Shortly thereafter, when the U.S. Senate ratified this by treaty, or agreement, with a vote of 41–14, Polk had fulfilled the first of his four Great Measures. He appeared to look upon it like filling in a giant jigsaw puzzle, suddenly and methodically adding to the United States what are now Oregon and Washington and more. Most of it was wild territory to be sure, and dangerous, but Polk had the vision to see it would not always be that way. So did another actor in this drama, the young army captain John Charles Frémont, who in the spring of 1846 was causing tremors in the West that would soon vibrate back to Washington and Mexico City.
It did not hurt that Frémont’s wife, Benton’s daughter Jessie, was a talented writer who undoubtedly tweaked his already enthralling story of life among strange and often hostile Indians, towering mountain majesties, mysterious alpine valleys, rushing rivers, and fertile purple plains, where the majority of citizens had been led to believe lay only what was called the Great American Desert. In any case, the adventures of Frémont were hailed far and wide.
It isn’t hard to see why. Consider, for instance, this passage he wrote in the spring of 1844, traveling south again in California after his party had very nearly perished crossing the Sierra Nevada in the snows of winter.
“Our cavalcade made a strange and grotesque appearance, and it was impossible to avoid reflecting upon our position and composition in this remote solitude. Within two degrees of the Pacific Ocean; already far south of the latitude of Monterey; and still forced on south by a desert on one hand, and a mountain range on the other; guided by a civilized Indian, attended by two wild ones from the Sierra; a Chinook from the Columbia, and our own mixture of American, French, German—all armed; four or five languages heard at once; above a hundred horses and mules, half wild; American, Spanish, and Indian dresses and equipments intermingle—such was our composition. Our march was a sort of procession. Scouts ahead, and on the flanks; a front and rear division; the pack animals, baggage, and horned cattle in the centre; and the whole stretching a quarter of a mile along our dreary path. In this form we journey; looking more like we belonged to Asia than to the United States of America.”
The public ate it up. His expeditions had earned Frémont the nickname Pathfinder, which various historians have pointed out was technically incorrect since he mostly followed western paths and trails already blazed by a handful of famed mountain men such as Jedediah Smith, Alexis Godey, and Kit Carson, who made their livings trapping and trading furs with Indians. This complaint might be valid if the sobriquet had been “Pathmaker.” But it was not, and the fact is that Frémont did indeed find the paths others had made before him. His own fame rose, however, because of his abilities as a surveyor, botanist, geologist, zoologist, anthropologist, navigator, astronomer, and all-around jack-of-physical-sciences who could, and did, put to paper accurate longitudinal and latitudinal topographical maps, along with useful observations such as where to find water, firewood, and grassland for animals. This was what had never been done.
Until then, the vast spaces out to the Rocky Mountain basin and beyond were considered by most Americans the same way sailors viewed old nautical charts of distant oceans, where drawings of ferociously puffing winds were frequently accompanied with the inscription Beyond here there be Dragons. Because the report of Frémont’s expeditions was issued by the Government Printing Office it was in the public domain and free for reprinting by U.S. newspapers—very many of which used the privilege—and ignited a virtual prairie fire of western migration into those heretofore mystical territories.
Frémont by then was in his early thirties, slender and strikingly handsome with piercing eyes, a lush dark beard, and a Gallic nose doubtless inherited from his father, a French wastrel who taught fencing, dancing, and languages and painted frescoes. In 1808 this Lothario had made off with Frémont’s mother-to-be, an FFV from Richmond, after her elderly husband hired him to tutor her.d The couple fled to Savannah where in 1813 Frémont was born, and his father soon after died, leaving the family in reduced circumstances.
Frémont turned out to be a brilliant scholar but gross profligacy led to his being kicked out of college before graduation. Still, he managed to land a job exploring and mapping former Cherokee lands in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee and Georgia with the famous topographer of the day Joseph Nicollet. It was the luckiest of happenstances for Frémont’s glorious future; as he later recalled, “Here I found the path I was destined to walk” or, as one early writer put it, “He learned to pack a mule, and what to pack on it.”
Appointed as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Topographical Corps, Frémont accompanied Nicollet on various mapping explorations in the North Carolina mountains and on tributaries of the Mississippi, and by 1840 his reputation was well enough established to propel him into the ranks of Washington society where he quickly found himself a favorite at the home of Senator Benton, the arch-expansionist, who also happened to be the father of the handsome, sixteen-year-old Jessie. This resulted in the sparking of an immediate friction between the young lieutenant and the senior senator from Missouri, who became irate when Frémont eloped with his daughter. However, once the deal was done Benton concluded there was nothing for it but to welcome Frémont into the family, which was a happy thing for Frémont’s career, since Thomas Hart Benton was a world-class hater who had nearly killed Andrew Jackson in a disgraceful gunfight at Nashville in 1813.
In any case Frémont, in the late summer of 1845, with rumors of war with Mexico already brewing, departed the frontier at Westport (now part of Kansas City), the jumping-off point for western adventures, and headed down the Santa Fe Trail to Bent’s Fort, Colorado, the last bastion of westward civilization until the Pacific coast. Ostensibly, the purpose of this expedition was to map the source of the Arkansas River, which lay along the eastern slope of the Rockies, but Frémont had in mind a grander plan he said had been conveyed to him through his father-in-law, Senator Benton, and which came from the highest authorities in government. It was necessarily vague, he said; there was, as yet, no war with Mexico, no Kearny’s march. But Frémont felt reliably informed that his immediate future lay not across the Rockies but across the Sierras, in the Mexican province of California.
Traveling with him was a fascinating set of sixty-two armed mountain men, including Kit Carson, Frémont’s chief scout and confidant, who needed no introduction to the American people since he was featured prominently in Frémont’s published account of his exploits. Carson had come a-runnin’ from his stock farm on the Cimarron River in New Mexico when a messenger informed him that Frémont was embarking on another journey of exploration.
Several years earlier Frémont had encountered Carson on a riverboat at the beginning of his second expedition and hired the wiry, bandy-legged, thirty-three-year-old mountain man and Indian fighter on the spot. It was the beginning of a long and prosperous friendship, and in the end Carson’s fame eclipsed even that of Frémont when he became, in fact, a legend in his own time.
Christopher Carson had been born in Kentucky in 1809, but the family of ten children soon moved to a plot of land in Missouri that was home to the Daniel Boone family, and which was then the last outpost of the great frontier. When he was nine, Kit’s father was killed by a falling tree, and soon Kit became apprenticed to a saddle maker where his job entailed stitching and repairing the saddles, gun covers, moccasins, and other leatherworks for the grizzly mountain men of the era, who even then were legendary in newspaper and pulp novels for traveling audaciously among the savages.
Kit didn’t stay long in the leather shop, but ran away at age fourteen, and somehow he found his way five hundred miles southwest to Bent’s Fort, then in the process of being built by the Bent brothers, who also became legends of the Southwest. The Bents took an interest in the tough young runaway, got him work with trading and trapping expeditions, and Carson soon became an old hand at mountain-manning, which is to say he did not hesitate to kill beavers, wolves, grizzly bears, Indians, or fellow
mountain men if they gave him cause. One of these, an obnoxious loudmouthed French-Canadian, he shot in a duel because he was, well, obnoxious, which passed for cause in those times—and which is where the legend of Kit Carson began.
Although he had never learned to read or write, Carson was fluent in Spanish, French, and a dozen Indian tribal languages, including sign language and smoke signals. He had been in scores of close scrapes and seemed to have the nine lives of a cat, except that he had used them all up over and over again.
By the late 1830s the fur trade was in decline, victim of financial panics and silk top hats,e and Carson decided to settle down as a stock rancher. He took an Indian woman for a wife and a daughter was produced, but the wife died and it was on a trip back to St. Louis to find a good Catholic education and home with relatives for his daughter that Carson first encountered Frémont.
When Carson appeared at Bent’s Fort in the Colorado Rocky Mountain foothills in August 1845, he brought with him for Frémont’s third expedition his partner in the stock ranch, Richard Owens, to join with another of Frémont’s old favorites, Alexis Godey, a rough-and-tumble twenty-six-year-old French-Canadian fur trapper.
Frémont observed of this trio that “under Napoleon they might have become Marshals, chosen as he chose men. Carson of great courage, quick and complete perception … Godey insensible to danger, of perfect coolness and stubborn resolution; Owens equal in courage, and in coolness equal to Godey, had the coup-’ail of a chess player, covering the whole field with a glance that sees the best move. His dark-hazel eye was the marked feature of his face, large and flat and far-sighted.”
Also along was the trapper Basil Lajeunesse, who had accompanied Frémont on his previous expedition, and Edward Kern, a talented Philadelphia nature artist, highly skilled at drawing and coloring birds, animals, and plants. The party also included several dozen other men who knew their way around the woods. Some would hunt for the expedition’s food and scout for trails or hostile Indians, while others managed and operated the surveying equipment and scientific gear.
At Bent’s Fort, a large, fortified trading post on the Colorado plains about a hundred fifty miles southeast of Denver, Frémont split his party in two, sending half under two army lieutenants to explore and survey the upper Arkansas River, while his half would push on over the Rockies and westward into Utah and Nevada and then across the High Sierras to California, where trouble was brewing.
By mid-September 1845 the expedition had reached the Great Salt Lake and stopped to do some exploring. Over the years, a few old-timers had made passing mention of the lake, and one or two tried to place it on a map. No one, however, could explain why the lake was salty, way out here in the middle of nowhere. “It was generally supposed that it had no visible outlet,” Frémont wrote, “but among the trappers, including those in my own camp, were many who believed that somewhere on the surface was a terrible whirlpool, through which its waters found their way to the ocean by some subterranean communication.”
Frémont took note of a large island out in the lake that Indians told him could be reached on horseback because of the low water level. He, Carson, and a few others rode out to it and killed several antelope from herds they came upon. When they returned to camp an old Utah Indian was waiting for them, solemn as a stone, with news that he was owner of all the island’s antelope and demanded to be compensated. “He was very serious with us,” Frémont wrote, “and gravely reproached me for the wrong which we had done him. I had a bale unpacked and gave him a present—some red cloth, a knife, and tobacco, with which he declared himself abundantly satisfied for this trespass on his game preserve.”
By then it was near the middle of October and Frémont knew all too well the hazards if the party did not get across the Sierras before the snows began. On his previous expedition they had nearly died to a man and he was anxious to move on. But which way? Last year’s crossing had been south of what is now Lake Tahoe, but that had been approached from the north, coming off the Oregon Trail. Frémont reasoned that the fastest way would be straight ahead west from the Salt Lake, across the Great Basin.
Frémont had another, private reason to want to get across the mountains as soon as possible. Before departing from the capital, he had been given to believe that his mission, and his destiny, was to influence by whatever means the acquisition of California by the United States. This he had divined from meetings six months earlier with his father-in-law, Benton, and such diverse other luminaries as Daniel Webster, Secretary of the Navy Bancroft, and even President Polk himself, whom Frémont had met briefly at the White House.
“For me,” he wrote later, “no distinct course or definite instruction could be laid down, but the probabilities were made known to me as well as what to do when they became facts. The distance was too great for timely communication; but failing this I was given discretion to act.”
The fog of history has never entirely lifted upon Frémont’s role in this interesting installment of the acquisition of California, and soon it would become even murkier with the West Coast arrival of a secret messenger sent by the president himself. It appears that by this point Frémont was under the distinct impression that if an opportunity presented itself in California his instructions were to act against the interests of the government of Mexico.
The problem now in Utah, however, was that every time he looked westward all he saw was barren desert and, behind that, an endless north–south chain of monstrous mountains, “looking like the teeth of a saw … in winter-time a forbidding project.” Far as the desert went, none of Frémont’s people knew anything about it. He inquired of Indians, but they “declared to us that no one had ever been known to cross the plain, and so far out into it as any of them had ventured, no water had been found.”f
Frémont lingered several days contemplating the predicament, studying the mountain wall with a telescope until he noted that “nearly upon the line of our intended travel, and at the farther edge of the desert, apparently fifty to sixty miles away, was a towering peak-shaped mountain that [looked to be] fertile.”
Finally he sent Kit Carson and two other men, along with a mule man with water and provisions, to leave that night to investigate, and he would follow with the main exploring party next day. If Carson found that the “peak-shaped” mountain was fertile, and contained water and grass for the animals, they were to send up smoke signals. If the smoke signals were negative, Frémont would return to the Salt Lake area and consider what to do next.
Following a long, dry day’s march, word came back to Frémont via Carson’s smoke signals that the mountain indeed had water, grass, and firewood, and the next day the exploring party reached the place, naming it Pilot Peak. After refreshing his party, he hurried westward through the latening autumn of 1845, groping his way through valleys and passes, examining, mapping, surveying, sketching, gathering fossils and geologic and botanic samples, measuring time and distances, and naming things and places as he went.
* Several hundred of these Irish deserted during the Mexican campaign, ostensibly on grounds that the Americans were prejudiced against Catholicism, which the Irish shared with the Mexicans. What befell them is the subject of an interesting footnote down the road.
† He grew up on a 10,000-acre plantation in Kentucky and also owned immense cotton plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi, one of which would be burned during the Civil War by Union troops after his son, General Richard Taylor, sided with the Confederacy.
‡ Against his wishes, his daughter Sarah had married young Jefferson Davis, a West Pointer now serving under Taylor on the Mexican border. Not long after the marriage in 1835 she died of yellow fever at Davis’s plantation at Davis Bend on the Mississippi.
§ or those unacquainted with southwestern chaparral, it is a combination of dense, fairly low scrub, often composed of dried prickly or thorny bushes and sage, small bent trees such as mesquite, cacti, and a host of smaller plants and flowers. Its favored residents seem to be rattlesnak
es, lizards, and coyotes.
‖ To form a “hollow square,” an infantry regiment (usually 400 to 800 strong) would be given a series of officers’ commands to move ranks in order that they formed, well, a hollow square, with rows of riflemen facing all four sides, so that it was theoretically impossible to surprise it, or to attack a weak point. It was especially effective against cavalry charges.
a The gunpowder was more volatile than they were used to, prone to explode, so they used less of it, thus putting themselves out of effective firing range.
b As the commanding general was holding an informal council of war that morning and advised by most of his officers to stay put and wait for reinforcements, some young subaltern walking past—nobody remembers who—sang out, “General, we whipped them yesterday, and we can whip them again.” That settled it for Taylor.
c While the Mexican infantry, composed mostly of illiterate Indians and mestizos, left much to be desired, the Mexican cavalry were arguably the best horsemen in the world, and their lancers, armed with razor-sharp eight-foot steel spears, were rightfully dreaded.
d FFV is an abbreviation for First Families of Virginia, the southern equivalent to having arrived on the Mayflower.
e For a hundred years beaver fur had been the material of choice for top hats in Europe, but when the China trade opened up Chinese silk became the new choice; not only was it shiny, it was cheaper and just as warm.
f It is today known as the Great Salt Lake Desert.
CHAPTER FOUR
True West
Archibald Gillespie, a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, was undoubtedly surprised, and probably shocked, when on October 30, 1845, he was ordered to the White House for a confidential nighttime meeting with the president. He was about to become a secret agent for the U.S. government.