The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (8 page)

Jessie Benton by no means shared Frémont’s hardscrabble background. Her upbringing had always been one of comfort. Nor did she share his reserved, often brooding temperament. She was far more open, optimistic, and outgoing. Like him, however, she tended to be impetuous and headstrong.
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That proved decisive. As the romance blossomed, her parents tried to stop it. They wanted their daughter to marry up in society, not down. They set up all sorts of roadblocks to keep their daughter from seeing Frémont. All failed. Without their approval—indeed, against their wishes—the couple eloped. No Protestant minister dared to marry them. But with the help of another senator’s wife, they found a Catholic priest willing to make them husband and wife. When Benton learned about it, he exploded. He fumed and hollered. He made dire threats. He threw the newlyweds out of his house.

In time, however, Benton’s love of his daughter overcame his ire. Not only did he invite the couple back to his C Street home; he also became his son-in-law’s patron. In 1842, when Nicollet was too ill to travel, Benton arranged for Frémont to take his place. At the senator’s urging, the U.S. Army appointed Frémont to head a twenty-five-man, four-month expedition to survey and map the Oregon Trail as far as the South Pass over the Continental Divide. He did that and more. He climbed to what he thought was the highest peak in the Wind River Range and raised a homemade eagle flag and declared all the nearby country American territory. When he returned home, he dictated his report to Jessie. She put it into lively, memorable prose. Congress then printed it by the thousands, and overnight Frémont became a hero, known popularly as the Pathfinder.

Frémont became even more famous in 1843–44 when he led a band of men all the way over the Oregon Trail, then south along the mountain range bordering California, and then across the Sierras into California. Later, he “circumnavigated” the whole West. Out of these expeditions, his Prussian cartographer and constant critic, Charles Preuss, produced the first scientifically derived map of the West and the first accurate, detailed emigrant map of the Oregon Trail. Again, on returning home, Frémont dictated his report to Jessie, and she put it into vivid prose.

John C. Frémont, “the Pathfinder.” Reprinted from Ben: Perley Poore,
Perley’s Reminiscences,
2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1886), 1:305.

In the eyes of many, Frémont was also a mistreated war hero. In 1846, probably on orders from Washington, he led sixty well-armed mountain men into Mexican California, defiantly raised the American flag on a hill outside Monterey, and then headed north to Klamath Lake in southern Oregon. Then, after meeting with President Polk’s secret agent Archibald Gillespie, Frémont and his men returned to the Sacramento valley, where in June 1846 they encouraged settlers to capture the little pueblo of Sonoma and proclaim the Bear Flag Republic. Shortly thereafter, when news of the war with Mexico reached California, the navy under Commodore Robert F. Stockton seized California ports. Stockton appointed Frémont commander of the California Battalion, a motley assortment of sailors, marines, soldiers, mountain men, and California residents, to finish the conquest.
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General Stephen Watts Kearny, in the meantime, arrived from New Mexico. Recently promoted, he immediately got into a dispute with Commodore Stockton over who was in command. Against Kearny’s wishes, Stockton appointed Frémont his successor as military governor and sailed off for Mexico. Frémont, who was now a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, rashly sided with the naval officer. Kearny, in turn, arrested Frémont for mutiny and marched him east, in disgrace, to face a rancorous court-martial. Despite having the public and Thomas Hart Benton on his side, Frémont was found guilty of insubordination and dismissed from the army. President Polk approved the verdict but reinstated him for “meritorious and valuable services.” Frémont bitterly refused executive clemency and resigned his commission.
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The court-martial, thanks to vast newspaper coverage, only added to Frémont’s fame. The public generally thought he got a raw deal. The College of Charleston, the school that had once thrown him out for poor attendance, offered him a teaching position on its faculty. The Charleston to Cincinnati Railroad offered him $5,000 per year to be its president.
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At this point, his father-in-law prevailed on him to prove to the world that the best path to the Pacific was straight west from St. Louis. With the financial backing of St. Louis businessmen who eagerly hoped to locate a central, all-weather railroad route through the Rockies, Frémont led a company of some thirty men into the rugged mountains of southern Colorado in the dead of winter. It was a disaster. Ten men, a third of the expedition, perished in the snow. Frémont blamed the guide, “Old Bill” Williams, a sixty-one-year-old mountain man, for leading the expedition astray. So did the Prussian cartographer, Charles Preuss, normally Frémont’s harshest critic. Others laid the blame at Frémont’s feet.
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Despite the failure of the 1848–49 expedition, the lively reports that Frémont and Jessie had produced a few years earlier had a life of their own. They quickly became classics in exploration literature.

Although a scientist, Frémont had an artist’s eye for detail. His observations were thus often memorable, romantic. He also celebrated his men and their adventures with boyish enthusiasm. And Jessie clearly had a gift with words. The reports caught the public eye. They could be read for scientific data. They could also be read as adventure stories. Fathers and mothers read them to their children.

The impact was immense. Joaquin Miller, growing up on an Ohio farm, later recalled listening to his father read by candlelight from Frémont’s report. Wrote Miller:

I never was so fascinated. I never grew so fast in my life. Every scene and circumstance in the narrative was painted in my mind to last and to last forever…. I fancied I could see Frémont’s men, hauling the cannon up the savage battlements of the Rocky Mountains, flags in the air, Frémont at the head, waving his sword, his horse neighing wildly in the mountain wind…. It touched my heart when he told how a weary little brown bee tried to make its way from a valley of flowers far below across a spur of snow, where he sat resting for a moment with his men; how the bee rested on his knee till it was strong enough to go on to another field of flowers beyond the snow, and how he waited a bit for it to go at its will…. I was no longer a boy…now I began to be inflamed with a love for action, adventure, glory, and great deeds away out yonder under the path of the setting sun.
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The reports were also timely. Hundreds of thousands now had their eyes on the West. How were they to get there? What might they encounter? Never before had there been maps that provided detailed directions. Never before had there been so much practical information, such as where to find water and firewood, where to graze livestock, or how to avoid Indian attacks. Never before had there been such vivid descriptions of the West.
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The account of the Great Salt Lake basin was so animated that Brigham Young, after reading it, became convinced that he had found the promised land for his long-suffering Mormon followers. And in 1847–48, he led them west to Utah.
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The reports also generated derivatives. The most important was probably a series of seven maps—created by Preuss—depicting the entire length of the Oregon Trail. Issued by the U.S. Senate in 1846, the maps became for thousands of emigrants their only guide. Others carried along Frémont’s detailed reports.

Typical were Josiah and Sarah Royce. Along with their two-year-old daughter, Mary, the Royces left Iowa for California on the last day of April 1849. After loading up with provisions, they set off in a covered wagon pulled by three yokes of oxen and one yoke of cows. They were guided, as Mrs. Royce later put it, “only by the light of Frémont’s
Travels.
”
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The Royces were just three of some thirty thousand Americans who made the trek across the Oregon Trail that summer. They were unique in that two members of their party, Sarah and Mary, were females. No more than one thousand females made the trip that summer. Nearly all the emigrants were young males. Never before had the United States seen such an exodus of young men, all heavily armed, most on the road for the first time in their lives. Did they understand what they were doing? Were they prepared for the rigors that lay ahead? No one knew for certain. Cartoonists, however, had a field day making fun of greenhorns heading west.

Cartoon making fun of greenhorns going west. From H. R. Robinson, “A Gold Hunter on His Way to California, via St. Louis,” ca. 1849. Library of Congress.

Only a few hardy souls traveled alone. Some traveled in small groups. Most joined pack trains or joint-stock wagon companies. These ventures involved laborious preparations, writing constitutions and bylaws, choosing captains, buying wagons and horses, studying Frémont’s reports. Usually the participants shared a common background and knew their fellow travelers before they got started.
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And usually they formed companies that were much like the ones that sailed around Cape Horn. Most were joint-stock companies in which each member paid in a certain amount for the purchase of wagons, oxen, and provisions. Most had titles that included the words “mining” and “trading.” Most had “Rules of Regulation,” which more often than not prohibited swearing, drinking, and violation of the Sabbath. And most had elected officers with military titles.

Initially, Josiah and Sarah Royce were not members of a large wagon company. They started out across Iowa with their own wagon and with just a few other emigrants. Traveling slowly, roughly three miles per hour, they joined up with several other “small companies.” It took them a full month to cross Iowa and reach Council Bluffs, which for them was the jumping-off point, the place where the adventure began. Here they found “a city of wagons” waiting to cross the river and head off into “Indian country.” And here they joined a “real” wagon train.

While Sarah Royce watched, Josiah got together with other men at Council Bluffs and helped organize a company, much like a militia company, with a captain and subordinate officers. The men also agreed to a set of bylaws. The most troublesome issue was what to do on the Sabbath. Should it be a day of rest? Or a day of travel? The majority decided it was too late in the season to spend each and every Sunday in camp. They would rest only if the weather was bad. Finally, on June 10, a Sunday, it became their turn to cross the river. They set off for the Far West.

The Royce wagon train followed the Mormon Trail, along the north side of the Platte River, to Fort Laramie. On the way, they encountered bands of Pawnees, Sioux, Cheyennes, and Poncas riding on scrawny horses back and forth across the grasslands, presumably hunting bison, although Sarah Royce never reported seeing a single buffalo. One band of nearly one hundred braves, some well armed and others carrying “indifferent weapons,” demanded a tribute from every emigrant passing through their land. The Royce train, brandishing rifles, revolvers, knives, and hatchets, refused to pay the tribute and forced their way past the “sullen” braves. Many expected more trouble ahead, a night attack perhaps.

Yet while the Royces worried about marauding Indians, the natives were just a minor problem. The big problem was Asiatic cholera. It ravaged every part of the United States in 1849. It flourished in Boston and New York, on dirt farms in Missouri and Illinois, and on plantations in the Deep South. It was quick and deadly. Victims were suddenly overwhelmed with diarrhea, cramps, and spasmodic vomiting. That led to dehydration. Then their faces turned blue, their skin crinkled, their fingers and toes became dark and cold. Then, often within just a few hours, they were dead. Men and women who were robust and healthy in the morning were dead by nightfall. It was eerie, unsettling, unforgettable.

The disease thrived wherever filth and want existed. Most vulnerable, therefore, were the infant cities of the West, where transients were plentiful and the sewage and water systems were inadequate. St. Louis lost one-tenth of its population. Almost as hard-hit was Cincinnati. Even harder hit was Sandusky. No one, however, understood what caused the disease. No one realized that it was due to a deadly organism,
Vibrio comma,
entering the body through the mouth and causing an infection in the small intestine. No one realized, moreover, that the incubation period was up to five days and thus many healthy-looking people were already deathly ill. President Zachary Taylor attributed the epidemic to “the Providence of God” and set aside August 3 as a day of prayer. Others blamed it on the national diet, “soft” water, strong drink, night air, or whatever their pet peeve might be. One Harvard doctor insisted that cholera was linked to limestone in the soil. Some emigrants on the Oregon Trail blamed it on beans and got rid of their entire bean supply.
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