Castro had ordered Frémont out of California forthwith, and in no uncertain terms he promised that force would be used in the event of noncompliance.
Taken aback by this inhospitable reception, Frémont began by dressing down Chavez, for General Castro’s “breach of good faith and the rudeness with which he committed it,” and in the end “refused compliance to an order insulting to my government.”
With that, Lieutenant Chavez departed to report to Castro, and Frémont marched his company to the summit of a nearby mountain called Gavilan Peak “and proceeded immediately to build a rough but solid fort of strong logs.” Not only that, but “while this was being built a tall sapling was prepared, and on it, when all was ready, the American flag was raised amidst the cheers of the men.”
There Frémont remained for three days, ensconced beneath Old Glory, on Mexican soil, defying General Castro, who had assembled a force of several hundred men below, including a band of Indians who, Frémont asserted, “were being kept excited by drink.”
Late in the afternoon on the second day, Frémont continued, “We discovered a body of cavalry coming up the wood road, which led from the Monterey road to our camp.”
Frémont took forty men and set up an ambush but the cavalry “halted, and after some consultation, turned back.”
By the end of the third day the thing had turned into a deadlock that appeared unsolvable, when Frémont’s flagpole fortuitously toppled to the ground, allowing him “to take advantage of the accident” by telling the men this was an omen that they should move camp, “having given General Castro three days to execute his threat.”
This seemed to have relieved tensions for all concerned, as Frémont now turned the expedition north toward Oregon. Right after he left, an Englishman arrived with a proposition from General Castro, which Frémont said was an offer to “unite my force with his [Castro’s] and jointly march against Governor Don Pio Pico.”
This was typical, Frémont said, “of the Mexican revolutionary habit,” but instead he marched on northward toward Oregon, to survey the area and shoreline around the great Klamath Lake.
For his part General Castro nailed up a proclamation in the billiard room of army headquarters (“Not the usual place,” according to the U.S. consul Larkin) informing California’s citizens that a gang of American bandoleros (highwaymen, robbers) was on the loose in California, and that he and “two hundred patriots had driven them out.” Some of Castro’s officers further bragged to the newspapers that they drove Frémont’s party “into the bulrushes of the Sacramento River, and that in their haste, they had left some of their best horses behind.”
This turned out to be untrue, at least according to Larkin, who wrote to Secretary of State Buchanan of the incident: “The horses proved to be those belonging to the Californians themselves, and had strayed into Captain Fremont’s band, and on raising camp they were turned out and left behind.”
Frémont’s route took him up into the Sacramento valley, carpeted in the early springtime with vast fields of blue nemophila and the California golden poppy. It was the time of the salmon run, and every river they crossed was teeming with salmon “three or four feet in length.” They observed a footrace between Indians who “were entirely naked,” and passed by 14,000-foot Mount Shasta (“Shastl,” in Frémont’s language). At one point they inadvertently made their camp “in a bear garden, where the rough denizens resented our intrusion and made a lively time for the hunters, who succeeded in killing four of them.” During this fracas Charley, one of the company’s Delawares, got his nose broken, but Frémont managed to set it himself, “and it healed without a trace of injury. I was always proud of this surgical operation,” Frémont wrote, “and the Delaware was especially pleased. He was a fine looking young man and naively vain of his handsome face, which now had a nose unusual among his people; the aquiline arch had been broken to knit into a clear, straight line, of which he became very vain.”
At one point Frémont had a fright when the big, jovial French-Canadian Archambault failed to return from a hunting expedition. They were worried that he’d fallen prey to Indians, but on the third day he and his horse turned up, exhausted and half-starved, and indeed he had encountered Indians but had made his escape in a series of close calls.
When they reached the dark, pine forests of the Klamath Lake (“Tlamath” is Frémont’s spelling) they encountered a tribe of Klamath Indians of whom Frémont said, “Though they received us in apparent friendship, there was no warmth in it, but a shyness which came naturally from their habit of hostility.” He had met these Indians in the winter of 1844 on his first trip to the Klamath region, and though his experience was friendly he had his suspicions, since the Klamath were a warlike people.
One night in camp Frémont’s ear caught the faint sound of horses’ hooves and, when he went to investigate, two men on horseback emerged from the darkness and into the firelight. They turned out to be an advance party sent by Lieutenant Gillespie, who had made the hazardous six-hundred-mile journey from Monterey with only a handful of men in order to overtake Frémont and deliver his secret messages. One of the party, to Frémont’s surprise, was Samuel Neal, who had been a member of his previous exploring expedition and who had stayed in California in the ranching business. The other was one of Neal’s associates.
Gillespie, they told him, was in grave danger, as their group, which had been composed of only six, was being trailed by a band of Indians. Neal, in fact, confided to Frémont that he didn’t think Gillespie could be reached in time to save him, but Frémont was determined to try. As he tried to sleep that night, Frémont “lay speculating far into the night on what could be the urgency of [t]he message which had brought an officer of the Government to search so far after me into these mountains?”
Before dawn the party of relief set out, ten of Frémont’s handpicked men including himself, Alexis Godey, Kit Carson, Basil Lajeunesse, Richard Owens, Joseph Stepp, and a half-breed (or métis) named Denny and four Delaware Indians, as well as Neal and his associate.
A late snow and fallen timber made the ride “hard and slow,” some forty-five miles back to a spot where Frémont calculated he would intersect Gillespie in an open meadow in the forest, with a stream, “if no harm befell him on the way.” Though they had seen no Indians thus far, they did find tracks indicating that Indians had followed behind Neal’s advance party. To Frémont’s relief, “The sun was about going down when [Gillespie] was seen issuing from the wood, accompanied by three men. All were glad to see him,” Frémont said, “whites and Indians. It was now eleven months since any tidings had reached me.”
That night by the fireside, as the little relief group camped on the edge of the meadow, Gillespie shared his letters and messages from Washington.
“I now became acquainted with the actual state of affairs and the purposes of the Government,” Frémont recalled later. Gillespie’s information “absolved me from my duty as an explorer, and I was left to my duty as an officer of the American Army with the further knowledge that the Government intended to take California. I was warned by my Government of the new danger against which I was bound to defend myself, and it had been made known to me on the authority of the Secretary of the Navy [Bancroft] that to obtain possession of California was the chief objective of the President.” There was also a personal letter to Frémont from his father-in-law, Senator Benton, which, he said, contained some sort of code reinforcing Frémont’s interpretation of his new duties.
Furthermore, Frémont recorded, “Now it was officially made known to me that my country was at war … I had learned with certainty from the Secretary of the Navy that the President’s plan of war included the taking possession of California, and under his confidential instructions I had my warrant.”
Here was where Frémont ignited a controversial firestorm that has vexed historians from that day to this, since it would have been impossible for him then, on May 9, 1846, to have known that war with Mexico had broken out, becau
se the Mexican massacre of General Taylor’s cavalry patrol had only occurred April 26, word of which did not reach Washington until May 9, and the official declaration of war was not passed by Congress until May 13. What’s more, Frémont made matters worse by stating a bit later in his memoirs: “I saw the way opening clear before me. War with Mexico was inevitable; and a grand opportunity now presented itself to realize in their fullest extent the far-sighted views of Senator Benton, and make the Pacific Ocean the western boundary of the United States.”
In light of what happened later, of Frémont’s central role in wresting California away from Mexican authority, many historians have seized on these apparently contradictory statements—that it had been “made known” the country was at war versus “war was inevitable”—to condemn Frémont as a sinister provocateur, a brigand, a flagrant violator of orders, a bullying land grabber, even an out-and-out liar.
What can be known is that Frémont’s knowledge of any war with Mexico had to have been brought to him by Lieutenant Gillespie. And since Gillespie could not have known there was in fact a declaration of war, it might be helpful to reexamine what exactly he did know.
For one thing, as he traveled through Mexico he had seen all the warning signs, the newspaper headlines, the mood of the people, the Mexican army troops marching north toward the Rio Grande, a consensus that “war was in the air.” For another, rumors of war abounded in every California settlement, as news drifted slowly northward. Then, very soon before Gillespie left San Francisco to search for Frémont, he was made aware by the U.S. consul Thomas Larkin himself that “Commodore Sloat may, by the next mail, which should be within six or eight days, have a declaration on the part of the United States against Mexico, in which case we should see him in a few days to take the country.”
What seems likely is that, given this information, Frémont concluded the United States was either at war or terribly close to being at war, and that given the huge gaps in communication over such wide spaces he had sufficient latitude to justify a military takeover of the province of California. None of the communications has survived, but we do know that Polk’s instructions to Commodore Sloat had been to seize the California ports with his naval squadron the moment war broke out. And we also know, or should know, that young company grade officers, when left on their own, often do impetuous, even inexplicable, things.
In fact, since his arrival in early December of 1845, Frémont remained, for the next twelve months, the only U.S. Army officer in California. And it appears that he acted in accordance with what he thought he was supposed to do.
In any case he went to sleep that night beneath the cold, hard stars above the Oregon meadow filled with thoughts and aspirations of what this exciting news would bring on the morrow. His reveries, however, did not last for long; he had scarcely closed his eyes, in fact, when a sort of “thunk” resonated in the camp. Kit Carson, famous as a light sleeper, was the first to awaken; he called out to Basil Lajeunesse, “What’s the matter over there?”
There was no answer. Then, suddenly, Carson and Owens leaped to their feet shouting, “Indians!” The “thunk” that had awoken Carson, Frémont wrote, “was the sound of an axe being driven into Basil’s head.” What caused Carson to shout “Indians!” had been the dying groans of the métis Denny, who had been axed and riddled with arrows as well.
Suddenly with shouts and whoops the party of Klamaths charged into the campsite, barely lit by the flickers of the campfires. They first met a Delaware named Crane, who was “jumping from side to side in Indian fashion, and defending himself with the butt of his gun.” Five arrows struck Crane and he went down; then Carson or one of the others shot and killed the leader, who was their chief, and the others fled, but from the darkness of the woods they kept up a deadly rain of arrows into the camp until nearly dawn. Frémont and the others hung blankets from the low boughs of cedar trees to deflect the arrows. Every so often several of the Klamaths would rush in, trying to recover the body of their chief, but they were driven off by gunfire.
At one point Godey, one of the great mountain men, stepped over to one of the campfires to look at something wrong with his gun and made himself a target. Carson shouted out, “Look at the fool! Look at him, will you!” At this uncivil rebuke, Godey “turned resentfully toward Carson for the epithet bestowed upon him,” Frémont later wrote, noting that Godey was “the most thoroughly insensible to danger of all the brave men I have known.”
By sunrise the Indians had departed, their tracks indicating fifteen to twenty had been involved in the attack. The cold gray morning light revealed, in Frémont’s words, “a sorrowful sight” of the bodies of Lajeunesse, Crane, and Denny. One of the Delawares scalped the dead Klamath chief, and Carson seized an English-made hand axe that was tied to the Indian’s wrist and “knocked his head to pieces with it.”d
The men packed the bodies of their dead onto mules and set out for Frémont’s main encampment. They’d intended to bring their comrades back and bury them properly in some nice spot by the lake, but after about ten miles, as Kit Carson tells it, the narrowness of the trail resulted in the bodies’ being “much knocked against the trees, and becoming much bruised,” and it was decided to bury them then and there. They held a brief service in a laurel thicket, digging the graves with their knives, as they had no shovels, and burying the men wrapped in their blankets beneath the laurels. “There are men above whom the laurels bloom who did not better deserve them than my brave Delaware and Basil,” Frémont recorded bitterly. “I left Denny’s name on the creek where he died.”e
As they reached Lake Klamath Frémont reported “many canoes” coming from different directions, an intended ambush, but he put his men in defensive posture and nothing materialized. The reunion with the others was anything but happy. The Delawares were especially anguished and went into mourning, blackening their faces with campfire soot, Frémont said, then “sat around brooding and waiting for revenge.”
This was not long in coming. Frémont, too, was outraged. “I determined to square accounts with these people before I left them,” he said. “It was only a few days back that some of these same Indians had come into our camp, and I had divided with them what little meat we had, and unpacked a mule to give them tobacco and knives.”
That evening Frémont held a powwow with the Delawares about the best way to avenge Crane’s death. The two chiefs, Swonok and Sagundai, consulted and told Frémont that if he would take all the other men out of the camp, but leave the Delawares behind, the Klamaths would soon come to scavenge and the Delawares would kill them.
This was done and “it was not long before the morning stillness was broken by a volley,” Frémont said, noting that the Delawares now carried additional scalps on their belts. Carson was particularly aggrieved because Lajeunesse had been a friend for years and thousands of wilderness miles. “The Indians had commenced the war with us without cause,” he said. “I thought they should be chastised in a summary manner, and they were severely punished.”
Next day the expedition continued on toward the main Klamath village beside the lake, which contained about fifty lodges. Frémont sent Carson and a party of ten ahead to reconnoiter but they were discovered and fighting broke out. When Frémont and the others came up, he said, “I saw a dead Indian sitting in the stern of a canoe. On his feet were shoes which I think Basil wore when he was killed.”f
The Klamaths had come out of their village into a field of sage and were shooting arrows, but the rifles of the mountain men took an awful toll and forced the Indians to retreat into a stand of pine, with fourteen killed. Frémont’s men then marched on the village and burned it to the ground.
Frémont then moved about a mile away and was making a secure camp when reports came that a number of Indians were moving on them through the forest. He decided to investigate, taking along Carson, two Delawares, and Archambault. Suddenly they came upon an Indian scout, Frémont said, who had drawn an arrow in his bow aimed right at Kit Carson
. Carson raised his rifle but it misfired. Then Frémont shot and missed, but he managed to drive his magnificent horse, Sacramento, directly into the brave, knocking him down just in time for the Delaware chief Sagundai, who was following right behind, to leap from his horse onto the Klamath and split his skull with his war club. “It was the work of a moment,” Frémont recalled, “but it was a narrow chance for Carson. The poisoned arrow would have gone through his body.” For the rest of his days Carson was grateful to Frémont for his life-saving gesture and retold the story at every opportunity.
The avenging having been accomplished, Frémont now turned his thoughts south to California and the next day, May 10, 1846, set the party out for the upper valley of the Sacramento. They had not traveled far when he came across a macabre sort of tableau. Along the trail was a tree with an arrow stuck into it. From the arrow hung a fresh, bloody human scalp.
Later Frémont learned that the scalp originated with Lucien Maxwell, one of two scouts he had sent ahead. Earlier that morning Maxwell and his companion had come across an Indian and challenged him. The Indian responded but chose unwisely to bring a bow and arrow to a gunfight, the result of which Maxwell had “put up in the trail to tell the story.”
Be that as it may, Frémont led his band past the grisly object, back into the Mexican territory, his mind probably racing with prospects. What he would find there was beyond even his wildest imaginings.
* Santa Anna lost his leg in 1838 during the so-called French Pastry War and thereafter used an artificial leg made of corkwood, until he was surprised by an Illinois regiment while eating a lunch of baked chicken during the Battle of Cerro Gordo during the Mexican-American War. Santa Anna got away, but his leg did not, and it is presently on display at the Illinois National Guard Museum in Springfield. Over the years the Mexican government has sought to have the leg returned but, so far, no dice.