Chapter Eight
THE SPANIARDS WERE SOMEWHAT RUDE AND INHOSPITABLE
Captain Frémont, 1845–1846
California and Oregon
The newcomers at Sutter’s Fort were John Frémont’s fifteen men. They soon rode away, searching for the larger party of their comrades who had taken the southerly route. They passed through groves of enormous trees. They moved alongside hundreds of elk, which at one point made “a broken band several miles in length” along the route. They didn’t find their comrades, but encountered groups of natives—“horse-thief Indians,” as John called them. These marauding bands were said to be “mission Indians,” who had been educated by the old missions in the ways of white civilization. Cut loose when the Mexican government secularized the missions and took the land—perhaps the cruelest lesson that civilization taught them about itself—many retreated into the mountains, descending to annoy the settlers who had taken from them. Indians tried to steal the expedition’s spare horses, and John’s men opened fire, killing several. John came upon one of his men facing a lone Indian. The Indian had a bow and arrow; the American shot him with a rifle.
Returning to Sutter’s Fort without finding his men—he was confident they would turn up eventually—John decided to visit authorities in Monterey to obtain a passport. Sutter had sailboats that he used for trade on the rivers, and John caught a ride with eight men, gliding through the delta where the Sacramento River met the San Joaquin. When the boat emerged on San Francisco Bay, John thought it resembled “an interior lake of deep water, lying between parallel ridges of mountains . . . crowned by a forest of the lofty cypress.” On the water, he saw a knob of rock known as Alcatraz Island, and beyond it the misty channel that led to the Pacific. Daniel Webster had been right when he told John over dinner of the bay’s value; this harbor could become the American gateway to Asia, the seaport Senator Benton had always envisioned in Oregon. John began thinking about what to name the harbor entrance (the Mexican landscape, in his mind, was already his to name), and as a student of Roman and Greek literature he remembered the Golden Horn, the name of the harbor at Constantinople from which the ancient Roman empire conducted trade with Asia. He named the entrance to his harbor Chrysopylae, or the Golden Gate.
Near the harbor mouth was a dilapidated Spanish presidio, or military base. Its old cannons protected a little town called Yerba Buena. Coming ashore, John found a local merchant named William Leidesdorff, who served as the American vice-consul and who welcomed John into his home, “one of the best among the few” in town, where he lived with his “girl-like” Russian wife in “a low bungalow sort of adobe house with a long piazza facing the bay for the sunny mornings, and a cheerful fire within against the fog and chill of the afternoons.” Leidesdorff was originally from the Caribbean, a man of mixed race—the son of a Danish father and a mulatto woman. He had emigrated to the United States and had become a US citizen when living in New Orleans. It was said that his appearance suggested “considerable Negro blood,” which limited his ability to pass as white; but he had found ways to escape the strict racial categorizations of his adopted country. He had managed to be appointed a ship’s captain, who made a port call in California in 1841 and then settled there when the ship was sold out from under him. In this remote location he was able to rise according to his ability. He became a merchant. He obtained thirty-five thousand acres in the countryside from the Mexican government, which was comparatively open to people of mixed race. When he accepted the job of vice-consul at Yerba Buena, he apparently became the United States’s first-ever diplomat of color. He was hired by the consul, who was based in Monterey, while the slave-owning president in far-off Washington surely did not realize his background. Now John settled by Leidesdorff’s fire. He learned that he could send a letter from California’s coast—ships regularly sailed down the coast to Mazatlán, Mexico, from which letters were carried overland to the Gulf of Mexico and placed on boats to the United States—and it was possibly the sight of Leidesdorff’s young Russian wife that reminded John of the person he needed to write.
What could a man say after eight months away from his wife? He tried to summarize what he had been doing. He reported crossing a new part of the Great Basin, and finding the landscape “so at variance” with previous descriptions of it that “it is fair to consider this country has been hitherto wholly unexplored, and never before visited by a white man.” He said he had been correct that no rivers escaped this interior zone: “I find the theory of our Great Basin fully confirmed.” He said he had found a better route to California, and seemed anxious to get the credit, sensitive to the criticism that he mostly explored trails that were previously discovered: “I wish this [new route] known to your father, as now, that the journey has been made, it may be said this too was already known.” In its list of accomplishments and points subtly scored, John’s letter resembled a newspaper opinion article. He probably knew that Jessie, without being asked, would arrange for a newspaper to publish it. Only toward the end did his tone grow personal.
I am going now on business to see some gentlemen on the coast, and will then join my people, and complete our survey in this part of the world as rapidly as possible. The season is now just arriving when vegetation is coming out in all the beauty I have often described to you. . . . So soon as the proper season comes, and my animals are rested, we turn our faces homeward, and be sure that grass will not grow under our feet. . . . Many months of hardships, close trials, and anxieties have tried me severely, and my hair is turning gray before its time. But all this passes, et le bon temps viendra [and the good time will come].
Vice-consul Leidesdorff escorted John to Monterey, 110 miles down the coast, riding through the cattle-grazing lands of ranchos in the San Jose Valley and over low mountains to Monterey Bay. The hillsides were covered with pines and free of undergrowth, so elegantly organized by nature that one visitor said the landscape had “the appearance of an extensive park.” Monterey lay on the sweeping curve of the bay shore, a town of only a few hundred people. A tiny cathedral stood there with a white sandstone front and curving roofline of a sort that was familiar throughout Latin America. Red-roofed adobe houses were scattered around. Cannons at the presidio guarded the town, though the guns were so old and the soldiers so few that it was indefensible. In 1842, when a US Navy captain received a mistaken report of war between the United States and Mexico, he had sent sailors and Marines ashore and captured Monterey without resistance, departing only when he was persuaded there was no war after all. Captain Frémont surely knew this, and just as surely studied the defenses when he arrived on January 26, 1846.
The vice-consul led him through town to the home of Thomas O. Larkin, the American consul—a trim man in his forties, with a cleft chin, thoughtful eyes, bushy sideburns, and graying hair. He was a New Englander by birth, as Frémont could have guessed as soon as he arrived at Larkin’s house. On Calle Principal, the main street, Larkin had built a two-story home with features that drew more from New England than from Mexico. Although the adobe brick walls were the same material as most houses in Monterey, the nine-pane windows, central staircase, and upstairs fireplace all spoke of the North Atlantic coast. Instead of a Spanish tile roof he had paid workmen to nail down redwood shingles. The New Englander had connections to California’s elite: his half brother had come to California before him and was one of the two Americans who married into the family of General Vallejo in Sonoma. Larkin himself, after thirteen years in California, was a successful merchant and a player in local politics, sometimes lending money to California officials. In his role as consul he didn’t receive much support from home—he complained that the State Department was regularly rejecting his expenses, even refusing to reimburse $31.34 he paid for a United States flag and staff—but he saw his future in a California that was part of the United States.
John had never met Larkin but probably had seen his work. The New Englander was the source of some of the stories about California that were appearing in eastern newspapers. A man like Larkin in some remote place could write a letter to an editor such as James Gordon Bennett, who controlled the New York Herald with its nationwide circulation—and if Bennett judged the information credible and entertaining, or at least entertaining, he might publish the letter as an article. Larkin’s letters were the ones describing California as paradise. He wrote of sailors from visiting American warships who “spent their leisure time ashore hunting wild deer or dancing with the tame dear, both being plenty in and about Monterey.” Beautiful women were just one of the attractions: “What do you think of a salmon weighing sixty pounds, and other fish every day in the year?” In 1844, as the looming annexation of Texas raised the prospect of war with the United States, one of Larkin’s dispatches suggested that Mexicans would not defend Monterey. The same year he extolled the raw but healthy state of the country: “We have . . . no elections, nor political mobs; no doctors nor much sickness; no surgeons, nor those with amputated limbs; no lawyers, therefore no court-houses nor prisons . . . Solomon, in all his glory, was not more happy than a Californian.” California was a dreamland—sunny, abundant, whimsical, undeveloped, and available to the first nation that came to take it.
LARKIN WAS AN EFFECTIVE CONSUL. “I never make to the Government an unreasonable request, therefore never expect denial, and have for many years found them well disposed toward me,” he told John. After the captain had a night’s sleep in Monterey, Larkin took him around town to have his visit to California properly authorized. They could not meet the governor of California, who had temporarily moved to Los Angeles, so Larkin sought other officials, of whom the most important was José Castro, the commander of the department’s military forces.
General Castro was in his late thirties, a man of John’s generation, solidly built, with bushy hair and sideburns connecting with his mustache. He owned a magnificent uniform but had few troops to command. Whenever Castro needed an army he had to raise it from the colonial population, recruiting men to meet this or that Indian war. But he was capable of making trouble, and John set out to pacify him. He said he was a lone US Army officer, and that his men were civilians; he was simply exploring the best route from the United States to Oregon. He said he would keep his men away from Mexican settlements, except when they needed to purchase supplies, and that he would leave for Oregon as soon as his men had rested and refitted. In response, General Castro apparently avoided ordering Captain Frémont to leave, while also not quite authorizing his visit. He was finessing the situation—he knew Mexico’s government would view the captain’s appearance with alarm, but did not want a confrontation. For the record, Castro wrote out a formal request to Larkin for information about the expedition. Larkin then wrote out a formal explanation, and Castro did not reply.
Returning to the interior, John at last united the two wings of his force and moved them to an abandoned rancho on the far eastern side of the Santa Clara Valley, well east of Monterey. Curious Californians came to meet them. John said the locals showed off their horsemanship, and “very friendly relations grew up with us,” but not for long. The captain learned that three of his men had gone off drunk and insulted Californians. For this he apologized. But he responded differently when a Californian came to accuse the expedition of stealing horses, a charge John indignantly denied. He followed up with an intemperate letter to a Mexican civil official, declaring that the accuser was not only wrong but offensive, and should have received “a severe horsewhipping” for opening his mouth. Forgetting that he was a visitor whose problematic presence was barely tolerated, he had swiftly become an entitled local who imagined he had every right to be where he was. He demonstrated more of this attitude in late February, when the expedition broke camp and moved out. Traveling to Oregon required John to ride north—yet he did not. He moved westward, across the Santa Clara Valley and over a chain of coastal mountains. He camped near the summit, studying groves of two-hundred-foot redwood trees, then drifted even farther westward, down to the Pacific, aiming for the coastal settlement of Santa Cruz.
This was a fateful provocation. It was impossible to pretend that he was keeping his promise to stay out of settled areas. Was he trying to trigger a Mexican attack that would justify a war? Probably not; this would require Machiavellian strategic foresight that he did not demonstrate elsewhere. Did he have a vague intention to kill time until news arrived of a declaration of war? This was plausible. In a letter that spring he wrote that a declaration of war was “probable,” and he sent a note to Larkin in Monterey, asking for “any intelligence you may have received from the States.” He may have thought his mission was simply to wait and see what came up. But if it was his plan to wait for news, he could have done it safely in the interior. Why wander to the settled coastline where he had promised not to go? Usually when he defied authority he had a reason that made sense, at least to him. In later years he would give several explanations, most of which could be disproven by surviving documents. But there was one explanation John gave that was plausible and fit his increasingly entitled frame of mind. He said he was shopping for real estate.
“I had before my mind the home I wished to make in this country,” he explained. “First one place and then another charmed me. But none seemed perfect where the sea was wanting, and so far I had not stood by the open waves of the Pacific. . . . [Only the coastline had] the invigorating salt breeze which brings with it renewed strength. This I wanted for my mother.” He had loved the sea since he was a boy. His happiest moments had been spent in places where “the eye ranges over a broad expanse of country, or in the face of the ocean,” walking the Battery alone or exploring the shore with Cecilia. Now he sought to recover that feeling on the western coast, and had heard that Santa Cruz was especially beautiful. John Charles Frémont risked war between the United States and Mexico because he wanted to shop for beachfront property to share with his mother.
After inspecting Santa Cruz he drifted southeastward, farther from Oregon and nearer Monterey. He camped a few miles outside the capital at the start of March, and messengers began passing between the camp and Thomas Larkin’s New England house in town. In a letter to Larkin, he suggested that he was passing time until the snow melted in the mountains. He also suggested he was technically following his promise to stay away from settlements because he was not bringing his main force into the center of Monterey: “I therefore practice the selfdenial which is a constant virtue here and forego the pleasure I should have found in seeing some little of society in your capital.”
The day that Captain Frémont sent this letter was the day California’s General Castro lost patience. Apparently someone disturbed the general’s breakfast with news of the wandering Americans. He wrote a letter and gave it to Larkin to translate for Frémont.
At seven o’clock this morning [I] was given to understand that you and the party under your command have entered the towns of this Department, and such being prohibited by our laws I find myself obligated to advertise you that on the receipt of this you will immediately retire beyond the limits of this same Department.
Larkin wrote a letter in reply, trying to smooth over the dispute by urging General Castro and another official, the Monterey prefect, to avoid any “unfortunate” clashes based on “false reports, or false appearances.” The prefect responded with mounting anger that there was no false appearance: Frémont was right there, and “must now either blindly obey the authorities or on the contrary experience the misfortunes which he has sought by his crime.” Larkin watched with alarm as General Castro began summoning armed men. Sixty men went up the road toward the Americans, then another forty, and Larkin expected that Castro might gather another hundred. The general also issued a proclamation warning of “a band of robbers commanded by a Capt. of the U.S. Army, J.C. Frémont,” and calling for all citizens to report to his headquarters to help him “lance the ulcer.”
Outside town, Captain Frémont was defiant. When a Californian delivered Castro’s demand to depart immediately or face the consequences, John said it was an insult to the United States and that he would not retreat in shame. (His subordinate Theodore Talbot summarized John’s position in a letter: “Captain said that he wd leave the country, but wd not be driven out.”) His men broke camp, but only to move to higher and more defensible ground, a mountain called Gavilan Peak. They raised an American flag while John used his spyglass to watch California troops and artillery gather below. Soon a courier from Larkin arrived bearing a letter, which John did not take time to read before replying, scrawling a note in pencil so that the same messenger could carry it back down to Monterey. “I am making myself as strong as possible,” he told Larkin, “in the intention that if we are unjustly attacked we will fight to the extremity and refuse quarter, trusting to our country to avenge our death.” He added:
I thank you for your kindness and good wishes and would write more at length as to my intentions, did I not fear that my letter will be intercepted; we have in no wise done wrong to the people or the authorities of the country, and if we are hemmed in and assaulted, we will die every man of us, under the Flag of our Country. Very truly yours,
J.C. Frémont
The captain envisioned himself a martyr. He might have imagined his struggle would win California for his country: his words echoed an earlier letter from a confrontation between Mexicans and Americans. In 1836, when Texas rebels were surrounded at the Alamo by thousands of Mexican troops, the Texan commander William Travis slipped a messenger through enemy lines with a note: “I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country. Victory or Death.” It was said that Travis’s sacrifice inspired other Texans to victory. But it was also true that Travis and his men died in a pointless effort to hold an indefensible position from which he had been ordered to retreat, and in 1846 Captain Frémont had wiser second thoughts. He finally opened and read Larkin’s letter to him. It was a sober warning that if John did not have orders from Washington authorizing his incursion, then he was in trouble, because he was violating Mexican law. Even if John’s force could defend itself, warfare with the Mexicans would “cause trouble hereafter to Resident Americans.” American settlers, already under pressure, could face collective punishment. That night John’s men broke camp and slipped away. It was a good time to head for Oregon.
THEY RODE NORTH PAST SAN FRANCISCO BAY, past Sutter’s Fort, and through the flatlands at the heart of the Sacramento River Valley. By the first of April they were almost three hundred miles north of Monterey. One night the captain brought out his sextant and calculated that he was near 40 degrees latitude, a little less than two hundred miles from the Oregon border.
Two men asked permission to quit the expedition and return to the United States. Captain Frémont agreed, realizing that he could give one of the men a letter to carry home to Jessie. He took out some paper to write by the fire. Informing his wife of the confrontation and retreat from Monterey, he put the best face on it. “The Spaniards,” he told her, “were somewhat rude and inhospitable.”
My sense of duty did not permit me to fight them, but we retreated slowly and growlingly before a force of three or four hundred men, and three pieces of artillery. . . . Of course I did not dare to compromise the United States, against which appearances would have been strong; but, although it was in my power to increase my party by many Americans, I refrained from committing a solitary act of hostility.
The letter was revealing, and not only because he probably inflated the size of the Mexican force at Gavilan Peak. By saying he could have increased his party “by many Americans,” he meant that he could recruit the American settlers of California just as Castro had called out the Californians. He still had this option. He was moving among settlers in the Sacramento Valley, stopping at some of their ranchos. One offered to raise a force of “hardy warriors,” an offer John declined for the moment. Another settler had already served under his command: Samuel Neal, who had come to California with the expedition in 1844, and dropped off at Sutter’s Fort to start a new life.
John was acting like a settler himself, allowing himself to be drawn into local disputes. Some said they feared attack by Indians, and the captain responded by vowing to protect them. It was not clear what disagreements—over control of land or resources—might have led to this fear of war. But having made a grandiose promise, John had to keep it, and he decided to strike the Indians a crippling blow. It was a significant change in policy. In all his travels he had never fought a full-scale battle with natives, despite occasional episodes such as the fight with the “horse-thief Indians.” He normally came among Indians while carrying the lamps of science and reason. Not all had responded well to him—in early 1844 one of his men had wandered off alone and had been killed—but John’s men rarely fired first, instead keeping well armed and on guard. Why would he now take the side of white settlers he had just met, by launching an armed conflict the origins of which he did not understand?
Captain Frémont said he could not leave the settlers defenseless. They suspected California’s General Castro was sending messengers to rile up the Indians against white people. John embraced this fear, taking up a racial stereotype of natives at odds with his experience: “An Indian let loose is of all animals the most savage. He has an imagination for devilment that seems peculiar to him, and a singular delight in inflicting suffering.” But on this occasion it was white men who took a “delight in inflicting suffering.” His scouts found a village where men had “feathers on their heads, and faces painted black, their war color,” as if preparing for combat. The main body of John’s men charged, killing some natives and driving others into a nearby river. The horsemen rode on to several more villages, whose inhabitants scattered. One of the Americans, Thomas S. Martin, later declared in an oral history that the attackers killed 175 Indians. Martin’s guess was probably high—all the numbers in his oral history were unreliable—but there was no reason to doubt the visceral statement of Kit Carson: “We found [the natives] to be in great force. . . . We attacked them, and although I do not know how many we killed, it was a perfect butchery. The survivors fled in all directions.”
PUSHING NORTH TOWARD OREGON, the expedition rode past Mount Shasta, a snowbound volcano that loomed over the valley and blended into the clouds. They departed the Sacramento Valley and climbed into mountains and high plains, a land of extinct volcanoes and lava fields long since grown over with forest. By early May they were in Oregon and riding past Klamath Lake, its waters ringed by mountains. They had seen this landmark during their wanderings of 1843–44, and John had a hazy idea to track down a friendly native chief he’d met. But the first Klamath Indians he saw this time were not welcoming. “Our arrival took them by surprise, and though they received us with apparent friendship, there was no warmth in it, but a shyness which came naturally from their habit of hostility.” Captain Frémont did not understand why Indians who’d been living safely beyond the range of white settlement might be concerned by the explorers’ sudden appearance. One day a group of Klamath men walked into the explorers’ camp, asking for food and possibly sizing up the visitors.
A few evenings later the men of the expedition had settled around their fires when they “caught the faint sound of horses’ feet.” The men waited quietly, listening, hands near their guns. “There emerged from the darkness—into the circle of the firelight—two horsemen, riding slowly as though horse and man were fatigued by long traveling.” John was surprised to recognize both men—two California settlers, including his former subordinate Samuel Neal. They said they were the vanguard of a small party that had been looking for John, escorting a messenger from the United States. In the morning Neal and Frémont rode back down the trail to meet the messenger, accompanied by ten chosen men including Carson and Basil Lajeunesse and a few Delawares. Late that day they found him, a white man accompanied by a black servant and two more California settlers. The messenger and his servant had come all the way from Washington, D.C., which he had departed the previous autumn.
It was too late in the day to ride back to the main force. John decided to spend the night in a cedar grove, where the messenger told his story by the fire. His name was Archibald H. Gillespie, and his servant was Benjamin Harrison. Gillespie was a marine lieutenant traveling undercover in civilian clothes. He was thirty-three, the same age as John; the firelight showed a man who was lean and weary, with a distinguished-looking Vandyke beard. He was a man of the world. In 1845, having finished two years on a navy vessel that circled the globe, Gillespie asked for an easy shore assignment that would restore his health, but was chosen for the mission to California; the government prized his fluency in Spanish. The exhaustion he felt from sea duty was overcome by the thrill of the new assignment. He visited Washington to receive instructions from Secretary of State Buchanan as well as President Polk. He caught a ship bound for Mexico, then traveled overland across the center of the country, boldly making observations about Mexico’s preparations for war and mailing letters back to Washington. He told Mexican customs officers and anyone else who inquired that he was a businessman traveling for his health, and offered papers to back up this cover story. He had other, more incriminating papers that he memorized and burned, intending to write them out again once he reached California.
At Mexico’s Pacific port of Mazatlán, he caught up with a visiting US Navy ship, whose captain obligingly welcomed him on board and set sail for Monterey as if on a regular patrol. On arrival, the traveling American paid his respects to the American consul Thomas Larkin. Revealing his true identity, he delivered a letter that he had since restored to written form—a letter from Secretary of State Buchanan. It informed Larkin that he had been appointed to a new position as a “confidential agent” of President Polk, authorized to conduct certain covert operations and paid six dollars per day. Larkin was to use his influence to conciliate Californians to the United States, peacefully preparing the way for eventual American rule. “The future Destiny of that Country,” Buchanan said, “is a subject of anxious solicitude for the Government and People of the United States.” The letter specifically said that the United States should not take California by compulsion. But President Polk “could not view with indifference the transfer of California to Great Britain or any other European power.” Polk was betting that if Europeans could be kept away, California would fall peacefully into American hands.
Seeking Frémont next, Gillespie slipped out of Monterey with Benjamin Harrison and a guide. The American settlers in the Sacramento Valley welcomed their countryman and organized the party that brought him onward to Oregon. Now, sitting by the fire, Gillespie produced more correspondence—letters addressed to Captain Frémont. There was a note from Jessie, the first words he had seen from his wife in almost a year. There was also a letter from Senator Benton. And there was an official letter from Secretary of State Buchanan, though it was merely a greeting and gave John no particular instructions. Gillespie verbally repeated the instructions he had delivered to Larkin—that the consul was to ensure warm relations with Californians and keep European powers out.
The exact nature of John’s instructions would prompt generations of controversy. Was he secretly told to conquer California? Neither Gillespie nor Frémont ever said so, though John asserted that he was given a message in a kind of elaborate code. He combined Buchanan’s seemingly innocuous letter with Gillespie’s words, then mixed in hints and suggestions from Senator Benton’s letter, along with John’s own memory of past conversations about California in the Benton home. Weaving it all together, John C. Frémont alone understood that he was being given a mission: “The information through Gillespie had 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 authoritative knowledge that the Government intended to take California. . . . It was with thorough satisfaction I now found myself required to do what I could to promote this object of the President.” So he said long afterward. Benton, also years after the fact, asserted nearly the same.
Their assertions were not quite true, according to the only shred of contemporaneous evidence that suggests what really happened. Although the letters John received did not survive, he wrote a note soon afterward to Senator Benton: “Your letter led me to expect some communication from [Secretary of State Buchanan], but I received nothing.” In other words, Senator Benton really did offer his son-in-law a hint that Buchanan’s letter would tell him something—but the secretary of state’s letter had to complete the thought, and the cautious James Buchanan didn’t. Buchanan, the only one who actually held a responsible post in President Polk’s administration, either did not want to order John on a covert mission or did not want his fingerprints on it. The attempt to send a signal was botched. It would be easy to imagine Buchanan in the Benton home, assuring his friend that he would of course write a letter with instructions for his son-in-law, and just as easy to imagine that Buchanan thought better of it afterward.
The one unmistakable sign John did have was Gillespie’s presence: the Vandyke beard at his campfire was enough to show that John was part of the grand design, whatever it was. Gillespie had come directly from the president, who had given clear enough instructions to Larkin and apparently wanted John to know them so he could assist the consul if needed. John momentarily lost track of himself that night as he considered the prospects. He did not organize the camp as he normally would. He forgot to post guards overnight, and failed to turn in to sleep at a sensible hour. By eleven o’clock that evening the camp had settled down, the men rolling into their blankets while John alone remained awake. “I sat by the fire in fancied security,” he said, “going over the home letters. I had about thought out the situation when I was startled by a sudden movement among the animals.”
The animals had been left near the lakeshore a hundred yards away from the fires. The captain rose and walked in that direction. He had acquired an innovative new weapon known as a revolver, which would fire several shots without the need to reload; he now drew this weapon and crept through the cedars to look around. Finding nothing amiss, he returned to the fire and resumed his reverie. He resolved that he would halt his exploration of Oregon and plant himself on California soil, even if he was not sure what to do there. The captain at last fell asleep under a cedar.
He was awakened by Kit Carson’s voice: “What’s the matter over there?” No answer came back. And then Carson shouted, “Indians!” He had been stirred by a noise in the darkness, a sickening sound from within the camp, the sound of an ax chopping.
THE MEN HAD TAKEN at least one security precaution. Most slept shielded by darkness, just outside the circles of light from the embers of the fires. Now, alerted by warning cries, they rolled to their guns and watched for targets. Some draped their blankets over tree branches to block flying arrows. When Klamath men ran into the firelight, Carson and several others fired. Their leader went down. The other Klamaths silently withdrew; they used axes, tomahawks, and arrows and never fired a gun. John’s men stayed alert the rest of the night, listening to every sound in the bushes, but the Klamaths never returned.
At daylight the captain looked upon the remains of Basil Lajeunesse. The Frenchman had been the first to die; it was the sound of an ax blow to his head that had alerted Kit Carson to the attack. Basil had been John’s best companion through three expeditions, a man with whom he had spent much more time than he’d spent with his wife the past four years. A Delaware named Crane was also dead, along with a mixed-race Delaware named Denny, while one more Delaware was injured. The dead Klamath leader still lay near the fires, with an English ax tied to his wrist. Frémont watched as Kit Carson “seized [the ax] and knocked his head to pieces with it, and one of the Delawares, Sagundai, scalped him.” Both Carson and Frémont later described this act of rage, destroying the Klamath’s head the way that Basil’s had been destroyed, which was the only way either man hinted at the emotions they felt.
The survivors draped their comrades’ remains over mules and started north to meet the main force, pausing to bury the bodies in a laurel thicket. “With our knives we dug a shallow grave,” John said, “and wrapping their blankets round them, left them among the laurels. There are men above whom the laurels bloom who did not better deserve them than my brave Delaware and Basil. I left Denny’s name on the creek where he died.” Generations later there is still a Denny Creek on the map near Klamath Lake. When the men reached the main camp, the Delawares there blackened their faces and went into mourning. John sat next to a Delaware man who put his hand on his heart and said, “Very sick here.” John replied that they would have vengeance, which white men including Carson wanted too. The work of reprisal began the following morning, when the expedition struck camp and moved out. At Sagundai’s suggestion, the surviving Delawares stayed behind in hiding—then ambushed and killed two Klamath men who arrived to inspect the vacant campsite.
Over the next two days the force circled Klamath Lake, hoping to sneak up on a Klamath village. Ten men under Carson went ahead of the main force and discovered Klamaths by a riverside. Carson was outnumbered but chose not to wait for reinforcements. He charged, sending the Klamaths fleeing in canoes across the river. His men fired from the river’s edge, then the wildly aggressive Carson led his horsemen plunging into the river to continue the chase. Too impatient to find a shallow ford, he went completely underwater with his men after him, soaking their gunpowder, which would have left them helpless on the far bank but for the timely arrival of the main force, which crossed with greater care. The Klamath people continued retreating, leaving their canoes behind. “In one of them,” said expedition member Thomas S. Martin, “we found an old Indian woman who had been shot.” The attackers burned the canoes and moved on to set fire to the Klamath village, where the houses were made of reed and willow, built beside racks hung with a bountiful harvest of fish. The huts “being dry,” Carson said, “the fire was a beautiful sight.”
That was how the attack was described by Carson and Martin, who later gave oral histories. John, with Jessie’s assistance, wrote an account that improved certain details. He did not say an old woman was killed in a canoe; he said it was a man: “His hand was still grasping the paddle. On his feet were shoes which I thought Basil wore when he was killed.” It would be hard to prove that John’s account was the false one—but his vignette of poetic justice was too perfect. It was more honorable to have killed a man than a woman, and better still if his shoes proved him to be guilty of the ambush, rather than a victim of collective punishment. This was one of several occasions on which John recorded vivid details—literary details of which he alone took note—that heightened the emotion of his account and tended to minimize, or at least explain, his men’s indiscriminate destruction.
There was a gap between Captain Frémont and his men, which was reflected in the differing stories they told. His men talked with brutal frankness; either they did not know that people outside their world might judge their acts to be wrong, or they did not care. John Frémont knew and cared. The life his men led was not quite his; it was a life he visited, knowing he would go home to his world of books and newspapers, cities and civilization. Writing and editing later, in the presence of his wife and with her influence, he sometimes gave his accounts a layer of Victorian varnish. In fairness, the violence still came through, as did John’s continuing flashes of humility: he understood that he was less skilled than his men. He recounted a moment after the torching of the Klamath village: The men were riding back to their camp when John came upon a lone Klamath man about to let loose an arrow at Kit Carson. John fired at the attacker and missed. He was no better at shooting from a horse in 1846 than he had been when failing to shoot buffalo on the plains in 1839. Fortunately for Carson, John’s horse leaped forward and trampled the man. Sagundai the Delaware chief then rode up and killed him. Carson generously credited Frémont with saving his life—or rather credited him and his horse. “I owe my life to them two,” he said.
Returning to camp, the captain gave the reins to Jacob Dodson, and left the young man to care for his horse while he walked to his tent to lie on a blanket and be alone with his thoughts. He was sharing his tent with Lieutenant Gillespie, the marine messenger. He had been with John five days, every one of them spent hunting other people or being hunted, and this was on Gillespie’s mind when he entered the tent: “By Heaven, this is rough work,” he said. “I’ll take care to let them know in Washington.” Frémont replied, “Heaven don’t come in for much about here just now,” adding that before they made it back to Washington they would have “time enough to forget about this.”