divide they had spent eight weeks traveling some five hundred miles over country so snowy, harsh, and remote that, except for a few Ute Indians near the end, they never saw another human being.

  The men rested in Parowan, a town of about four hundred. It was only three years old, a product of the Mormon migration to the region in the late 1840s. Had the expedition failed to locate it, there probably was no other town near enough for them to reach. Writing a letter to Benton, John said that “the Delawares all came in sound, but the whites of my party were all exhausted and broken up, and more or less frost-bitten.” John released two men who did not want to continue, including the photographer Carvalho—lame, exhausted, suffering from diarrhea, and without his daguerreotype equipment. Upon reach
ing the town, Carvalho was sent to the house of a Mormon family, and saw their “three beautiful children. I covered my eyes and wept for joy to think I might yet be restored to embrace my own.” He caught a wagon bound for Salt Lake City, planning to return home by the emigrant route when his health and the weather improved.

  John planned to resume his survey as soon as he could resupply his men, which proved to be difficult. He had failed to bring enough cash to buy fresh animals. He offered to pay with drafts against Palmer, Cook and Company, his financial agents in San Francisco, but his checks were of little value to people living so far from a bank. He was lucky to discover almost the only person in the territory who was in a position to help: Almon Babbitt, a senior figure in the Mormon church, who was also the secretary and treasurer of Utah Territory, an aide to the territorial governor Brigham Young. Babbitt was about to travel on territorial business to San Francisco and Washington, D.C. He arranged for a Mormon bishop to buy horses for the expedition using money from church tithes; in exchange, Babbitt would accept John’s notes and cash them in San Francisco in the name of Brigham Young. Without Babbitt, John said he would have faced “the alternative of continuing on foot.”

  Reaching the Pacific coast by mid-April, John publicized the route he had traveled, writing letters to newspapers in San Francisco and Washington, but his case for the railroad line was not persuasive. When at last it was built, more than a decade later, the line would follow a different route several hundred miles farther north. The most concrete achievement of this, John’s final expedition, was Carvalho’s daguerreotypes. No one had photographed such wilderness scenes before, though the images were scant compensation for the suffering. Maybe the true purpose of the expedition was the suffering. John could say, in the words of the oration he had memorized and recited as a youth, that he and his men were achieving “mental and moral greatness” by overcoming the western landscape, whose “awful grandeur” proclaimed “the residence of freemen.” At the beginning of his ordeal he had been so ill he could barely get started; by the time he reached San Francisco he said he felt restored and energized, writing in a letter that he was “well and so hearty that [I am] actually some 14 pounds heavier than ever before.”