by Judy Alter
I watched the road openly then, no longer pretending to the children that things were normal. At nightfall John appeared, looking tired but at least in one piece.
"That Mrs. Ketton," he said as soon as he dismounted and gave the horse to Jake to be put up, "she's a prize. Arrived at the mine tonight with a basket of food"—her husband was the foreman of the men in the Pine Tree—"and when they tried to turn her aside, she said she was going in, no matter what. It's a pretty name you'll leave behind you—shooting a woman for carrying supper to her husband,' she told them. And then she marched right into the mine. I suspect she had guns under the food in that basket."
"Don't you worry for her?" I asked, incredulous at what this woman would do for her man. It didn't occur to me that I did and had done as much—but in other ways, ways that didn't require such bald courage.
"Yes," John said, "I worry a great deal. But I think those men are reluctant to shoot a woman... and I think they also know they're dead men if they do."
"You must send someone for help. The governor—he can't let this happen," I said.
He shook his head tiredly. "The roads are blocked, Jessie. There must be well over a hundred men involved in this, and they say they'll shoot anyone who tries to ride out of this valley."
We were captives, surrounded! I could not believe that such could happen in modern times.
"What are you going to do?"
"Whatever occurs to me," he said.
Things got worse the next day, much worse. John had been at home for the night, and he, Jake, and Jake's "assistant," Isaac, had been armed to the teeth—thirty-two bullets among them, I'd counted, wondering how long they would last. But not an hour after John left to return to the mine, a rider came by the house at a fast gallop and threw a rock that barely missed a window, instead making a nice dent in the front door. Attached to it was a note warning that the children and I had twenty-four hours to leave the valley or "suffer the consequences." The note, which demanded a reply by sundown, said the house would be burned.
"Mother?" Lily asked, for she had found the note and brought it to me.
"Have Jake bring the buggy around," I said, "and put on your best town dress."
I, too, dressed for town—not as I would have in Washington but plenty good enough for Bear Valley, and not the mourning for my father that I'd been wearing—and we went directly to the saloon where the Hornitos had their headquarters.
"Wait here, Jake," I said as he helped me out of the buggy.
"Mrs. Frémont, you can't go in there."
"Yes, I can," I said determinedly, marching through the swinging doors. Once inside, I found myself confronted by speechless men, all of whom seemed to freeze in midgesture as they stared at me.
"Your note," I said scornfully, throwing the piece of paper, still tied around its rock, onto the floor, "has been received. There will be no reply. You may come and kill us—women and children—but there will be no victory in it." With that I swept out of the saloon and back into the carriage.
"Home, Jake," I said, an order so imperious that it set Lily to giggling.
"Are you not afraid?" she asked as we drove away.
"Yes," I confessed, "I'm afraid of a bullet in the back at this very moment. But if Mrs. Ketton can be that brave for her husband, so can I."
Lily's look of admiration was more than enough thanks for me. "We've got to get word out to the governor," she said.
"Lily," I cautioned, "don't even think of it. You cannot ride out of here, good horsewoman that you are."
In the end, though, it was Lily who saved us. While I kept vigil in the bedroom window—watching to see that John's horse was ridden home and never led, which would have meant he was tied across the saddle—Lily developed a plan and put it into effect. She used her mountain horse, Ayah, and without my knowledge, at night, rode along a mountain valley, guided only by the stars, until she reached Coulterville some ten miles away, from where she was able to send for help.
The governor sent immediate word that the Hornitos did not have a prayer. There was no way they could force men to abandon a mine and then claim it was unworked. When he threatened to send in the militia, the siege was over.
Afterward we were occasionally troubled in the night by a bomb of powder in a tin can, but other than frightening the wits out of Lily and me, these were harmless.
"Jessie," John stormed, "you should never have gone into town. I don't want to think about what could have happened."
"If Mrs. Ketton could feed her husband," I said serenely, "I could do my part too. And they were cowards... they wouldn't have done a thing to a woman." Then, turning the tables on him, I accused, "You should not have gone before them unarmed."
"A man does what he has to," he said, shrugging, and I knew he did not see the similarities in our arguments. I never told him that I had been so frightened that I'd penned my will—an astonishing forty pages, as though I had many possessions to leave!
A week or so after everything had calmed down, a delegation of women from the valley came to see me. They rode sidesaddle, dressed in their best finery, and accepted shyly when I invited them into the house for tea.
"Had you given up and left, our valley would have run red with blood," one woman said. "We're grateful to you."
My spirits were high to know that I had not only helped John, but also helped a group of women who saw themselves as helpless.
* * *
We stayed at Las Mariposas two years, or three summers, but the summer of I860 proved so unbearably hot—we found we could roast eggs in the dust of the road in eighteen minutes—that John announced one day we were going to San Francisco.
"Oh, John, it's too hot. I cannot get myself together for a trip." The thought of dressing in city clothes and putting on my public face was more than I wanted to deal with. But he was insistent.
"It is cooler by the ocean," he said, "and you'll be glad you've come with me." He had just returned from a business trip to the city, and I was frankly baffled by his eagerness to return.
Things had been going well for John. For a while the Mariposas was under a gray, if not black, financial cloud—John's former partners, who had been in charge during the presidential campaign, sued for their share, and taxes and legal fees seemed to take everything, so that we had a principality but no cash for groceries. But then the lawsuit against the Merced Company, those who had been behind the Hornitos fiasco, was settled in John's favor, and he put in a new crushing mill, which accelerated operations greatly. But his biggest triumph was the building of a railroad on the property. With John acting as his own superintendent, Chinese workers—the first to work on railroads in this country—built four miles of track winding up the steep faces of Hell's Hollow. John was triumphant, and I could not help pointing out that he'd gotten his railroad one way or another.
"Not quite the transcontinental route I dreamed of," he admitted, "but I'm satisfied with it."
I told myself that this trip to San Francisco was probably a celebration that things were going so well at the mine, and it behooved me, heat or no, to show some enthusiasm. So soon enough we were off in the carriage, the boys left behind in Lily's care, with the one-eyed supervision of a cook I'd recently hired. John dubbed her "Irish Rose," though not to her round and florid face.
John drove not to any of the places I'd expect—the hotel or stores—but straight on to a point of land that jutted out into the ocean. There he pulled up at a modest but charming house.
"John! We cannot arrive to pay a call unbidden," I protested.
"We're not 'paying a call,' " he said."This is our new home—your new home. I bought it in your name."
"My name!" The very idea of owning property overwhelmed me. Hesitantly, I stepped from the carriage into his waiting arms.
"Come!" he said. "Don't you want to explore?"
The house had windows and French doors in abundance, so that almost every room had a view. To one side we could see the entrance to the bay—
John had named it the Golden Gate on an expedition years before—and directly ahead, Alcatraz Island. Beyond, across miles of water, the Costra Contra Mountains. Looking back landward, I stared at the city.
"It is mine?" Then irrational fear struck at my heart. Was he getting rid of me, putting me somewhere out of the way? "You... you won't live here with me?"
He laughed heartily and put his arms around me. "Of course not. I'll be back and forth. I can't leave the mine... you know that, Jessie." His voice took on an earnest, pleading tone. "But I want you to be in the city. You don't have to live like an exile anymore."
I jumped a little. Had he known how I'd felt all along in Bear Valley? I'd thought I'd hidden my feelings better than that.
"John...." I could say no more. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and I walked into his arms. We stood there together, silent, in our new home for a long time.
We called it Black Point because of the laurel trees that surrounded it and, from a distance, made it all appear dark as coal. I furnished the house with all the things I'd had in my father's house and had missed so terribly. Outside we made curving walks through beds of roses and fuchsia and little patios, where I could sit and marvel at the view in any direction. We were close enough to the water that I heard the flapping of the schooners' sails as they rounded the point, and the wooden paddles of the steamers. When the children arrived, we had horses and Lily's eternal poultry yard, and in no time Black Point was the home of my heart.
"I have no need to go back east ever," I told John. "With Father dead the East holds nothing for me. It is dead to me. We shall live our lives out here." I should have known that fate never works that way.
A young Unitarian preacher named Thomas Starr King was making a name for himself speaking on behalf of abolition and Abraham Lincoln, now the Republican candidate for President. I went to hear him one day and was so impressed that I introduced myself afterward.
"Mrs. Frémont! This is indeed an honor." He was taller than John, though not nearly as robust, and he had those same intense blue eyes that looked directly at you without wavering. Still, there was almost an air of frailty about h
im until he spoke, and then his vitality overwhelmed the listener, drawing you along with him to heights of glory—sometimes for rationality, always for abolition, and often in Mr. Lincoln's name.
"I admired very much what you said," I told him, suddenly at a loss for words before those eyes, "and the way you said it."
"That is high praise, coming from you," he replied, never taking his eyes from mine. "I should like to call at your home, if I may. I know I can benefit from your knowledge and experience with politics."
"Of course," I assented, and left hurriedly, lest he see the blush that had begun to creep from my neck to my cheeks.
Within weeks Starr King was a regular caller at Black Point, and I, a lifelong Episcopalian, had purchased a pew in the Unitarian Church. I had also learned a great deal about the minister. Among other things he was precisely my age. Like John, he had been raised in the South and had been desperately poor, so that now he was both ambitious and proud of how far he'd come.
His wife, Julia, accompanied him to Black Point only once. She spoke with a Bostonian accent, sat very straight in her chair, and seemed unable to smile.
"How are you liking our California weather?" I asked amiably as I served tea.
"Not at all," she replied without hesitation. "Nor the city. I am simply waiting for the day Thomas comes to his senses and returns to Boston."
Taken aback, I made no more small talk about Boston—nor did I inquire about children, of which I knew they had none. In minutes Starr and I were deep into a discussion of Mr. Lincoln's political possibilities and the mistakes we both thought he was making in his campaign. Julia sat silent and martyred for the better part of an hour while we chattered like magpies.
Shortly thereafter, the poor Julia broke her foot on a flimsy wooden sidewalk—"It never would have happened in Boston!" she told Starr—and was confined to her house for many months.
"Seeing quite a bit of that new Unitarian minister, I hear," John said on one of his visits.
"Mr. King comes often to discuss politics with Mother," Lily said helpfully. "We like him."
John shot me a look over her head. "So I hear, so I hear." When our daughter was out of earshot, he added, "Watch, lest I get jealous, Jessie."
That blush began to rise again, for I feared that John, having read my discontent at Bear Valley in spite of my best pretenses, could now pierce through my acting to discover my strong attraction to Starr King.
It was, I told myself repeatedly, foolish even to think of King as anything but a friend. He was not as handsome as John, nor as bold and courageous. But then the other side of my mind would remind me of his intellect, the long and passionate discussions we shared... and, yes, his attentiveness. To Starr King I was new and wonderful. John and I had not been lovers for some time; we were companions and business partners and parents together, and occasionally we shared a bed and went through the motions of love, but the passion that had sparked our early marriage had dwindled to nothing. The bloom, as they say, fades from the rose with familiarity. Starr King offered the kind of sensuousness, the drowning in pleasure, that comes with a new relationship.
"I am unhappy, Mrs. Frémont, and I must confess it to someone," Starr said one day. Though I called him Starr in my mind—fascinated by all that such a name implied—we had never in conversation let ourselves get beyond the formality of addressing each other as mister and missus.
"Perhaps," I said teasingly, "you should find a priest to whom you can confess."
"Sometimes I wish I could," he said ruefully. "Catholicism makes things easier in that sense." Then, without another second's hesitation, he plunged into his unhappiness. "It's Julia. She is so bitter all the time that we... we have no marriage left at all. We cannot talk... we..." He hesitated, and I knew he was thinking of the privacies of marriage, which a well-bred man would not discuss with anyone, let alone a happily married woman. "We are strangers to each other," he finished lamely.
"Every marriage goes through dismal periods," I said primly. And then, striving for more honesty, added, "My relationship with Mr. Frémont has been anything but even over the years. The presidential campaign took a great toll... but I am happy now to say that we are enjoying the fullness of marriage as it should be." I still sounded prim, and besides, I was lying. Our relationship was good and strong and solid, but it lacked the very element Starr was hinting at.
"I am happy for you," he said, but his eyes told me that was not what he meant. "I wish," he continued boldly, "that I had a wife like you. I hope"—and here his voice faltered just a minute—"that Mr. Frémont is fully aware of his good fortune."
My heart beating furiously, I murmured, "I believe he is... and I of mine." The message that I hoped I was somehow sending was that one of those rare and unpredictable mixes of chemistry drew me to him but that I was not going to allow myself to stray.
I had been tempted and survived, and I hoped desperately that the same had been true of John—and always would be.
Starr continued to call frequently, and our discussions once again centered on politics—ultimately, he was the one who saved California for the Union.
One night he brought with him a young man who looked to me a gambler—shiny black suit, curly dark hair, a sort of dramatic mustache—but had none of the personality to go with his appearance. Whereas Starr's appearance was so bland as to distract and animated only by the force of his personality, this man's appearance hid a painfully shy soul.
"This," Starr announced dramatically, "is Bret Harte, the newspaperman." He added the qualifier as though I would immediately recognize Mr. Harte. I didn't but managed to welcome him heartily.
"Harte writes short stories," Starr continued, as proud as though he'd just invented the man himself.
"Really?" I asked with genuine interest. "You must read them to us." There were so
me five or six people assembled in the parlor, each of whom nodded encouragingly.
"Oh, I could never... I could not read my work aloud," he protested quietly, and I saw that he was not simply being modest and waiting for us to urge him on. He was genuinely shy.
"Perhaps later," I said and drew him toward the group, where he sat for hours, listening to the conversation but offering not one word himself.
It was weeks before he finally ventured to read, and then it was a story about a baby born in a rough mining camp. We applauded heartily when the reading was finished and demanded the title of the story.
"'The Luck of Roaring Camp,' " he replied.
Bret Harte joined us every Sunday night for dinner thereafter, but he never wore out his welcome. Charley and little Frank hung on the tales he read aloud and pronounced him their favorite author.
I took the position of critic, one that I was glad to fill. John had been supposed to work on his memoirs with me, and I'd looked forward to being his amanuensis once again, but the Mariposas kept him too busy. I sensed, anyway, a reluctance on his part to begin the project, as though to write one's memoirs signaled the end of one's accomplishments. John, I knew, still had adventure in his soul. Meanwhile, I could be Mr. Harte's amanuensis. I worked with him, suggesting a word here, a phrase there, never being as bold as I would have with John but still leaving my mark on his writing.
"Mr. Harte," I said one evening, "we have a visitor who will no doubt interest you. Mr. Melville from the East... you know his books, I am sure."
Harte's old shyness returned, and he managed only to mumble when I introduced him to Mr. Melville, who was then fleeing from the failure of his two latest books, Moby Dick and Pierre. "I thoroughly enjoyed Moby Dick," Harte told him in his soft voice.
"You're about the only one," Melville said. He had a pitiful air of defeat and sadness. Fleetingly, I wondered if I could take him on as a project, too, but I quickly dismissed the idea. Melville spent the evening discouraging Harte from trying to be a writer. "They'll kill you," he said. "Go find yourself a safe job somewhere. I'm going back to work in the customs house. I'll never write again."