Frémont then returned to Los Angeles to relinquish his duties as governor of California, but he was followed by Colonel Mason, his superior in rank as well as in civil authority. Now thoroughly alarmed at his future, Frémont wrote Kearny asking if he could take sixty men and ride to meet Winfield Scott’s army in Mexico. Now it was Kearny’s turn to start refusing things—permission denied. Frémont must have suspected then that his goose was cooked. Flush with the exhilaration of the California conquest, he had hitched his wagon to the wrong star. For years he had been a freewheeling American icon in buckskin, an explorer in the western wilds reporting to political authorities in Washington’s highest circles, including his powerful father-in-law. Now he was about to get a taste of the real army—the hierarchy of rules and regulations, of chain of command and West Point spit-and-polish yessir-nosir-whatever-you-say-sir!
As if that wasn’t enough, Frémont got into a squabble with Mason over various demands the colonel made regarding documents Frémont had issued, which escalated into, of all things, a duel.
It was Frémont’s challenge, and therefore Mason’s call as to weapons. He picked double-barreled shotguns and buckshot at twenty paces, a sporty choice. Mason, in fact, was said to be expert with a shotgun, but when word of the affair got around the consensus was that these were not exactly considered gentlemen’s weapons. But it was a sordid affair from the beginning. Distasteful as they were to begin with, duels at least were supposed to concern matters of personal honor, not peevishness over bureaucratic irritations. It led some people to think Frémont had spent too much time in the woods.
* Some chronicles have them as Lipan Apaches.
† This was the year Santa Anna took power and closed down the church missions that had made inroads in socializing the Indians.
‡ Craniology, or phrenology, a popular pseudoscience of the nineteenth century, asserted that it was possible to understand and even predict human behavior by examining the shape of the skull.
§ Because of the circumstances of their hasty departure, the Mormons were able to recoup only a fraction of the value of their various properties.
‖ Wilmot vehemently denied this and insisted the proviso was designed ultimately to end slavery, which was viable only for cultivation-intense crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice that ultimately wear out the soil, “so that after 10 or 15 years the planter finds himself with his slaves doubled in numbers and his land worthless.” Upkeep of the slaves, Wilmot asserted, would eat up owners’ savings and ultimately end the practice.
a Thumb was a famous dwarf in the employ of the circus impresario P. T. Barnum, who had managed to introduce him to England’s Queen Victoria among other European crowned heads.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Last Roll Call: A Warm Salute
Frémont’s duel never came off, but his troubles had just begun. The day after he issued the challenge, Colonel Mason wrote Frémont that he needed several days’ time to go to Monterey before the duel, a request that Frémont granted—in writing. In the meantime Kearny got wind of the affair and wrote Frémont that he had ordered Mason not to engage in any duel, and that “the necessity of preserving tranquility in California, imperiously requires that the meeting above referred to [the duel] should not take place at this time, and in this country, and you are officially directed by me to proceed no further in this matter.”*
Meanwhile, Kearny had other plans for the Pathfinder, which did not bode well for his military career. On May 29 the general announced that he was leaving California for Washington in two days. Frémont was to turn over all of his topographical instruments to Lieutenant Henry Wager Halleck of the engineers and assume a place at the rear of Kearny’s party on the long march home.
Frémont asked if he could go to San Francisco for some botanical and biological specimens he had been collecting. Permission denied. When Kearny’s entourage reached Sutter’s Fort on June 11, Frémont again applied for leave to return home under his own steam, which, he said, “with my knowledge of the country, would allow me to reach the States some forty or fifty days earlier than yourself.” Permission denied. Next he asked if he could take “a party of sixty men and 129 horses” and join the Mounted Rifles in Mexico, under General Winfield Scott. Permission denied. Instead, Kearny prepared to push on across country with Frémont deliberately assigned to bring up the rear, apparently for purposes of his humiliation. By now it must have been apparent to Frémont that he was more or less a prisoner.
What had caused the bizarre hubris on Frémont’s part remains a mystery. Perhaps it had to do with the Latin aspects of his French heritage, but he hardly gave anyone the impression that he was a practicing Frenchman. The duel challenge, however, was revealing. Could it be that his sudden acceleration from captain in command of a sixty-man party of mountain men to lieutenant colonel in charge of a combat battalion had somehow gone to his head?
Doubtless Frémont regarded Kearny’s entrance into California a surprise and unwelcome intrusion, but surely he considered that to defy a general and hope to remain in the army was a risky business at best and might even lead to an encounter with the wrong end of a rope. Stockton, an eccentric and known troublemaker, obviously had much to do with it, and in fact he had egged on the whole thing by appointing Frémont governor in the first place, then hiding behind the navy to solidify his position. But from what Frémont published afterward, it can be fairly said that he had come to think of himself as a man of destiny who was disposed as such to take action, right or wrong. It was as if he were looking into a tarnished mirror that caught only a fractured glimpse into his future and had failed to reflect the fine, thin line between the heroic and the ignoble.
Kearny’s party learned at Sutter’s of the grisly end to the Donner tragedy, as Keseberg was at last brought out of the mountains by a relief party that reached the pass April 17, 1847, when the snows had subsided. This fourth relief actually had a dual mission of rescue and plunder, after the custom of the times. They knew from the previous relief that three people had been left on the mountain alive, and if any of them remained alive they would be brought out. At the same time, they knew there were many valuables left up there—money, jewelry, weapons, tools, utensils, clothes, and so forth—abandoned to the elements like so much flotsam and jetsam. The party of seven, led by a self-styled mountain man named William “Le Gros” Fallon, met at Sutter’s, where it was agreed they could keep one half the value of what they found, the other part going to the survivors or the survivors’ children.
Upon their arrival at the Donner camps the party “was obliged to witness sights from which we would have fain turned away, and which are too dreadful to put on record.” So said Fallon in his journal, where he put them on record anyway. The patchy snow was strewn in all directions with human remains and bones and no one was alive but Keseberg, half deranged, who was “reclining in his cabin, smoking his pipe,” surrounded by bodies that had been carved up, and their livers, brains, and eyes removed and placed in a large pan. On the floor beside him, they said, was a kettle containing what Keseberg claimed was human blood. George Donner had finally died a week earlier and Tamsen Donner, faithful to the last, had wrapped his body in a sheet and laid it out in the snow, then came to Keseberg’s cabin, wanting to go after her children, but she died that same night. According to Fallon, Keseberg told them he had eaten her.
Two months later Kearny’s return march, with Fallon acting as guide, “reached the scene of these horrible and tragical occurrences,” noted Edwin Bryant, the newspaper editor who had crossed the mountains, fought with Frémont’s California Battalion, and was now going home to tell his tale.†
“A more revolting and appalling spectacle I never witnessed. The remains were, by order of Gen. Kearny, collected and buried under the superintendence of Maj. Swords. They were interred in a pit in the centre of one of the cabins for a cache. These melancholy duties to the dead being performed, the cabins by order of Major Swords, were fired, and everything connected with this horrid
tragedy consumed.‡ The body of Mr. George Donner was found at his camp, wrapped in a sheet. He was buried by a party of men detailed for that purpose.”
Soon as word of the Donners’ plight got out, the rumors and exaggerations had begun. By the time Keseberg was rescued the newspapers flaunted the most lurid tales of cannibalism, murder, and depravity. The California Star, for example, wrote, “The day before the [rescue] party arrived, one of the emigrants took a child of about four years of age to bed with him, and devoured him whole before morning, and the next day ate another about the same age before noon.” Or this: “A woman sat beside the body of her husband who had just died, cutting out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and ate!” Or this: “The daughter ate the flesh of her father, the mother of her children. So changed had the emigrants become,” the newspapers reported, “that when the party sent out arrived with food, some of them cast it aside and seemed to prefer the putrid human flesh that still remained.”
It was bad enough without all that nonsense, but the nation was both scandalized and mesmerized by the calamity as the story wafted back east, sometimes merely as third- or fourth-hand hearsay. What had happened to the Donner expedition was a great human tragedy that piled up stroke of fate after stroke of fate from the outset, beginning with the devolution of James Reed as wagon master. Reed may have been smart, rich, and tough but what had been needed was an experienced mountain man to lead that caravan across the country; then there was the unwise decision, after being warned against it, to take the Hastings Cutoff, which set them behind a full month so that their climb into the mountains was the same as climbing into a trap.
After Reed was banished the social system disintegrated. In large part the cannibalism must have been dreadful for the cannibals, but not deplorable; the human instinct to survive can trump the mightiest taboos, and who is to say that under similar circumstances Kearny’s people, crossing parallel down south, or Cooke and his Mormons, would not have done the same thing. It was a classic example of pragmatism, perhaps the ultimate example of it. What was deplorable, of course, was Foster’s murder of the Indians and whatever Keseberg was rumored to have done, if he did it. The distinction between their actions and the others’ is plain, not blurred.
There were eighty-seven emigrants in the Donner train and thirty-nine of them died, five before reaching the mountain pass and the rest on the mountain or trying to get off of it. Most of these last were cannibalized. Throw in Sutter’s two Indians, Luis and Salvador, who had come as rescuers, and you have forty-one souls who perished. That left forty-eight, many of them children, who went on to new lives in California. Over the years journalists and historians tracked most of them down and got them to tell and retell their stories. Keseberg, for instance, lived to the age of eighty-one and became, of all things, a restaurateur. It was said that he often went about the streets of Sacramento like the Ancient Mariner, proclaiming his innocence to anyone who would listen—the only thing missing was the albatross.
The Donner experience was more than just a ghoulish aberration; it quickly became an instructive lesson on how not to cross the great American continent. To suggest that the Donners represented the western emigration would be absurd, given what happened to them. In the first place they were probably more financially substantial than other wagon trains, and that alone set them apart. But the legacy they shared was the immense ambition, or wanderlust, that seemed to overtake much of the nation following reports such as Frémont’s—not of gold dust and instant riches but of vast fertile lands to be sowed and reaped, a seductive harvest home. A life different, exciting, and a little dangerous was their manifest destiny. That is what the Donners stood for in the beginning, though they won’t be remembered for it. But even the horror of their failure underscores the success of countless others who heralded Polk’s initiative to expand the United States to the Pacific Ocean.
In the beginning of April, at the height of the Kearny-Frémont set-to, Frémont had sent his faithful scout Kit Carson back east with letters to his father-in-law and to James Buchanan, secretary of state, giving his side of the controversy—though, oddly, nothing was written to the War Department. At last Carson was going to Washington. Among his entourage was the poor navy lieutenant Beale, whose feet were still so damaged from the barefoot walk across the desert that Carson “had to lift him on and off his horse,” and he actually thought he was going to die.
Carson took the southern route as before, along the Gila and up to Taos where he was devastated to learn of the uprising that killed his brother-in-law, Charles Bent, and so many of his friends and had nearly killed his wife, Josefa. At least he got there for the hangings of the rebels and had more than a week before he was off again for St. Louis. There he was warmly received by Benton and invited to stay in the senator’s home in Washington, which he reached on June 5, 1847. It was said that Carson was greeted at the District of Columbia railway station by Jessie Benton Frémont herself and escorted to the Benton home.
Both Benton and Jessie understood the implications contained in Frémont’s correspondence; the Pathfinder was defying a U.S. Army general, his superior, who had been under orders from the president of the United States. Among the many charges possible could be the accusation of mutiny, a hanging offense. They were fearful of the shape of things to come, and on June 7, trying to head off trouble, Jessie accompanied Carson to meet the president. In that capacity, Carson handed Polk the letter Frémont had written to Benton, which explained his decision to accept and retain the governorship of California and to defy Kearny. Basically, Frémont laid it all on Commodore Stockton, with whom, Frémont said, he had “contracted relations” from which “it would be neither right nor politically honorable to withdraw my support.” The letter went on to say that Kearny might be apt to make trouble and that Frémont wanted the president to appreciate his position.
In fact, Polk already knew Frémont’s position and didn’t agree with it one bit, for Kearny’s messenger Captain Emory had lately arrived with Kearny’s side of the story, in which the general had written to the War Department, “I am not recognized in my official capacity, either by Commodore Stockton or Lieutenant-Colonel Fremont, both of whom refuse to obey my orders, or the instructions of the president.”
“Mrs. Fremont,” the president wrote in his diary, “seemed anxious to elicit from me some expression of approbation of her husband’s conduct, but I evaded making any. In truth, I consider that Col. Fremont was greatly in the wrong when he refused to obey the orders issued to him by General Kearny. It was unnecessary, however, that I should say so to Col. Fremont’s wife, and I evaded giving her an answer.”
Polk met with Carson again that night, alone, with further discussion about the “unfortunate collision between our land and naval commanders in that distant region.” Knowing that the scout was close to Frémont, the president remained inscrutable as the Sphinx. But the next day he met with his cabinet, which was unanimous in deciding to send Carson back immediately with dispatches affirming that Kearny was in charge in California. The fact that Kearny had already taken charge and was on his way back to Washington was notwithstanding; it was the issue of disobedience that mattered.
Next morning Jessie Frémont returned to the White House with Kit Carson in tow, again to plead her husband’s case, a matter that was becoming tiresome for James K. Polk. He informed her that the dispatches he was sending back to California with Carson would thoroughly clarify the situation.§
Kearny’s column reached Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on August 22, 1847, from whence it had departed one year and two months earlier. Much had happened in that space of time. On the same day, Kearny called Frémont into the post commandant’s office and told him to consider himself under arrest and to report to the adjutant general in Washington. The charges were mutiny, disobedience of orders, assumption of powers, and other military offenses, down to and including insubordination. Kearny had thrown the book at him.
Soon as the tel
egraph wires began to sing with news of Frémont’s arrest, a blizzard of mostly anonymous articles began to howl in the press, either in his defense or in his disparagement. Benton charged that some of them were the defamatory work of Captain Emory and Colonel Cooke of the Mormon Battalion, both of whom he charged with envy over Frémont’s fame and of holding the characteristic disdain of West Pointers for non–Military Academy officers. Both men denied the charges. Because of Frémont’s renown, the months leading up to the court-martial devolved into a media circus, with scarcely a day passing that some new aspect of the case was not headlined in the press, then flayed in next day’s papers with opposing views. Naturally Frémont’s mountain men—for instance, Godey, Carson, Walker, Dick Owens, and Bill Williams—stood by him and doubtless would have entered the letter-writing contest in his favor if they hadn’t been illiterate. Thus far, it was shaping up to be the most dramatic trial of the century.
Benton, meantime, seemed to have come nearly unhinged. Each week he penned a torrent of letters to anyone and everyone involved in the matter, chiding, threatening, blustering, wheedling. His capacity for hatred seemed boundless. He treated the charges against his son-in-law as a matter of family honor. One night before a fireplace in the White House a vitriolic Benton seethed to the president that if justice were not done, he would use his powers to court-martial Kearny, Emory, Cooke, and Captain Henry Turner, Kearny’s adjutant, causing the president later to groan to his diary that the senator “is a man of violent passions, and I should not be surprised if he became my enemy.”
On November 2, 1847, at straight-up noon, Frémont’s trial got under way in the Washington Arsenal, presided over by a general of infantry—not a good sign for Frémont. Seated behind their leader was a cluster of Frémont’s mountain men in their buckskins, and on the opposite side of the aisle a detachment of Kearny’s loyal officers, in full dress.