by H. W. Brands
The human porters usually made it to Panama alive; and when they didn’t, their bodies received comparatively respectful treatment. Not so for the mules. “We found the ‘road’ in a horrible condition,” wrote Stephen Davis, “the mud being 4 or 5 feet deep in some places, and at frequent intervals were dead mules in various states of decomposition, which were now being torn and devoured by vultures.”
The travelers’ reward for a hard day slogging through the mud was a night at the Washington Hotel, an establishment much advertised along the route from Chagres. It boasted forty beds, although the assertion proved even more inflated than many in that immodest time and place. The beds “consisted of frames of wood five feet long,” explained Frank Marryat, “over which were simply stretched pieces of much-soiled canvas—they were in three tiers, and altogether occupied about the same space as would two fourposters.” Moreover, in Marryat’s case, they were already filled, leaving him to spend a miserable night outdoors, soaked, dirty, perched on a dead tree to avoid the wet ground, but tormented there by ants until he discovered a refuge among the packsaddles of a team of mules turned loose by their drivers till morning.
During the first several months of the Gold Rush, nearly all the traffic across the isthmus went from north to south—that is, from the Caribbean to the Pacific. But as early as the end of 1849, outbound gold-seekers met men returning from the mines. The encounter could be sobering. “Some were returning rich in gold dust and scales,” wrote Frank Marryat, who ran into a group of returnees at the Washington Hotel, “but the greater part were far poorer than when they first started to realise their golden dreams. And these latter were as drunken and as reckless a set of villains as one could see anywhere. Stamped with vice and intemperance, without baggage or money, they were fit for robbery and murder to any extent; many of them I doubt not were used to it.” The picture they painted of California was grim. “They foretold with a savage joy the miseries and disappointment that awaited all who landed there.” Yet the outgoers tried to put the best face on things. “There are various reasons for some returning without gold,” wrote one who refused to be discouraged. “Some are sick and spend their money to get well, and some lose all their money by gambling.” The good news outweighed the bad: “All agree that there is gold enough for many years to come.”
Once again, Jessie Frémont fared better than most travelers. She slept in a real bed, with a roof and screens to keep out the rain and ants—and snakes and rats and mosquitoes and leeches. Yet the atmosphere of the place weighed on her as on the others. “The nights were odious with their dank mists and noises,” she wrote. Determined to bear up, at least in public, she kept her fears to herself—which caused the guardian assigned to her by the steamship line to assume she was stronger than she was. “As there were no complaints or tears or visible breakdown, he gave me credit for high courage, while the fact was that the whole thing was so like a nightmare that one took it as a bad dream—in helpless silence.” But the nightmare diminished with the dawn. “There was compensation in the sunrise, when from a mountain top you look down into an undulating sea of magnificent unknown blooms, sending up clouds of perfume into the freshness of the morning; and thus from the last of the peaks we saw, as Balboa had seen before us, the Pacific at our feet.”
Crossing the continental divide, Jessie felt she was crossing a chronological and emotional divide as well. Balboa in Darien recalled Prescott’s history of the Spanish conquest, which she had read at home with her father and family. That happy time now seemed so long ago as to beggar the memory. “It lay before the date which should hereafter mark all things— before and after leaving home.”
DESCENDING THE MOUNTAINS, the isthmian travelers emerged onto an open plain that ended at the ocean and the old city of Panama. The city showed its past—and its present. “Never were modern improvements so effectually applied to a dilapidated relic of former grandeur as here,” remarked Frank Marryat wryly.
The main street is composed almost entirely of hotels, eating- houses, and “hells” [saloons]. The old ruined houses have been patched up with whitewash and paint, and nothing remains unaltered but the cathedral. This building is in what I believe is called the “early Spanish style,” which in the Colonies is more remarkable for the tenacity with which mud bricks hold together, than for any architectural advantages. The principal features in connection with these ancient churches are the brass bells they contain, many of which are of handsome design; and these bells are forced on the notice of the visitor to Panama, inasmuch as being now all cracked, they emit a sound like that of a concert of tin- pots and saucepans.
At the corner of every street is a little turreted tower, from the top of which a small boy commences at sunrise to batter one of these discordant instruments, whilst from the belfries of the cathedral there issues a peal, to which, comparatively speaking, the din of a boiler manufactory is a treat. If those bells fail to bring the people to church, at all events they allow them no peace out of it.
The Panamanians were a diverse lot. “The natives are white, black, and every intermediate shade of color, being a mixture of Spanish, Negro, and Indian blood,” observed J. D. Borthwick. (A less worldly emigrant put the matter less neutrally, saying the city “is inhabited by all of the hell hounds of god’s creation, for they are some blacks, spanish jews with French.”) Like most of the overwhelmingly male argonauts, Borthwick paid particular attention to the fairer sex. “Many of the women are very handsome, and on Sundays and holidays they dress very showily, mostly in white dresses, with bright-colored ribbons, red or yellow slippers without stockings, flowers in their hair, and round their necks, gold chains, frequently composed of coins of various sizes linked together.”
Borthwick went on to describe a custom among the Panamanian women that struck him—with most other travelers through the isthmus— as very curious, if not downright dangerous.
They have a fashion of making their hair useful as well as ornamental, and it is not unusual to see the ends of three or four half- smoked cigars sticking out from the folds of their hair at the back of the head; for though they smoke a great deal, they never seem to finish a cigar at one smoking. It is amusing to watch the old women going to church. They come up smoking vigorously, with a cigar in full blast, but, when they get near the door, they reverse it, putting the lighted end into their mouth, and in this way they take half-adozen stiff pulls at it, which seems to have the effect of putting it out. They then stow away the stump in some of the recesses of their “back hair,” to be smoked out on a future occasion.
Borthwick estimated the native population of the city at about eight thousand; beyond this was the floating mass of perhaps three thousand transients. The latter included, along with the honest travelers, a considerable collection of sharps, pickpockets, and other birds of prey seeking a living from the birds of passage. Gambling was epidemic; even Jessie Frémont, simply through observation, became something of an expert at judging fighting cocks. The appetites of all were whetted by the gold that passed through Panama on its way back to the Atlantic world. “This morning 22 mule loads of gold dust started for Cruces, with over $1,000,000,” wrote Stephen Davis in his diary, still wondering if he had seen what he thought he had seen.
THE LARGE NUMBER of transients in Panama reflected not simply the appeal of California gold but the peculiar manner in which the gold deranged traffic all along the Pacific coast of the Americas. During the spring and summer of 1849, California resembled what physicists of a later generation would call a black hole; in this case ships (rather than light) went into the harbor of San Francisco but didn’t come out. Crews abandoned their vessels even before the anchors touched the bottom of the bay; despite the direst threats and most alluring promises, ships’ captains found their vessels unmanned and themselves marooned on the golden shore. The effect was felt as far away as Nantucket, where an alarmed shipowner wrote to the captain of his whaling craft, “Keep clear of there by all means, or you will not have a cr
ew to bring you out.”
As a result, during that spring and summer, argonauts piled into Panama by the hundreds, then thousands, expecting to see the Pacific steamers promised them at New York—steamers that simply didn’t come. Jessie Frémont, despite all the money at her disposal and all her family connections, found herself stranded with the rest of the mob. For weeks she waited, dreading that Lily would catch the fever and die—or worse, that she herself would die, leaving Lily alone in this godforsaken place. The point of the journey was to make a home in California with Lily and John; would they ever be reunited?
Her worries grew with the unexpected delivery of a letter from John. Since their parting at Westport on the banks of the Missouri, Jessie naturally had feared for his safety. She fancied herself modestly psychic; at one point she was seized by a feeling that he was in grave danger. “I became possessed with the conviction that he was starving,” she wrote. “Nor could any effort reason this away.” Now she learned the truth, which did little to assuage her fears.
John wrote of a disaster that had befallen his latest expedition. The expedition’s stated purpose was to discover a route across the Rocky Mountains that would be passable for railroad trains in winter as well as summer. Frémont had been over the Sierras in winter, and was convinced that where he could go, trains could follow. But neither he nor anyone else he knew of had crossed the Rockies, on a latitude convenient to California, in the dead of winter. Such was precisely what he set out to do.
Frémont’s unstated purpose was probably no less important. Publicly humiliated, deprived of his livelihood, he was determined to demonstrate that his career was not over, but just begun, that his heroism defied the slings and arrows of his outrageous misfortune. The very arguments against attacking the Rockies in midwinter became, by Frémont’s inner calculus, reasons for making the assault. The greater the danger, the greater the glory.
After leaving the Missouri, Frémont and his men ascended the Arkansas River to Bent’s Fort and Pueblo. It was early December, and the snows of winter already cloaked the peaks and clogged the passes. Trappers, traders, and other veterans of the mountains shook their heads on hearing Frémont’s plan. To try the mountains in winter meant certain death, they said. But Frémont had ignored the pessimists who told him the Sierras were impassable in winter, and his success had taught him to trust his own judgment.
He needed a guide, a man who knew the mountains. Kit Carson would have been his first choice had Carson been available, but Carson had other obligations. Instead Frémont chose Bill Williams. “Old Bill” was legendary, first for his age, which was uncertain but obviously advanced for one of his hazardous profession; second for his knowledge of the southern Rockies, which surpassed that of any other white man and most Indians; third for his eccentricities, which included an awkward style of walking that made him appear constantly drunk (he was drunk often, but not constantly, and not in the mountains), a ludicrous manner of riding a horse, which made Ichabod Crane appear a professional jockey, and a wardrobe off-putting even by the casual standards of cleanliness common in the mountains; fourth, and finally, for his instinct for survival, which had gotten him through more winters and other hard times than he could count. (While some doubted Williams could count very well, he was sufficiently educated to have been a Methodist preacher in earlier life.) Frémont relied on Williams’s survival instinct, although others preferred not to. Kit Carson later commented, “In starving times, no man who knew him ever walked in front of Bill Williams.”
From Pueblo the party entered the mountains. The initial ascent was difficult but exhilarating, and not a little frightening. One of the men, describing the view backward and forward from one of the first passes, wrote, “The sight was beautiful, the snow-covered plain far beneath us, stretching as far as the eye could reach, while on the opposite side frowned the almost perpendicular wall of high mountains.”
Into those mountains they plunged, and almost immediately discovered why the neighborhood regulars were so skeptical. The snows were deep and grew deeper daily; the drifts mocked the men’s efforts to move forward and defied the mules to find forage. At one point the party spied what seemed to be grass pushing up through the snow where the wind apparently had blown away the drifts; on closer inspection the tufts proved to be the tips of tall trees buried to nearly their full height. The cold intensified with the increasing elevation and the advancing season. The wind shrieked through the passes and sliced through the clothing of the men. All the elements assaulted the expedition, which began to look like a ruined military column. “The trail showed as if a defeated party had passed by: packsaddles and packs, scattered articles of clothing, and dead mules strewed along,” Frémont wrote Jessie.
Conditions only deteriorated. The storm became a constant blizzard. Williams lost the way, leading the group into a maze of mountains from which there appeared no exit. Frémont unwisely determined to save the baggage rather than leave it and evacuate the men as rapidly as possible to a lower elevation. He dispatched a party of four, including Williams, to the settlements of northern New Mexico, there to acquire fresh provisions and mules to replace those now dead in the snowdrifts. He himself remained in the mountains with the rest of his men.
Christmas came while Frémont and the others awaited relief. “Like many a Christmas for years back,” he wrote Jessie, “mine was spent on the summit of a wintry mountain, my heart filled with gloomy and anxious thoughts, with none of the merry faces and pleasant luxuries that belong to that time. You may be sure we contrasted much this with the last at Washington, and speculated much on your doings and made many warm wishes for your happiness.” Frémont intended to commence a career in law once he and Jessie and Lily were established in California; to this end he had brought some books on the expedition. “You remember the volumes of Blackstone which I took from your father’s library when we were overlooking it at our friend Brant’s? They made my Christmas amusements. I read them to pass the heavy time and forget what was around me. Certainly you may suppose that my first law lessons will be well remembered.”
Days elapsed, then weeks, with no return of the relief party. Rations ran low, and the men’s spirits sank even lower. One man, perhaps irrational from cold and hunger, perhaps simply weighing his options, deliberately chose to let himself freeze. “In a sunshiny day, and having with him the means to make a fire, he threw his blankets down in the trail and lay there till he froze to death.”
Frémont decided he could wait no longer. The relief party might have lost the trail or been ambushed by Indians. Selecting a small group, and leaving the others with the baggage, he set out in the same direction as the first party. For several days the group struggled along before discovering a thin column of smoke wafting above a stand of trees. This must be the rescue party, they thought, and they hastened their painful steps toward the smoke. “We found them—three of them, Creutzfeldt, Brackenridge, and Williams—the most miserable objects I have ever seen. I did not recognize Creutzfeldt’s features when Brackenridge brought him up to me and mentioned his name. They had been starving. King had starved to death a few days before. His remains were some six or eight miles above, near the river.” (Unknown to Frémont at the time he wrote Jessie, the three survivors had eaten part of King’s body.)
After obtaining horses from friendly Indians, the Frémont group and the three survivors hurried on to the New Mexican settlements. Though Frémont didn’t detail it to Jessie, by the time he reached Taos he was nearly dead: utterly exhausted, frostbitten (one leg was threatened by gangrene), almost snow-blind. Unable to travel farther, he dispatched his most trusted lieutenant, Alexander Godey, to lead a party back into the mountains to rescue the men who remained there.
What the rescuers discovered was a human catastrophe. The two dozen men had waited for a week, then decided they must find their own way out. One by one they fell by the trail. “Manuel—you will remember Manuel, the Cosumne Indian—” Frémont wrote Jessie, “gave way to a feel
ing of despair after they had travelled about two miles, begged Haler to shoot him, and then turned and made his way back to the camp, intending to die there, as he doubtless soon did.” Ten miles from camp another man surrendered to fate, threw down his gun and blanket, and tumbled into a drift to die. Overnight a man went crazy from hunger, wandered off from the main group, and was never seen again. Another man died quietly the next day; a companion, snow-blind and himself at death’s door, stayed behind with him and soon succumbed also.
Frémont spared Jessie few of the grim specifics.
Things were desperate, and brought Haler to the determination of breaking up the party in order to prevent them from living upon each other. He told them “that he had done all he could for them, that they had no other hope remaining than the expected relief, and that their best plan was to scatter and make the best of their way in small parties down the river. That, for his part, if he was to be eaten, he would, at all events, be found travelling when he did die.”…At night Kern’s mess encamped a few hundred yards from Haler’s, with the intention, according to Taplin, to remain where they were until relief should come, and, in the meantime, to live upon those who had died, and upon the weaker ones as they should die.
How much cannibalism actually occurred, no one cared to discover. When Godey arrived with relief, he was content to load the living onto the mules he brought and leave the dead to the snows and whatever nonhuman scavengers might find them.
In all, Frémont lost ten men of his party of thirty-three. Yet he expressed no remorse, no questioning of his judgment in the mountains, no doubt as to whether the goal had warranted the sacrifice. Perhaps he felt that his own close call released him from self-criticism, in that he had suffered alongside his men. Perhaps he felt that those who died simply weren’t as strong as he.