Chapter Eleven, Imperfect Union

Chapter Eleven

WE PRESSED ONWARD WITH FATAL RESOLUTION

Two Travelers, 1848–1849

New York, Panama, and the San Juan Mountains

By the start of 1848, the telegraph network developed by Samuel F. B. Morse was spreading with astonishing speed. Only four years after his first experimental line carried the first message from Washington to Baltimore, lines now shot up the East Coast to New York and Boston, and westward over the Appalachians to Buffalo, Detroit, and Louisville. It was common for newspapers to contain items in a column headlined “By Electric Telegraph,” and this was how much of the nation learned of the end of the war. On February 4, the telegraph spread “rumors of peace” from Mexico, based on negotiations over a peace treaty. By February 18 the telegraph spread word that a messenger had reached New Orleans with a copy of the treaty. Its text described the new southern border of the United States, including the new boundary of California: a line starting at the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, the town that John’s men had approached by ship and seized in mid-1846. Americans coveted its fine harbor, which was the reason Commodore Stockton had sent John to take it. His action established the farthest southern extent of American possession along the coast, and thus set the terms of the treaty negotiation: Mexicans could be told they might as well surrender that much land since United States troops had occupied it anyway and would never give it up. From San Diego the new border stretched inland, a straight line until it hit the Colorado River some 160 miles away. Land the size of an empire lay north of that line.

California remained isolated for the moment, still thousands of miles from the nearest telegraph line, so Jessie and John were slow to learn what had taken place there as John was leaving the army and the war was nearing its conclusion: gold had been discovered in California. It was found along the American River, the same waterway that John had followed down to safety from the snowy Sierra Nevada in 1844 (“Never did a name sound more sweetly!”). Now it was the setting of a seminal American story, which involved so many people whom the Frémonts knew that they were practically first cousins to the event.

The story started with John Sutter, who approved the construction of a gristmill that would be powered by the waters of the American. It was on land Sutter leased from Indians. In January 1848, the carpenter overseeing the mill construction discovered something glittering in a water channel. Sutter asked the mill workers to keep the news secret, but bragged about it himself. One of the first people he told was Mariano G. Vallejo, John’s onetime prisoner at Sutter’s Fort who was now refashioning his life under United States rule. In February, Sutter decided to inform the military governor of California, hoping to obtain official protection of his claim; his messenger brought a gold sample to show the governor and an aide, both of whom had met John during the war. The aide, Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, bit the gold and pounded it flat with an ax to test its properties. Gold fever spread quickly; by the time Sherman escorted the governor to inspect the area of the discovery in July, about four thousand men were spread over the land surrounding Sutter’s claim, digging holes and using water to sift the earth. They might find several thousand dollars’ worth of gold in a day; they might find nothing. “For a time it seemed as though somebody would reach solid gold,” Sherman said. The governor purchased an oyster can filled with gold at ten dollars per ounce and sent small vials of it to Washington. Thomas Larkin, the US consul, added a letter describing the find.

Two messengers, by two different routes, raced for the East, and the one who moved faster was Edward F. Beale, a friend of the Frémonts. He was in his midtwenties, with eager, observant eyes and a fringe of beard along his chin. Beale was the young naval officer who had served with John during the war. He returned to Washington by late 1847, which was when Jessie asked him to linger long enough to testify on John’s behalf at the court-martial. Afterward her loyal friend reported to the navy’s Pacific Squadron, but had hardly arrived on station when he volunteered for the task of racing eastward again to bring the container of gold to the capital. President Polk seemed unimpressed when young Beale first showed him the gold in September 1848 (Polk, exhausted and a lame duck after declining to run for a second term, told his diary that “nothing of importance occurred” on the day of Beale’s visit), but the family of Jessie Benton Frémont knew better.

William Carey Jones, Jessie’s brother-in-law and John’s onetime defense counsel, learned that Beale had smuggled the gold vial past bandits in a journey across war-torn Mexico, and Jones wrote it up as an adventure story for a newspaper. Other papers picked up the story, and Jessie’s friend Beale grew famous. The tale further spread news of the gold, which was capturing the country’s imagination. Even Jessie was intrigued when she returned to Washington late that fall. “Are there any flowers or plants peculiar to a gold region?” she wrote John’s botanist, apparently curious if underground riches might be located through study of the flora.

The same letter made it clear that she was still grieving her losses. She confessed, “I have had neither the quiet nor the strength” to copy out a list of plants for the botanist. Home was not relaxing, with her mother’s condition worse, her father’s mood increasingly bitter, and her husband gone. But at least Jessie could say she would not be apart from John for long, for she planned to travel westward with Lily by her side in early 1849. “I shall go by the isthmus after the steamers commence running,” she explained. The lure of California was inspiring the creation of a new steamship line to carry passengers in comfort from New York southward to Panama, where they would cross the narrow country to catch a California-bound ship on its Pacific coast. The overland portion of Jessie’s journey would be fifty miles, compared with John’s roughly two thousand from St. Louis to San Francisco—“a much less interesting, but shorter & safer way for women & children.”

Safety, of course, was relative. A newspaper article in early 1849 reported that of eight ships that had recently attempted to anchor on Panama’s Caribbean coast, six had run aground. Once people reached the isthmus they risked tropical diseases, and some were turned away from overcrowded ships departing from the Pacific side. But the newspapers also contained enticing tales. One ship was said to have brought twelve thousand dollars’ worth of gold to Charleston, South Carolina, and the captain of another returning ship declared that “the gold stories are not at all exaggerated, but are rather below the truth.”

Steamers to Panama departed from New York, which Jessie reached in early 1849, days before her ship sailed. She checked into the finest of the city’s hotels, which was a fitting place to launch a journey west. Many years before, John Jacob Astor had run his western fur empire from his home on that property; now Astor’s house was replaced by the Astor House, a six-story building of white stone. Shops lined the facade, including a bookstore called Bedford and Co., which was selling a twenty-five-cent edition of Fremont’s Exploring Expedition. Steps led up to the lobby, where Jessie stood on marble floors between piles of luggage that awaited the attention of porters. Hallways to either side led to sitting areas segregated by gender and family status: parlors to one side were “devoted to the single male guests,” while the opposite corridor led to “a suite of public apartments used by ladies and married people,” decorated with “velvet, lace, satin, gilding, rich carpets and mirrors.” Jessie went for a walk in the Astor’s upscale neighborhood. She found a jeweler’s shop and showed the proprietor three emeralds that she wanted to have set in gold. John had given her the emeralds, which he had brought from the conquest of California, mysterious prizes of war. As was the case with John, anything she did now made the papers: the New York Sun wrote a story about the emeralds that was picked up by other papers across the country. The article speculated without evidence that Colonel Frémont had either obtained precious stones once owned by “Mexican and Peruvian Emperors” or discovered a secret emerald mine.

Returning to the hotel, Jessie had experiences sure to play on her mind. She discovered relatives who were staying at the Astor, but her delight at familiar faces became dismay as they questioned her plans. “I was much in the position of a nun carried into the world for the last time before taking the veil. All the arguments, all the reasons, all the fors and againsts, had to be gone over with this set of friends; all the griefs opened up again, and the starting made harder than ever.” Hardly had she completed this inquisition when she faced a crisis involving one of her companions. Jessie was planning to travel with a maid, a young woman named Harriot, who was following her to California, less out of eagerness than a sense of duty. Harriot was engaged to a man who did not want her to go, and as Jessie later told the story, the fiancé appeared in New York and took desperate measures. “He went off,” she said, “and raised the whole force of people who were allied for rescuing colored people being carried off to the South against their will.” A crowd of African Americans began gathering at the hotel.

New York’s black community knew that free black residents had been kidnapped and sold into slavery—people such as Solomon Northup, a musician lured away from Rochester, New York, in 1841 who had not been seen since. So many people had disappeared that state law provided assistance for efforts to recover them, and Jessie realized that “the cry of ‘carrying off a free colored girl against her will’ had the same effect . . . as an alarm of fire.” Protesters, or a “colored mob,” as Jessie called them, “poured into the Astor House, filling the lower halls, and raising such a commotion that Mr. Stetson,” the hotel manager, “came for us to see what could be done.” The crowd refused to trust the intentions of Jessie or her family. “It was true that we were Southerners . . . [but] not true that [Harriot] was being carried off against her will. The trouble was that she had no will; she had only affections, and these pulled her in contrary directions.” Another possibility didn’t occur to Jessie—that Harriot was pulled less by affection than by society’s expectations. She was trapped between the competing demands of two people whom she likely felt she could not refuse: her assertive white employer and a man. The protest at last decided the issue. Jessie released the maid from her obligation and sent her into her fiancé’s arms.

Stetson, the hotel manager, found a substitute servant, a white woman, who joined the traveling party when the steamship Crescent City glided out of New York Harbor on March 15, 1849. A cheering crowd bid the ship good-bye, and many newspapers took note of the famous explorer’s wife on board. Jessie was on deck with three companions: her daughter, Lily; the new maid; and one of her brothers-in-law, Richard T. Jacob, who had been told to travel for his health and who could serve as Jessie’s escort. Three hundred and thirty-eight passengers crowded the vessel, which a newspaper said was “a larger number . . . than has heretofore gone in any steamer” for Panama. Only 5 of the 338 were female, including Jessie, Lily, and the servant. The men and boys included would-be prospectors and others who hoped to profit by them. One burly passenger, twenty-seven-year-old Collis P. Huntington, was the co-owner of a hardware store in Oneonta, New York, and hoped to set up a branch store in California, obtaining his gold by selling goods that were needed in the goldfields. He was traveling with an initial stock that included rifles, woolen socks, and medicine.

Jessie avoided all such people and retreated to her cabin: “I was too worn down and silenced to care to know strangers.” Once the ship cleared New York Harbor and emerged on the ocean, her brother-in-law also retired to his berth, “thoroughly seasick.” And then Jessie woke in the night to discover the servant stealing items from her trunk. She reported the crime to the captain, who had the servant placed in another part of the ship. Only Lily remained with her. Jessie was more alone than she had ever been.

On the choppy sea off Cape Hatteras, she received a visit from a stewardess, who “made me go into the air.” The sympathetic stewardess arranged a seat for her on the rocking wooden deck beneath the masts and the smoking funnel. “I had never seen the sea,” she said, and “no one had ever told me of the wonderful new life it could bring . . . that grand solitude, that wide look from horizon to horizon, the sense of space, of freshness.” She began to feel of the sea as her husband did. She found some relief from “the numbness of grief” and “morbid dwelling on what was now ended.” In short order she had lost her son, said good-bye to her husband, let go of her mother and father, and separated from nearly everything of the life she had known. Now she plunged forward in a way she never had before. She became aware of the buzz of excitement on the ship and remembered the gold strikes. Above all she remembered her chance to reunite with John, and to do so in the West, which he loved. He might already be in California by now. She felt her optimism return. “Perhaps the sharpest lesson of life,” she said, “is that we outlast so much—even ourselves—so that one, looking back, might say, ‘When I died the first time . . . ’”

THE LAST LETTER JESSIE HAD RECEIVED from John placed him at Bent’s Fort, the adobe-walled trading post just east of the Rockies. It was the place to which Jessie had addressed her passionate letter to John in 1846, hoping in vain that he would soon find it there. In November 1848 John did stop there to buy extra mules and supplies. The expedition had encountered snow on the prairie and ice when fording the Arkansas River, and men at Bent’s Fort affirmed that winter was arriving early. John didn’t stay long. He pushed westward up the Arkansas to Pueblo, in the future state of Colorado, facing the snowcapped Rockies. He was near the 38th parallel, almost directly west of St. Louis and directly east of San Francisco Bay; and here he asked around for a guide. He needed one because he was not aiming for well-known passes. He meant to move directly westward, through territory much less familiar.

Many lives depended on who gave directions, and the man who took up the challenge was William Williams, known as Old Bill Williams. John knew him; he had worked for the previous expedition when it passed through this region in 1845. Williams was “a man about six feet one inch in height,” according to one description, “gaunt, red-headed, with a hard, weather-beaten face, marked deeply with the small pox.” He was said to be “all muscle and sinew,” worn from his travels but more comfortable outdoors than in. He was an eccentric horseman, who rode with the stirrups so short that his knees nearly touched his chest. But he said he knew passes in the direction John wanted to go, and agreed to try for them even though he expressed doubt about the wisdom of a winter crossing.

Williams, it seemed, had been everywhere and seen everything. As a young man he had lived in western Missouri as a missionary to Indians, but lost interest in converting them and went to live among them. He married an Osage woman, learned the language, and worked for federal Indian authorities as an interpreter and messenger. Sometimes he delivered documents to William Clark, the explorer turned Indian superintendent, and he assisted when Clark persuaded the Osage to sell their land and leave Missouri. Later Williams worked as a fur trapper, ranging as far as California and Canada. Although the perilous and exhausting trade was a young man’s game, he kept on for decades, spending months or years at a time in the mountains before descending into Taos, New Mexico, to cash in his pelts and spend his profits on a drunken spree. He was sixty-two when he proposed to apply his rich experience to guide John’s men, starting by crossing the Sangre de Cristo (“Blood of Christ”) Mountains, which they reached on November 26, 1848. The party numbered thirty-three, after a few had dropped out and Williams joined. They had more than a hundred mules, though the men started out on foot to spare the animals, which were loaded with shelled corn so they could be fed when the grass was covered with snow.

At the end of the first day of climbing, the group made camp near an overlook, where several men had a last glimpse of safety in the east. “The sight was beautiful,” said one of the men, Micajah McGehee, “the snow-covered plain far beneath us stretching eastward as far as the eye could reach, while on the opposite side frowned the almost perpendicular wall of high mountains.” Each day afterward the journey grew more difficult and the snow deeper, and they had not gone far before John began to lose faith in Bill Williams. “We occupied more than half a month in making the journey of a few days,” John complained, “blundering a tortuous way through deep snow, which already began to choke up the passes, for which we were obliged to waste time in searching.” The loss of time was dangerous, damaging the men’s morale and using the mules’ rapidly dwindling supply of corn. John thought Williams must have “entirely forgotten” the mountains they were crossing, while the mapmaker Charles Preuss wrote a summary judgment in his diary: “It was obvious that Bill had never been here.” Williams did make one remark that suggested he knew the ground, though it was not reassuring: Micajah McGehee heard him say that “two trappers . . . had been frozen to death here the year previous.”

Some expedition members blamed their trouble on John, who was giving the orders. Richard H. Kern, brother of the artist Edward Kern, wrote in his journal that exceptionally deep snow on December 9 should have persuaded John to turn back, but “with the willfully blind eyes of rashness and self-conceit and confidence he pushed on.” At last they descended to the broad valley of the Rio Grande, which led in a westerly direction. John was expecting to follow it upstream to the next mountain chain. (“Usually the snow forms no obstacle to winter traveling” in the valley, he said.) But they found the valley covered in powder too deep for the mules to get at grass, and the animals had eaten nearly all their corn supply. As the men camped in a treeless region of snow-covered sand dunes, the hungry mules tried to flee, setting off eastward en masse. “We had to rise from our beds,” said McGehee, “lifting half a foot of snow with our top blankets, and strike out in pursuit of them.”

The Rio Grande Valley presented the men with an opportunity to show that they were as wise as the mules, because it gave them a chance to escape. Although John was aiming upriver to the west, he knew that if he changed directions and marched downriver, the valley would bend southward toward small settlements not many miles downstream. Beyond those settlements, about a hundred miles away, was Taos, New Mexico, where Kit Carson lived. A detour of several days could bring the men to safety, supplies, a better pass, and possibly a different guide. John did not detour. He was not ready to admit defeat, just as he had delayed almost two weeks before giving up his effort to cross the Great Basin in 1844.

They climbed westward into the San Juan Mountains. Richard H. Kern, who, like his brother Edward, was an artist, sketched bare trees and vertical rock walls, beneath which the men seemed like dots on the snow. John considered this terrain to be “the most rugged, and impracticable of all the Rocky Mountain ranges, inaccessible to trappers and hunters even in the summertime.” If this was so, why was he attempting to cross these mountains in winter, and why would he imagine that railroad tracks could run through them? A railroad required a pass with a slope gradual enough for locomotives pulling heavy loads; John seemed to have lost sight of his purpose. “We pressed onward with fatal resolution,” he confessed. “Even along the river-bottoms the snow was already belly-deep for the mules . . . The cold was extraordinary; at the warmest hours of the day (between one and two) the thermometer (Fahrenheit) standing in the shade of only a tree trunk at zero.” The men in the lead beat down the snow with mauls so that it might hold the weight of those who followed. “Nothing was visible at times through the thick driving snow,” said McGehee. “For days in succession we would labor to beat a trail a few hundred yards in length, but the next day the storm would leave no trace of the previous day’s work.” Men suffered frostbite in their “noses, ears, faces, fingers, and feet.” In the evenings their fires sank down as the snow melted beneath them, creating holes where the men ate from their dwindling food stores; the only item of which they seemed to have brought an inexhaustible supply was coffee. At night, after the men had gone to sleep, starving mules ate the blankets off the backs of other mules, or wandered into camp and tried to eat the blankets off the men.

Having forgotten about finding a pass that was gradual enough for a railroad, John seemed even to forget about finding a pass suitable for men. He led the movement toward a final, bare summit ridge high above the tree line. If they could cross this ridge, he believed, they would leave the watershed of the Rio Grande and enter the watershed of the Colorado River, which would lead them on a mostly downhill path to the west and south. On their first try they were beaten back by a snowstorm. “Old Bill Williams,” said McGehee, “was nearly frozen; he dropped down upon his mule in a stupor and was nearly senseless when we got into camp.” The men lit their fires that night at the same place as the night before. On a second try they crested the ridge, descended the far slope to the first stand of timber, and gathered wood for their fires at an altitude of about twelve thousand feet. John looked back up their trail, which resembled the path of a defeated army: “pack saddles and packs, scattered articles of clothing, and dead mules strewed along.” When he studied the vista westward he saw nothing but snow and more mountains. There was no green grass visible down below, no temperate lower valley as there had been when they emerged from the Sierra Nevada in 1844. There was almost nothing to feed the animals, and no sign of game to feed the men. At last John acknowledged his situation: “It was impossible to advance, and to turn back was equally impracticable. We were overtaken by sudden and inevitable ruin.”

San Francisco Bay lay roughly a thousand miles to the west.

JESSIE’S SHIP, THE CRESCENT CITY, was carrying her into a world she had known only through books. The ship was bound through Caribbean waters to the coastline of Panama, which she had first learned about in 1842, when she translated the memoir of the Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz. His story had begun at the Spanish gold port of Nombre de Dios, on the Panamanian coast, as she recalled when that coast came into view. The pilot of Jessie’s ship maneuvered toward the port of Chagres, where it must have been possible by now to find the harbor entrance by watching out for the wrecks of other ships that had run aground. When the Crescent City safely dropped anchor, the passengers looked out over woodlands. A fort from Spanish times spread across a hilltop to the left, its stone walls gray and mossy in the heat. Nearby lay a town, which a passenger on the ship described as “two or three hundred huts made of bamboo poles and covered with the leaves of the palm.”

Smoke rose over the water, and a little steamboat came into focus beneath it. The boat pulled up alongside the Crescent City, taking on the first of several loads of passengers and mailbags. The boat, Jessie thought when her turn came to transfer over the side, was “as small as a craft could well be to hold an engine . . . It seemed like stepping down upon a toy.” With Jessie’s party and a few others on board it chugged up the tree-lined Chagres River, which led inland and partway across the isthmus. Soon the river became too shallow and rocky for the steamboat, forcing the passengers to transfer to smaller boats, mostly dugout canoes paddled by local crews. Swarms of Americans were making their way up the river that spring, a journey inland of only thirty miles or so that nevertheless took several days against the current. Sleeping in barns or on the bamboo floors of houses, crowds of men woke each morning and spread through the river valley like locusts, paying high prices for coffee and eggs, which they supplemented by hunting in the woods. “The scenery is delightful—the most beautiful I ever saw,” one traveler wrote home, describing how he and his companions shot birds that resembled wild turkeys, lizards on the riverbanks, and even a monkey, which “cried like a child” when hit. “The woods are alive with parrots, chattering away like so many demons.”

Jessie enjoyed a more comfortable journey, because people in Panama had instructions to care for her. They were American engineers, conducting surveys for a railroad across the isthmus to speed the way to California. An investor in the railroad, William Aspinwall, intended it to connect with his new steamship line, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which was starting service from Panama up the coast to California. Aspinwall had spent time in Washington obtaining a $199,000 contract to carry the US Mail to the west coast, and had become a friend of Senator Benton. Naturally the man with the federal contract was pleased to look after the influential senator’s daughter, “with all the sympathies of his kind nature,” as Jessie put it, and he made arrangements for “my comfort and security.” Rather than a dugout canoe, Jessie’s party boarded a whaleboat, larger and steadier on the water. Coming ashore each evening, she slept in an oversize tent prepared by the surveyors. US Army officers were part of the survey, and at each campsite she would find one or two waiting “to see that everything was right, and to have the pleasure of home talk with a lady.”

The Chagres was nevertheless a miserable river for travel. The whaleboat was repeatedly stuck on sandbars. On the last of these Jessie’s brother-in-law Richard Jacob, “being young and strong and a Kentuckian,” impatiently leaped out and helped to drag the boat into deeper water. “He was very triumphant,” Jessie said, until a short time afterward, “when suddenly his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell prostrate from sunstroke.” Jacob was treated by a doctor at Gorgona, the next town, who insisted he must flee this climate and recover in New York. Soon Jessie was even more alone.

While lingering at Gorgona—another collection of bamboo huts, surrounding a handful of stone houses—she began to notice something wrong. The town was supposed to be a way station for travelers, where they left the boats and climbed on mules for the next part of the journey, but people seemed to be stuck. “There were hundreds of people camped out on the hill-slopes,” said Jessie. They had yet to make it to Panama City on the Pacific coast—and there was no rush, because Panama City was crowded with travelers awaiting boats to California. The hillsides around Gorgona were, in effect, the back of a line that stretched more than twenty miles to the ocean. “There were many women, some with babies, among these; they were in a hot, unhealthy climate, and the uncertainty of everything was making them ill: loss of hope brings loss of strength: they were living on salt provisions brought from home with them, which were not fit for such a climate, and already many had died.”

Eventually the engineers arranged mules for Jessie’s party, and the ladies joined the line of other travelers that wound through a tropical forest and over a low chain of mountains. They followed a trail that, Jessie was told, had been used since Spanish times. Generations of travelers had worn a groove into the ground (“It was more trough than trail”), yet the path was still barely the width of one mule. They passed through a rock cut so narrow that men had to ride sidesaddle as Jessie did. Jessie was praised for her fortitude by one of the men from the railroad survey, though she felt that she was deceiving him: “The whole thing was so like a nightmare that one took it as a bad dream—in helpless silence.”

At the old walled city of Panama, cannons jutted out of slots in the tops of the walls, and the ocean glittered beyond. Centuries ago the Spanish authorities had built the city on a peninsula jutting into the Pacific; now, for the American travelers, that peninsula was a magnificent dead end. Pacific Mail steamers were supposed to depart regularly between Panama City and San Francisco Bay, but there was a gap in service. A steamship that had departed for California weeks ago had not returned on schedule; another ship that was expected to begin plying the route had yet to make an appearance at all. Any ships in the harbor that could be chartered had long since sailed away filled with would-be gold prospectors. Stranded Americans were crowding into hotels or camping.

Jessie went to the city square, which was dominated by an old Spanish cathedral, its two white bell towers separated by the ornate and curving stone facade. She located a particular house facing the square, knocked, and presented a letter of introduction that she had wisely obtained back in Washington; a Latin American diplomat had written it to his aunt in Panama City, and she took in Jessie and Lily, assigning them to a room with a balcony overlooking the square. Jessie was so charmed by the view that she wrote a poetic description—although, as with her husband’s reports, she submerged her own voice beneath that of someone else. Six-year-old Lily wanted to write her grandfather Senator Benton, so on April 27 Jessie took dictation of what Lily said, performing a tiny masterpiece of ghostwriting that preserved the cadence and imperfect grammar of a six-year-old while doubtless improving a few words.

From here I see the jail and the government house and the water carts and the little Indians flocking about. . . . I see horses coming along with water. I saw a plenty processions [Catholic funeral processions] and one the man that led it was dressed all in gold cloth that shined like the sun; we saw the prisoners marching with dirt on their shoulders and chains around their waists and one of the guard masters with a gun on his shoulder to make them march about.

The stranded Americans formed a temporary community, organizing a vigilance committee to guard against crime, as well as Protestant church services to burnish their souls, while also doing what they could to make money. Panama City “is apparently completely in possession of our countrymen,” said one. “There are American water-carriers, porters, boatmen, builders of canoes; there are auctions held hourly, when trunks, tents, camp stools, watches, preserved meats and even gold washers, are knocked down by the inevitable hammer.” Mailbags were arriving from New York, sealed and marked for delivery to San Francisco; realizing that many of the letters must be intended for them, the Americans elected another committee to open the bags and look. Newcomers from the East brought newspapers, which passed from hand to hand.

It is likely that in some of these newspapers, Jessie spied her own name. Papers across the nation had picked up the story of the bold travels of “Mrs. Fremont,” as she was called (Jessie was virtually never referred to by her given name), and all through that spring and summer, brief updates on the progress of the explorer’s wife were making the papers in New York and Washington, then spreading to places as distant as Worcester, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; and even Tahlequah, the new capital of the relocated Cherokee Nation, in Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. But any pleasure she may have felt at her growing fame was destroyed when she began to learn the fate of her husband. A headline in the New York Herald read:

DREADFUL INTELLIGENCE FROM THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS—

Horrible Sufferings of Colonel Fremont’s Party.

She clutched the paper and sat on the sofa and read. The paper, of course, took her back in time, because information traveled so slowly. She was reading of events from December and January—long before she had even departed New York.

WHEN JOHN REACHED the western side of the mountain in December 1848, he instructed his men to remain a few days in camp. They ate their macaroni and cooked the meat of dead mules. John drank coffee and developed a plan of retreat. First the men would lug their baggage and equipment back over the windy summit they had just crossed, returning to the eastern side of the mountain so they could descend to one of the streams that fed the Rio Grande. That river would be their highway to safety, although once the men began to move they found the labor brutal and demoralizing. “A few days were sufficient to destroy our fine band of mules,” John said. “They generally kept huddled together, and as they froze, one would be seen to tumble down, and the snow would cover him. . . . The courage of the men failed fast: In fact, I have never seen men so discouraged by misfortune.” A handful refused to quit, above all Alex Godey, who had gone with John to California and then to the court-martial and was with him still. By Christmas Day they were on a tributary of the Rio Grande, and John sent four volunteers ahead in search of aid. He assigned Old Bill Williams to guide the group, a bizarre choice given his work so far, but these were desperate times. The remaining twenty-nine men, including John, would slowly shift their baggage down to the main channel of the Rio Grande and wait there, tending fires to stay alive and rationing the food that remained. John had a simpler option available: abandoning most of the equipment and marching everyone to safety while they still had some food left. But leaving the equipment would mean ending the expedition; he thought he could resume on a new route once the fresh supplies came up.

At quiet moments in a tent or wrapped in a blanket near a fire, John reached into a bag and fished out a set of books: William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. He had borrowed them from Senator Benton’s library in Washington, dense and demanding volumes commonly read by aspiring lawyers. The Illinois lawmaker Abraham Lincoln had read them twice and later kept them in his cluttered law office; now John was reading them in his shelter in the ever-deepening snow. He was thinking of a career mixing law and politics, still focused on his California future amid the increasing pain of hunger and cold.

One day a man named Proue vanished from camp. “In a sunshiny day,” John said, “and having with him the means to make a fire, he threw his blankets down in the trail and lay there till he froze to death.” Now they were twenty-eight by the riverside in the snow, and some were increasingly bitter toward their commander. The artist Richard H. Kern entered in his journal that Proue had really died “by Frémont’s harsh treatment,” though he didn’t specify what the treatment was. Given the way that John occasionally humiliated men who did not share his single-minded focus on his mission, it is plausible that he treated Proue poorly, although that was not the true cause of death. The cause of death was John’s ordering his men into the San Juan Mountains in winter.

Around January 8 John concluded that they could wait no longer for relief. He formed a second party to go for help and led it himself, bringing along four others: the mapmaker Preuss, his best man Godey, Godey’s nephew, and Jackson Saunders, a black man who had been a servant in the Benton household and now served as John’s orderly. The men he left behind could be forgiven for thinking, as the small party walked out of camp, that John was taking only the men he knew best and cared for the most, but John surely thought that these were the men he could rely upon the most. Their journey was bleak. For the first four days walking downriver in the snow, the little party did not spy another person. They built a fire each evening and ate the last of their meat and macaroni. After that they had nothing but strong coffee, heavily sugared, and this alone sustained them. On the fifth day they surprised an Indian man, a member of the Utah Nation who was walking on the ice of the river. The man agreed to lead them to his house some miles away, and when they reached it the following morning they sat down to eat what Charles Preuss called “a magnificent breakfast of corn mush and venison, together with our coffee.”

It was the latest of many times that John could say he owed his life to a native; however, the man’s help was not yet enough. They needed animals and food to rescue the men left behind. In exchange for a rifle and John’s own two blankets, the Utah man agreed to guide them onward, bringing four “wretchedly poor” horses that were too weak to carry the men but that could at least carry their few supplies. They had not walked far before they discovered three men huddled around a fire. They seemed like strangers at first. “We had to open our eyes to recognize them,” said Preuss, “so skinny and hollow-eyed did they look.” They were the remnants of the party John had sent for relief. Exhausted and starving, they seemed to have “entirely lost sight of the purpose of their expedition,” as Preuss put it, and they focused only on finding food while walking short distances each day. They had boiled and eaten straps, gun cases, and anything else made of leather. One had died. When discovered, the survivors were gnawing the meat of a deer they had killed, having spent twenty-two days walking the distance that John’s party had just covered in six. Gathering up the three men, John’s group staggered into a little town. When they learned that the settlement could not offer enough animals to relieve the men still stranded upriver, heroic Alex Godey rode downriver to the next town and returned with a string of mules.

Some of his men would later view John as their savior. Others took a darker view. He had led them on an absurdly dangerous mission, persisted long after its hopelessness was apparent, and at the end walked away from the bulk of his men. That John had led them all on a delusional expedition was undeniable; that he had disregarded their welfare in the interest of his goals was obvious. That he had abandoned them was somewhat unfair. John had at last moved to find help, succeeding where a previous party of experienced men had failed, and after he was safe he traded away his own gun and blankets to find help for the others. But it was accurate that John did not personally return to relieve his men, as a commander might have been expected to do. Eager to continue to California—he seemed never to consider turning back east—he focused on reorganizing his expedition and left the rescue to Godey, who enlisted a handful of generous Mexican residents and soldiers from a nearby army post and worked upriver to discover the remaining men of the expedition in small groups—walking, huddled by fires, or dead.

From these men Godey learned what had happened. After waiting a few days in camp, the twenty-three men had started for help on foot. They had walked only two miles when an Indian called Manuel returned to camp to die. After ten miles another man, named Wise, threw away his gun and blankets, staggered forward, and died; his comrades buried him in the snow. Two days later another man raved all night about things he imagined eating, and in the morning wandered off and disappeared. Later that day two more men said they could walk no farther, and their comrades built them a fire before leaving them. That evening, one of the remaining eighteen men killed a deer, which sustained the ravenous group for another day. A day or two afterward, Vincent Haler, the man in charge, said the party should break into smaller groups. Haler said he was determined to keep walking until he was rescued or died, while another group was willing to build a fire, wait for help, and if necessary eat those who perished first. The men who were left in the trailing group described the separation differently—that the stronger men were abandoning the weaker. The last days of the flight would be clouded by conflicting accounts, rumors, and shame, but some of the men said their comrades ate the bodies of the dead.

Haler staggered onward at the head of a party of eight, though two of his men gave up in the days that followed and had to be left beside fires. At last two Indian youths in Haler’s party walked ahead of the others, and it was these Indians who made it possible to save all who remained alive. Haler heard gunshots in the distance—a signal that the two youths had found the approaching relief party—and came forward to find Godey. Upon seeing each other, the men cried. After a meal, Haler’s men and the relief party turned upstream together, gathering the wreckage of men huddled by firesides. In all, eleven had died, one-third of those who had ridden into the mountains at the end of November. One of the survivors, Andrew Cathcart, described himself as “a perfect skeleton, snowblind, frostbitten and hardly able to stand.”

John decided that the survivors should continue down the Rio Grande to recover at Taos, New Mexico. He led the way there, riding by the end of January into the old Spanish colonial settlement overlooked by snowcapped mountains. Until recently the town had been part of Mexico; now there was a United States Army post, where the commander ordered rations distributed to John’s men. Near the army post John found the home of his friend Kit Carson: a low adobe structure where Carson lived with his third wife, who was Mexican, as well as several children. It was here, with a family, that John rested and began to compose a letter to his wife.

Taos, New Mexico, January 27, 1849

I write you from the house of our good friend Carson. This morning a cup of chocolate was brought to me while yet in bed. To an overworn, overworked, much-fatigued and starving traveller these little luxuries of the world offer an interest which in your comfortable home it is not possible for you to conceive.

He told her all that had gone wrong, though he blamed it all on Old Bill Williams. He said he still expected to proceed west, regrouping the men who were willing and able to continue, and starting for California by a southerly route, along old Spanish trails.

. . . How rapid are the changes of life! A few days ago, and I was struggling through the snow. . . . Now I am seated by a comfortable fire, alone—pursuing my own thoughts—writing to you in the certainty of reaching you—a French volume of Balzac on the table—a colored print of the landing of Columbus on the wall before me—listening in safety to the raging storm without!

He insisted the mental stress of his experience had no effect on him. “You will wish to know what effect the scenes I have passed through have had upon me. In person, none.” He then said the same thing a second time. “The destruction of my party, and the loss of friends, are causes of grief; but I have not been injured in body or mind. Both have been strained, and severely taxed, but neither hurt.” As if trying to persuade himself, he then phrased it a third time: he had seen “strong frames, strong minds, and stout hearts” give way in others, “but, as heretofore, I have come out unhurt.” He added that “the remembrance of friends” had sustained him.

Over the next few days he reorganized as quickly as possible to continue westward, preparing to leave town so swiftly that some of the men who dropped out of the expedition, such as Richard H. Kern, felt abandoned. They complained that they were left to buy their own meals while John hoarded all the rations he’d been given by the army. That John was determined to reach the Pacific there could be no doubt; his search for a rail route had failed, but he meant to meet Jessie at their new home.

He had marked his thirty-sixth birthday on January 21, soon after escaping the snow.

JESSIE READ HIS LETTER three months later, in May, thirty-six hundred miles away in Panama City. Near the end she saw this sentence: “It will not be necessary to tell you anything further. It has been sufficient pain for you to read what I have already written.” That was wrong. Jessie wanted to know one more thing that she had no chance of knowing: What had become of her husband in the months since his letter? What were his odds of survival when he set out across the southwestern mountains and deserts? As the news of John’s predicament spread among the other travelers stranded in Panama City, “friends and strangers both rose to protest against my going any farther.” Even if Jessie and Lily made it safely to California, it was reasonable to fear that John would not be there to meet them. Jessie spent an entire day sitting on a sofa in her host’s house by the square, “my forehead purple from congestion of the brain, and entirely unable to understand anything said to me.” To combat her “brain-fever,” Jessie’s hosts summoned a physician, who proposed that she raise blisters on her skin. She rubbed a substance called croton oil on her chest, believing that the blisters it caused would pull impurities from her body.

After a few days she felt well enough to walk out to the ramparts of the old walled city. Stranded Americans strolled atop the walls during the cool hour before sunset. “They were an eager, animated set of people when first there, but the failure of the steamers to arrive had told upon every one. They felt, like shipwrecked people, that there was no escape.” While many, like Jessie, were living in hotels or houses in town, others were living in tents just outside the city walls; Jessie would have seen their camps from her perch on the ramparts. One of the men in the tents was Collis P. Huntington, the New York hardware store owner, who had decided against a hotel so he could save money and camp near his supply of guns, socks, and other goods. Huntington, at least, was thriving: he was already starting his career as a gold rush trader, ranging into the Panamanian countryside for goods to sell to his fellow emigrants. But others ran short of money, caught tropical fevers, or buried members of their parties who fell ill and died. It was the frustrated, sick, and idle who caught Jessie’s eye as she sat on the barrel of an old brass cannon. “The sight of this discouraged set of people almost decided me to go home,” she said, but she persisted until the evening the travelers heard a cannon shot in the harbor. It was the signal of a ship arriving. A second cannon blast announced that another steamer had arrived almost simultaneously. One ship, called the Oregon, had returned from San Francisco Bay, and the other had arrived to work the San Francisco route for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, having come from New York all the way around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. The moonlit square in front of Jessie’s house filled with disembarking passengers. “Of course I was up, dressed, and looking at all this busy throng,” Jessie said, when she heard a man call out her name: “Mrs. Frémont here! Heavens, what a crib for a lady!”

The man in the crowd was Jessie’s friend Edward F. Beale, the naval officer who had brought the news of California gold to Washington. She drew the bearded man away from the raucous mass so they could talk; these two young people, both in their midtwenties, were equally astonished to discover each other. After delivering the news of the gold strike, Beale had accepted an assignment to return to California with dispatches in the fall of 1848; Jessie knew this much, and might reasonably have expected to encounter him after her arrival at San Francisco Bay. But now, after less than two weeks in California, he was rushing back eastward, completing his third round trip from one coast to the other in three years. He had reached Panama City on the Oregon. Only in an excited whisper would he have said what he was carrying: a gold nugget that weighed eight pounds, which he expected to show off to investors in New York. He had grown from a mere messenger to an active promoter of California’s riches. He was carrying a watch newly encased in gold. Several gold nuggets dangled from the watch chain. Many men were mining for gold, Beale said, and this was the reason that the steamship Oregon had been delayed in returning from California to Panama; its crew had abandoned it for the goldfields, and the steamer rode eerily at anchor in San Francisco for weeks until the captain could round up another crew. Almost every ship that reached San Francisco suffered the same fate.

Beale was in an enormous hurry—he was determined to cross the isthmus in hours, rather than weeks, to catch the next ship on the Caribbean side—but he lingered long enough to hear Jessie’s story. When he learned of John’s misfortunes, Jessie recounted, “I was not advised but ordered to go home.” Beale insisted that she gather up Lily and her baggage; he would escort her. Just as firmly, Jessie refused. She bade Beale good-bye, then made sure she had tickets for herself and for Lily on one of the steamers bound for California. After Beale departed, she paid an emotional price for her decision, suffering the pangs of rethinking a choice made in haste. The book about the Spanish conquistador returned to her mind. “In the chronicle of the conquest of Mexico there is one night of disaster and massacres which Bernal Díaz records under the head tristissima noche [the saddest night]; I had had many sad nights since leaving home, but after my old friend left I think I could name this my saddest.”

The Pacific Mail steamship Panama raised anchor carrying more than three hundred passengers on a vessel built with berths for something closer to two hundred. Extra passengers spread blankets on deck around the funnel, beneath the ship’s three masts, and between the two huge side paddle wheels that propelled the ship. A newspaper correspondent who was among the passengers wrote that the “throng” of people with their “motley” manners and appearances were “full of picturesque interest . . . but to the comfort loving traveller, who had to hob nob with and elbow this strange crowd of varied hue, within the contracted limits of a steamboat . . . it was any thing but agreeable.” Pacific Mail ships had a design flaw that caused them to roll side to side so sharply that the paddle wheel on the high side might rise six feet out of the water, spinning uselessly in the air. Yet for all the rocking of the deck, the “equatorial heat,” and the “bilge water,” the newspaper correspondent said “it ill became us to grow querulous, when the ladies bore their part of suffering and discomfort so heroically. Mrs. Fremont, who was on her way to join her husband, showed a power of endurance that was a fit counterpart to the heroism of that adventurer.” The New York Evening Post eventually printed this description.

The few women were allowed some separation from the mass of men; Jessie received one of the staterooms belowdecks. But within a few days at sea, she developed a cough so severe that a man in the next cabin heard her through the wall. Blaming the dank air inside the coal-fired ship, he led her up on deck and helped arrange for her to spend most of her time on the quarterdeck, the raised area toward the back of the ship that was typically occupied by its officers. The crew draped an oversize flag over a boom to form a tent, which soon became a refuge for all the females on board. Jessie, Lily, and the others had a view of other passengers as they kept up the patterns of the temporary society they had created during their delay on land. A pastor stood on the rocking deck and continued the Protestant Sunday services that had begun in Panama City; Jessie would have caught his voice when it carried over the sound of the steam engine and the creaking of the masts in the wind.

By now she had run through all of her reading material and all that she could borrow (“Everybody had a Shakespeare and not much besides”), so she had time to study the faces of the men on the main deck below. Some were familiar. There was a sitting congressman from Georgia on board, a man she might have spied around Washington and whose presence was somewhat mysterious. (“No one knows what business has brought him here,” the New York Post correspondent said.) A former congressman from Mississippi was also on board, along with several other politicians, their business equally undefined. There were at least two military officers in the crowd, one from the army and one from the navy. The navy lieutenant proved to be useful. Late one night Jessie woke to a commotion of voices and realized in the darkness that some crisis was unfolding. Beyond the voices she heard “a low, busy, grating, whispering sound of waters—and [on the otherwise dark sea] I could see long broken lines of foamy white, which even my inexperience told me were unusual.” These were breakers—waves crashing over a shoal, on which the steamer was about to run aground. The captain did not wake when men pounded on his door, so the navy man, Cadwalader Ringgold, took charge and directed the steamer away from danger.

Jessie rose the next morning and stood in the pure ocean air. She passed her birthday on the Pacific on May 31, 1849, with the mountains of California somewhere off to her right as the ship worked its way up the coast. She was twenty-five years old, starting a new life, shielded from the sun and rain by the colors of the flag.