Chapter Seven, Imperfect Union

Chapter Seven

A TASTE FOR DANGER AND BOLD DARING ADVENTURE

The Frémonts, 1844–1845

Washington, St. Louis, and Alta California

When the presidential nominating conventions were over, the 1844 general election pitted James K. Polk, the advocate of territorial expansion, against Henry Clay, a skeptic of it. Clay was a gray-haired former senator from Kentucky, the Whig party founder, and a brilliant orator who had walked the national stage even longer than Thomas Hart Benton. Much like Benton, Clay had spent his early career promoting visions of empire, but had lately grown to fear the consequences. New territories would provoke conflicts over slavery, he said, so it was “better to harmonize what we have than to introduce a new element of discord.” Clay’s difference with Polk presented the country with a fateful choice, which would also have great influence over the future of the Frémonts.

It was not, however, an absolutely clear choice, since the election touched on many issues at once. In the key electoral state of Pennsylvania that year, the big news was neither Texas nor slavery but a dispute involving immigrants. They were Irish Catholics, who were seen as a threat because of their religion. Philadelphia’s Catholics called attention to their faith when they asserted an equal right to practice it. Pennsylvania mandated the use of the Bible—typically the Protestant, King James Version—for students to practice reading in the public schools. Catholics used a longer version of the Bible and said using the King James Version violated the separation of church and state. Shocked Protestants formed a new nativist party known as the Native Americans or American Republicans, and in May 1844 organized a rally provocatively located in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. Irishmen violently broke up the rally. Nativists then burned two Catholic churches, saying they were upholding the right of free speech.

Weeks later, crowds of nativists came from out of town to march in Philadelphia’s Independence Day parade. Some reserved their own railroad cars to travel down from New York. A nativist mob formed outside a Philadelphia Catholic church, alleging that weapons were hidden inside and saying they feared a terror attack. When the sheriff and the state militia arrived to protect the church, the mob wheeled a cannon up from the waterfront and opened fire. A local resident, George S. Roberts, reported “watching the flashes of artillery against the sky.” It took four days to end the battle, in which a number of people were killed, and the New York Herald declared that Philadelphia was “the scene of riot and bloodshed—of civil war.” When news of Philadelphia’s violence reached the telegraph office in Baltimore, it was wired to Washington, where Samuel Morse was still demonstrating his invention. He found the information so important that he rushed the latest updates to Secretary of State John C. Calhoun.

Philadelphia’s “civil war” fed into nationwide resentment of immigrants. The Democratic Party actively courted immigrant and Catholic votes in hotly contested New York and Pennsylvania. The Whigs had brooded for years on what they perceived as an unfair Democratic advantage, and in 1844 some talked of suppressing the immigrant vote. Joseph T. Buckingham, the Whig editor of the Boston Courier, published a signed editorial (addressed to “Native Americans!”) at the end of October, saying that he was willing to grant newcomers every privilege except political power: “domestic demagogues” must be stopped from winning office with the votes of “factious foreigners.” Immigrants should be treated with “generosity and justice” and paid “liberally” for their labor—but adult immigrants should be required to wait twenty-one years before becoming eligible to vote, the same period that newborn native children had to wait. It was the sort of rhetoric that might bring out the nativist vote—or drive immigrant voters to the polls to resist. Because the presidential election was close, the Frémonts’ fate, and the nation’s fate, could depend on which side of the immigration debate prevailed.

It took many days through October and November for the election results to become clear. Not all states voted on the same day, so instead of an election night there was an election season, from late October to mid-November, during which the Frémonts followed each day’s vote tallies in the Washington papers. On November 3, the compositor of the Whig Standard in Washington was typesetting county-by-county results from Pennsylvania when fresh information came in. Rather than start the story again, he interrupted himself for a late-breaking news bulletin:

Half past 2, p.m.—We have received, by Professor Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, the following additional returns. . . .

Henry Clay was on his way to losing Pennsylvania, the second most populous state. The most populous state, New York, went for Polk by a mere five thousand votes. The Democratic coalition, with its important immigrant vote in those two states, narrowly prevailed; had New York instead gone to Clay, so would the election. The Democratic-leaning Daily Madisonian crowed on November 6 that Clay would be “shamefully defeated,” and when Polk won Michigan a week later a headline proclaimed, THE DEMOCRACY GLORIOUSLY TRIUMPHANT. By November 16 the Whig Standard surrendered, announcing not only that the election was lost but that the newspaper was closing: “We have no regrets, personally or otherwise, except that our cause has not been triumphant.” The paper acknowledged that some Whigs had additional regrets—especially a fear that the coming conflict over Texas would split the Union.

Although Senator Benton had formally supported the winner, everyone knew his feelings. He grimly gathered evidence that the incoming administration planned to punish him. On January 12, 1845—it was a Sunday, but no day of rest for him—he wrote his friend and ally Francis Preston Blair, editor of the Washington Globe, and in his carefully indented handwriting began listing evidence of conspiracies against them, seventeen numbered points in all, including:

3. The design to send you on a foreign mission, [and thus remove you as editor of the Globe] . . .

5. The design to destroy Benton through newspaper denunciations . . .

11. Prostitution of the Post Office to all the schemes . . .

. . . These, and other points of inquiry, will confirm, & extend your knowledge of the plots against us.

Yours truly, Thomas H. Benton

Benton was not wrong. Blair was removed as editor of the main Democratic Party paper, neutralizing one of Benton’s channels of influence. Benton himself was harder to dislodge, since Missouri’s legislature, which chose its senators, elected him to a fifth six-year term; but his home-state opposition was growing.

LAWMAKERS READ POLK’S VICTORY as a popular mandate for Texas, and even before the inauguration considered an annexation measure, which Senator Benton could no longer stop. He even helped the process in hopes of uniting the party. President Tyler approved the measure hours before completing his term at the start of March, leaving Polk with only a few more steps to complete the transaction. The evening before Polk’s inauguration a crowd held a “Texas Torch-Light Procession” down Pennsylvania Avenue, their cheers surely audible a block away at the Benton house. A pro-Polk newspaper reprinted an article on Texas under the headline LAND! LAND!

The next day guards blocked the streets near the Capitol, keeping the crowd away until the hour of the inauguration. When the guards stepped aside, a newspaper reported a “fearful” rush: “No limbs, happily, were broken, though injuries both to clothes and persons certainly were sustained.” Thousands filled the lawn in the rain. The Frémonts doubtless had walked the few blocks to attend, while dignitaries including Senator Benton joined the incoming and outgoing presidents on a platform erected over the eastern Capitol steps. Although it was still raining as Polk took the oath (John Quincy Adams quipped that the ceremony was witnessed by “a large assemblage of umbrellas”), a reporter said Polk delivered his inaugural address “in a firm tone of voice, with the air of a man profoundly impressed by it himself.” He celebrated the annexation of Texas, and acted as if Oregon was already won (“our domain extends from ocean to ocean”). Stiff and formal, his gray hair combed back straight from his forehead, he also called for the preservation of the Union, which he said was endangered: “It is a source of deep regret that, in some sections of our country, misguided persons have occasionally indulged in schemes and agitations, whose object is the destruction of domestic institutions existing in other sections.” Listeners understood that “domestic institutions” meant slavery, and that the “misguided persons” in “some sections” were Northern abolitionists. Their “schemes and agitations” were the problem, not slavery—and Polk went to some lengths not to say “slavery” or “slaves.” His euphemisms invited his audience to consider the situation in the abstract, without thinking of the human beings affected. He ended the speech by asking for the aid of God, and then he was done, and out of the rain, and governing.

He agreed to meet Senator Benton after the inauguration. If he ever had supported his allies’ “design to destroy Benton,” the president set it aside; he needed his fellow Democrat’s power in the Senate. They shared broad goals: Polk wanted Oregon along with California and Texas, and Benton didn’t object to these goals so much as the manner in which they were being sought. Benton, too, grasped the need for accommodation, and brought an offering to the presidential mansion: his famous son-in-law, who had seen as much of California as anyone in Washington. Polk had not articulated his California ambitions in his inaugural address, but Benton, having gathered intelligence from men around Polk, could perceive what those ambitions were.

John told the new president that official Washington did not yet know much about the land west of the Rockies. “I mentioned that I had, shortly before, at the Library of Congress, drawn out from the map-stand one giving the United States and Territories, and found on it the Great Salt Lake represented as connected with the Pacific Ocean by three great rivers.” John said the map was wrong, that no rivers flowed from the Great Basin to California, but the president gave the impression that he believed the maps. It didn’t matter. Whatever California was, Polk wanted it while there was still a chance. He was thinking of geopolitics, not geography: Mexico’s hold on that distant territory was tenuous, and he worried that Britain, already in competition with the United States for Oregon, might seize California first. Benton believed that Americans could take California the way he wanted to secure Oregon, by encouraging emigrants to settle there in such numbers that the result became inevitable. Polk favored more direct measures: he wanted to buy California from Mexico.

The president’s interest did not come from nowhere. California was a part of the national conversation. The New York Herald published a steady flow of articles that mentioned it—fifty-nine stories during 1843 and fifty-three in 1844; in other words, more than one article per week. Although the Herald naturally paid far more attention to Oregon and Texas, its interest in California was consistent. Some of the articles were letters from an anonymous correspondent in Monterey, California’s capital, who went by various aliases—“Americano,” “Paisano,” or no name at all—and promoted the appeal of California. Other papers printed their own California stories, including some from the same anonymous correspondent, and this subject of interest to news editors became of interest to public men. Daniel Webster, the great senator and former secretary of state, invited Captain Frémont to dinner to discuss California, and wrote in a letter in March 1845 that he regarded the excellent harbor at San Francisco Bay to be “twenty times as valuable to us as all Texas.” Webster opposed territorial acquisitions—he meant his remark to disparage Texas as much as praise California—but it was all the same to Polk, who wanted both.

Polk’s new secretary of state was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania—the Bentons’ neighbor and friend, the recent presidential aspirant, and the groomsman who’d had Jessie on his arm at the wedding of the Russian ambassador. In the spring of 1845, Buchanan began bringing documents to the Benton house relating to Mexico. He was a distinctive character in Washington, regarded with a mixture of respect and derision. Some found him fastidious and almost effeminate; Andrew Jackson called him Aunt Fancy. He was cautious and noncommittal, avoiding strong stands that might harm his later prospects. Yet this weakness was a kind of strength: he was a survivor who arrived in Washington in 1821, the same year as Benton, and had spent all the years since moving in and out of Congress and prime administration posts. Buchanan, a bachelor, had dropped by the Benton home for dinner for years, and it was politically savvy now for Buchanan to seek Benton’s counsel as a way of showing the administration’s respect. The two climbed the stairs to Benton’s third-floor library, sometimes joined by another senator who lived in the neighborhood, as well as by John and Jessie. Some of the papers Buchanan placed on the table were in Spanish, and at her father’s request Jessie wrote out translations as the men tried to guess the mood in the distant Mexican capital they’d never visited.

The plans for John’s next expedition began to change. He was already under orders to arrange another trip, and before the inauguration those orders ruled out California: his commander, Colonel Abert, told him to scout the upper reaches of the Arkansas and Red rivers, which were east of the Rockies. He was to work near Bent’s Fort, twelve hundred miles or so short of San Francisco Bay. Even if he was to contemplate a detour to California, his instructions allowed no time: he was to return within the current year, and hire no more than forty men. It would be his least ambitious expedition. John’s letters to Abert suggested that he was planning an ordinary scientific survey; he requested permission to hire a “Botanical Colourist” to make drawings of the plants they encountered. Then the Polk administration took charge. On April 10, John was told he could increase his party by ten or more if desired, and he should also note “the military peculiarity of the Country which you shall examine.” He was given extra months to explore before he returned, but should still come back as soon as possible so that “if any operations should be required in that Country, the information obtained may be at command.” He was, in other words, gathering information of military use in the event of war, in an area near the US border with the Mexican province of New Mexico.

There was still no mention of California. There was nothing in the orders—at least nothing in the written orders—to justify the description published in Niles’ National Register, an influential newspaper, on May 3:

EXPLORING EXPEDITION. Lieutenant Fremont is now . . . organizing an exploring company of young men to form an expedition to the waters of the Pacific. He desires none but young men of intelligence and good character. The expedition will last for three years, and its operations will probably extend from the Black Hills to the Western ocean, and from California to the northern limits of Oregon. Those who have a taste for danger and bold daring adventure, may now have a chance.

It was hard to imagine the Register printing the story unless John or someone close to him was the source. He was by now comfortable describing his mission in different terms than his chain of command, and this was different enough to attract attention: “What we do not understand,” a Boston paper said, “is how, or for what purposes, an expedition is sent from the Government into Mexican territory, nor why our engineers are employed in surveying rivers and harbors not belonging to us. We have no objection to the survey; we only want to know by what right it is ordered.”

When asked directly, John said he was seeking a better and shorter route to Oregon, and thought the route might lead through California. Because his objective was incompatible with his orders to hurry back with information from the border with New Mexico, he planned to divide his force at Bent’s Fort. Some of his men would survey the eastern slope of the Rockies and head home as ordered, while most would journey with John into Mexican territory.

Did President Polk, his commander in chief, really mean for John to go to California? At least Polk did not mind, since Frémont’s destination was publicized before he departed and the president did not object. Polk also did not object when, after John’s departure, his destination was discussed in the presidential mansion. Senator Benton had a long talk with the president, and Polk made a vague entry in his diary: “Some conversation occurred concerning Capt. Frémont’s expedition, and his intention to visit California before his return.” The phrase “his intention to visit” framed it as Captain Frémont’s choice, which Polk could disavow later if necessary.

JOHN SAID GOOD-BYE TO JESSIE IN MAY 1845. They had been together nine months this time, their longest period yet without a separation. If he’d told the newspapers that he planned to be gone three years, he surely had to face his wife and tell her something; Lily was two and a half, having had her first real chance to know her father, and if he really did stay away three years, he would by the end have missed more than half her life. Like many a spouse with bad news, John may not have spoken with perfect clarity; Jessie came away with an impression that he would use the summer of 1845 traveling to California and the summer of 1846 returning, reaching her after an absence of fifteen months or so. They would not have to be entirely out of touch, because letters could be sent to and from California by sea.

Jessie would not accompany him to St. Louis this time; her mother was ill in Washington. Charles Preuss would not be coming either; the German mapmaker decided to skip this expedition to spend more time with his wife. Other familiar faces would be coming: Jacob Dodson, the son of the Benton family servants, was ready to go west again. So, too, was William Chinook, the young native man who had come east with John in 1844 and was now desperate to return to Oregon. John and Senator Benton had arranged for him to spend the previous nine months with a family in Philadelphia, but nine months was too long. William was so depressed that his hosts summoned a physician, who reported that “he seems drooping & anxious about his return,” and “eager to join his old friend Captain Frémont to whom he seems much attached.” Informed that it was time to go, he came down the coast to Washington bearing a Bible he’d been given by his hosts, and said that he had “been a Quaker all winter.” Doubtless he was also wearing white men’s clothes, although his “old friend” Captain Frémont was unimpressed, later writing a patronizing description of William speaking pidgin English and unchanged in his Indian ways. William would travel with John as far as St. Louis, where an Indian agent would help connect him with travelers bound toward his home along the Oregon Trail.

A steamboat glided up to the St. Louis waterfront and deposited John with his companions on May 30, 1845. The publicity of the expedition had preceded them, and when John organized a meeting for potential recruits, he was mobbed. The crowd overflowed the warehouse where he had planned to speak, forcing him to adjourn to a nearby park, where men were so frantic to catch his attention that he could not get a word in. He escaped the meeting, only to have men follow him back to his lodgings. In the days afterward he managed to interview men who wanted to work for him even though he offered miserable wages. Thomas S. Martin of Tennessee nearly turned down the job when he learned the pay was just fifteen dollars per month, but the captain proposed a compromise: he would “name no wages at present,” but if Martin went along he would “make everything satisfactory.” So alluring was the work that Martin agreed. More than ninety men enrolled, and in June they started west on a Missouri River steamboat, aiming to pick up animals at the Missouri border as John had done before.

Enthusiasm for American empire was peaking that spring and summer of 1845. This was the season when a thousand emigrants to Oregon departed from Independence, Missouri, with many embarking from other points. In Washington, President Polk was preparing his first diplomatic proposal to divide Oregon with Britain, with the southern part attaching to the United States and the northern part to British Canada. He faced public pressure to take it all (“Fifty-four forty or fight!” was the slogan, referring to the Oregon country’s northern border, surely one of the few slogans in American political history that turned on a popular interest in latitudes). When the British rejected his proposal due to an apparent miscommunication, Polk withdrew his plan, demanded all of Oregon, and began making preparations for war; perhaps the new ship Princeton, with its powerful gun Oregon, really would prove itself on the Oregon coast. It was possible that the United States could be fighting two wars, because the annexation of Texas was proceeding. The Post Office was establishing service from New Orleans to the Texas port of Galveston. Captain Robert F. Stockton, creator of the Princeton, sailed into the Gulf of Mexico for an ostensibly friendly visit at the Mexican port of Veracruz. He then steamed up to the Texas coast and plotted, unsuccessfully, to raise a private army of Texans to march against Mexico.

In his essay that summer declaring “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent,” journalist John L. O’Sullivan began picturing the United States after that destiny was realized. The Pacific coast would be connected to the East by a transcontinental railroad. Alongside the tracks would march a long row of wooden poles bearing copper wire. “The day cannot be distant,” he wrote, when congressmen would travel to Washington from the Pacific coast in less time than it once took from Ohio. Just as soon, “the magnetic telegraph will enable the editors of the ‘San Francisco Union,’ the ‘Astoria Evening Post,’ or the ‘Nootka Morning News,’ to set up in type the first half of the President’s Inaugural before the echoes of the latter half shall have died away beneath the lofty porch of the Capitol.” Once they had a fully connected continent, Americans’ “yearly multiplying millions” would dominate the world; Europe would never be able to compete against “the simple solid weight of two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions—destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945!”

The new secretary of the navy was the historian George Bancroft, the man who, after Polk’s nomination, had written that territorial expansion was “the manifest purpose of Providence.” He was a New England minister’s son who became a teacher and then the author of a multivolume history of the United States, which began with an epigraph: “Westward the star of empire takes its way.” He’d gone into politics in 1837, when Martin Van Buren appointed him the federal collector of customs in Boston. His power of patronage (the men he hired included fellow writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, appointed a “measurer of coal and salt”) and his power of the pen had given him influence when he swung his support to Polk at the Democratic convention. Polk brought him to Washington, where he could nudge the star of empire on its way. Around the time of the inauguration, according to Bancroft, Polk sat with him and, slapping a hand on his thigh for emphasis, named four main goals. Two were standard Democratic priorities: low tariffs and an independent treasury system, a predecessor of the Federal Reserve. The third was settling possession of Oregon. The fourth was California. Bancroft ordered extra navy ships to the California coast, and made plans to assign a new, aggressive commander to the Pacific squadron: Robert F. Stockton of the USS Princeton.

THE MORE THAN NINETY MEN Captain Frémont assembled in St. Louis included some reliable old hands. Theodore Talbot was with him again. Basil Lajeunesse, John’s favorite companion on two previous journeys, signed up for the third. Alex Godey, another Frenchman, joined the party as he had the last. Kit Carson would be summoned to join the expedition on its way west, and he would bring a friend, Richard Owens, who was as experienced as Carson. John thought of Godey, Owens, and Carson as the elite of his party, and his most recent report included an anecdote illustrating what he admired about them. Returning home from the previous expedition in April 1844, the men encountered a Mexican trading party that had been victimized by Indian horse thieves. Though they had no stake in the matter, Carson and Godey volunteered to track down the thieves and punish them. The two rode back into camp a day later, driving a band of recovered horses and bearing “two bloody scalps, dangling from the end of Godey’s gun.” Frémont considered this a “disinterested” act of justice performed by this diverse pair of his countrymen—“the former an American . . . the latter a Frenchman, born in St. Louis.” The mapmaker Charles Preuss witnessed the same scene and found it revolting: “The more noble Indian takes from the killed enemy only a piece of the scalp as large as a dollar. . . . These two heroes . . . brought along the entire scalp.” Preuss thought that John simply admired the men for drawing blood: “I believe he would exchange all [his scientific] observations for a scalp taken by his own hand.”

Although Preuss’s dark commentaries would be missing on the latest expedition, the “botanical colourist” Edward M. Kern was also skilled as a topographer and could carry out both roles. John filled out the force by recruiting twelve men of the Delaware Nation, mainly as hunters, though he appreciated their skill in a fight. Two of the men were chiefs, who gave their names as Swanok and Jim Sagundai. The Delawares were dressed and equipped in a fashion similar to that of the white men; a drawing of Jim Sagundai showed a mustached man with strong features, wearing a buckskin coat. He had a knife tucked in his belt and another hooked on his chest, and a rifle at hand; the only hint of a different tradition of warfare was the spiked war club he rested comfortably on his knee as he took a seat. The presence of so many Frenchmen and Delawares ensured that English would be just one of several languages spoken on the trail.

They were getting a late start, moving out in June rather than May, so he set them sweeping across the prairie, not taking the trouble to stop for scientific observations for the first few hundred miles. The “principal objects of the expedition,” he knew, “lay in and beyond the Rocky Mountains.” As they hurried forward, some of the men chafed under John’s command. Several quit the expedition, saying the captain was imposing conditions to which they had not agreed. Later, a group of men shot at prairie dogs for sport and accidentally shot a mule; as punishment the captain decreed that they must walk instead of ride for ten days, leading their horses. A few days later the men on foot shot a buffalo, and Captain Frémont relented, saying they could remount as a reward.

On the high plains approaching the Rockies, the travelers “encountered a Cheyenne village which was out on a hunt. The men came to meet us on the plain, riding abreast and their drums sounding. They were in all their bravery, and the formidable line was imposing.” His men fingered their weapons. The approaching Cheyennes proved to be friendly and rode alongside the explorers for several days, but John’s men remained watchful and tense. One night a man posted as a sentry let an ember from his pipe get in his powder horn; the explosion startled the camp, and even the pipe smoker, into thinking they faced an Indian attack.

One day an animal strayed from camp. Basil Lajeunesse took a companion to look for it, and they too vanished. A day and a night passed. Captain Frémont ordered most of the men to remain in camp and went out with a group of searchers. It was open countryside, sometimes offering vistas for miles, but not as flat as it seemed; subtle dips and rises obscured much of the landscape from view, and it emerged that Basil and his companion were only a few miles from camp. John spied the missing men and decided to play a prank. “Throwing off the greater part of our clothes we raised an Indian yell and charged. But there was no hesitation with them. They were off their horses in an instant and their levelled pieces brought us to abrupt halt and a hearty laugh.” He could have been killed by friendly fire, but so enjoyed playing Indian that he decided to try it again when returning to camp. His group charged their comrades with “the usual yell. Our charge gave them a good lesson, though it lasted but a moment. It was like charging into a beehive; there were so many men in the camp ready with their rifles that it was very unsafe to keep up our Indian character. . . . Still, like all excitements, it stirred the blood pleasantly for the moment.”

Reaching Bent’s Fort a little east of the Rockies, he bought supplies and divided the party. Two junior officers separated from John at the head of thirty-three men, following John’s original orders to map the rivers in the area before turning back to St. Louis. On August 16, 1845, John started west again with the bulk of his force, a “well-appointed compact party of sixty; mostly experienced and self-reliant men, equal to any emergency likely to occur and willing to meet it.” He paused briefly on August 20 to read the sun and the stars. He was once again near the 38th parallel, about 1,600 miles almost due west of Washington, D.C. He was about 1,200 miles due east of Sutter’s Fort; it was just a bit farther to San Francisco Bay.

They spent the autumn traversing little-known parts of the Great Basin, naming landmarks as they went; John had realized that a mapmaker could claim that privilege. One of the Delaware leaders, Sagundai, found a spring where they camped one evening, so John decreed it Sagundai’s Spring. Encountering a river, the captain declared it the Humboldt after the geographer who inspired his mentor Joseph Nicollet. Reaching the western lip of the Great Basin, he confronted the Sierra Nevada, and here he divided his force of sixty, sending most men and supplies well south to outflank the highest and coldest of the mountains and enter California by a comparatively safe route. The captain said he would meet them on the far side after his smaller party of fifteen pushed directly over the mountains west of Lake Tahoe. It was a gamble to cross the mountains this far north so late in the season, and it created the risk of a desperate struggle like that of 1844; but he wanted the pass to form part of his new route to Oregon, so he started upward, scanning the sky as he went. At 5,900 feet above sea level the riders passed a glittering lake, eleven miles of water tucked between rock faces and smooth as a mirror. It would someday be called Donner Lake, after the party of emigrants who took a similar late-year gamble there in 1846 and got trapped in the snow—but for John’s men in 1845, the weather held. The sky stayed clear as they crossed the divide at 7,200 feet and followed westerly streams down to John Sutter’s land near sea level. The crossing was easy—it had taken only a few days—the sort of anticlimax that tended to start John Charles Frémont looking for new chances to prove himself.

THE LAND THEY WERE ENTERING was a world apart. Geography had made it so: California’s great Central Valley, stretching 450 miles north to south, was deeply isolated by mountain peaks, deserts, and ocean. Although it was alluring country, temperate in all seasons and watered by the annual snowmelt from the mountains, the difficulty in reaching it meant that California had been settled by Europeans much later than other parts of the Americas. Spanish conquistadors, who controlled the Aztec empire to the south by 1521, failed to seriously penetrate California for almost two and a half centuries afterward. It was so hazy in the European mind that early maps displayed it as an island, and its great anchorage at San Francisco Bay went undiscovered for generations. All the British colonies on the Atlantic coast and all the Spanish and Portuguese dominions of South America were established before the colonization of California. Not until 1768 did the landscape meet its match, in Father Junípero Serra, a Spanish cleric who walked much of the way from the Baja California peninsula to San Francisco Bay, founding a string of Catholic missions as he went. Clerics sought to teach the arts of Spanish Catholic civilization to the native population—several hundred thousand people who, until then, had enjoyed California’s plenty for many centuries undisturbed. Alta, or Upper, California became a department separate from the peninsula of Baja, or Lower, California.

The northernmost of all the missions was in a valley above the Bay of San Francisco, at a settlement called Sonoma. By the time John’s men were approaching California in 1845, this mission, like the others, was closed, its adobe buildings dilapidated; the government of independent Mexico had secularized the missions, seizing the vast lands the clerics controlled. In theory the land should have reverted to the Indians, but in reality colonial administrators made immense land grants to settlers, who developed ranchos, vast farms alive with cattle. The land was worked by Indians, poorer settlers, foreign migrants, and anyone else the owners could find in their sparsely populated world. At Sonoma the largest landowner was Mariano G. Vallejo, the son of a Spanish soldier, who built an enormous house and military barracks near the mission, on Sonoma’s central square. He was called General Vallejo, for he had once commanded Alta California’s scanty armed forces. He now held a less expansive post, overseeing affairs in northern California, which gave him responsibility for dealing with American settlers as they came over the Sierra Nevada into the Central Valley. Several hundred had done so in recent years, usually following the California Trail—crossing the Rockies at South Pass, then angling southwestward across the Great Basin toward San Francisco Bay, mostly settling near the bay or at points north.

In December 1845, a messenger arrived in front of Vallejo’s house, which had a balcony stretching the full width of the second floor, a sloping roof of red Spanish tile, and a kind of castle tower looming over one corner. The messenger pounded on the wooden door and delivered a letter to General Vallejo, who settled down to read it. He had a youthful face, with dark hair and thick sideburns that reached almost to his lips. Although not yet forty, he was known for his dignity and patience, and commanded the respect normally accorded an older man. He was tied by blood or friendship to many of California’s leading figures, as well as to some of the foreigners who settled there; American migrants to California had married two of his sisters. General Vallejo favored immigration, knowing that foreigners brought skills and boosted the population in ways that Mexico’s central government did not—Californians sometimes felt so abandoned by Mexico City that they talked of attaching themselves to Britain or France. Vallejo had been thinking that California’s destiny lay with the United States. But for the moment he had duties as a leading Mexican citizen, and when the message arrived at his house at the end of 1845, he did not like what he read. The letter came from John Sutter at his fort on the Sacramento River. It said that a small number of Americans had arrived—a US Army officer at the head of a few men. They were purchasing horses and other supplies. They seemed to have been in the country for several weeks already. Vallejo was troubled to have been notified so late, and wrote instructions on the back of the letter for his secretary.

Charge [Sutter], in the quickest way possible, to send detailed information about the new immigrants, a thing which has always been done in similar circumstances, even in case of small parties, which he inopportunely failed to do when it was most necessary and, even, urgent.

Everyone knew that American settlers had seized Texas in 1836, leading to fear of a repeat in California. In 1840 a few settlers had talked up a Texas-style revolution, prompting the government to temporarily deport them. With the US annexation of Texas beginning to make war seem likely in 1845, Mexican authorities tightened restrictions for migrants, insisting that new arrivals ask for passports in order to remain in California. Because the newly arrived party of men had yet to do so, they were undocumented immigrants. Vallejo wanted more information, though he also hesitated to raise a military force to hunt down the interlopers. He waited for clarity on who they were and what they intended to do.