Chapter Fourteen, Imperfect Union

Chapter Fourteen

ALL THE STUPID LAURELS THAT EVER GREW

Celebrities, 1851–1854

San Francisco, London, Paris, New York, and Washington

In the summer of 1851 Jessie recorded that rarest of events: both Frémonts together, at home and at rest. They were in their new lodgings in San Francisco, and she was composing one of her letters to Francis P. Blair in Washington. She was sitting with her husband by the fireside, she told Blair, “even in this month of August, for as our season of fogs is not over we need bright fires morning & night.” John, just returned from a journey to Los Angeles, “sits nearest the fire being the thinnest & most cold blooded of the two.” They were drinking “some real China tea.” They were watching “little Charley in his basket.” Jessie called across to John: Did he have anything he would like to say to Francis P. Blair? John answered and she wrote: “I have asked Mr. Frémont for a message and he says I must tell you to prepare yourself for a Whig Senator in his place, politics being too costly an amusement in this country just now.”

California was Whig now, Jessie said. The elections within a few months would produce not only a Whig senator but also a Whig governor. But the Frémonts didn’t mind—the likely Whig governor was, like the Frémonts, a big landowner with property on the edge of Indian country, which meant that he would do something to remove the threat of Indians. “You will see how fortunate it is for our interests that he should be in power.” This was a striking political forecast, both because of its calculated self-interest and because it was wrong. Democrats were not about to lose power. Within a few months they captured both the governorship and the Senate seat, and neither went to John, who had withdrawn from the arena. He continued riding across the state in pursuit of business schemes, and by late 1851, not even California’s vastness gave him room enough to move. He presented steamer tickets to Jessie, who was delighted to be told it was time for their first real vacation: an extended visit to Paris, taking time away at last from duty and ambition.

On closer examination, there was more to the journey than a vacation. John was still seeking British investors to expand his operations on Las Mariposas. He decided to visit London on the way to Paris, because the competing stories told by his agents were beginning to undermine his credibility there. His relations remained strained with the agent Hoffman, such an obsessive letter-writer that neither of the Frémonts had the patience to read all that he wrote them. (Hoffman himself was running out of patience while waiting for John’s tardy responses, and finished one note with the line, “The mail has this moment arrived—not a line from you—the world here is astounded.”) Then came a further complication, which involved Thomas Hart Benton. John’s father-in-law had never seen Las Mariposas, but believed the land grant was becoming a danger and distraction to his son-in-law. Benton arranged for the Mariposas to be sold for one million dollars, conditional on John’s approval. The move revealed the arrogance, and the foresight, for which the former senator was famous: in a letter to Hoffman, the London agent, Benton explained that John was “not adapted to such business and it interferes with his attention to other business to which he is adapted.” John wavered, first seeming to accept the sale, then revoking it. This angered Benton, opening a breach with his sponsor. Worse, Benton had been right. John was not “adapted” to business, didn’t know what he was doing, and would have better served himself to sell. Allegations of scandal were beginning to surround the land grant: a newspaper in the new settlement of Stockton, California, alleged that “extensive frauds were about to be perpetrated in Europe” by John’s agents. John filed a libel suit against the paper, but the claim still reached newspapers in New York within weeks, which guaranteed that it would also be read in London.

On February 1, 1852, the Frémonts boarded a steamer for Panama. The railroad across the isthmus was not finished, so it remained a rough passage; nine-month-old Charlie was wrapped in a tablecloth and slung onto the back of a porter. A second ship took them to New York; then, for the first time in their lives, they started across the Atlantic, on a ship called the Africa, with the family taking over the whole ladies’ salon since Jessie was the only woman traveling. The transatlantic crossing that had taken their ancestors months to complete now took ten days or less, and in late March they arrived in the capital of the British empire, 2.5 million people spread along the Thames, the closest thing to a capital of the world. As always, the papers took note of the Frémonts; a correspondent in London, writing for a newly established American sheet called the New York Times, said John had arrived just in time to rescue his prospects. It was “a great relief” to London investors that “the Colonel was coming in person to clear up all doubts, and remove the ugly suspicions.” The couple checked into a suite at the Clarendon Hotel, with “chintz and flowers and wood fire,” an address that “becomes a millionaire fresh from California.”

It was uncertain how rich John really was, but he surely had fame—even in London, where he recently had been the star of a smash-hit documentary. From April 1850 to late 1851, a lecturer in London had shown an art display on the explorations of John Charles Frémont. His lecture featured eighty scenes of John’s adventures that were painted on a single enormous canvas, scrolled with hand cranks as awestruck audiences sat for two hours watching the procession of pictures. During nineteen months of performances in a packed lecture hall, some 350,000 people saw the story of the dashing explorer, which was advertised both in general newspapers and in women’s publications. John’s agent in London was bothered to discover that the lecturer had obtained his information from Senator Benton and from John himself; the self-promotion seemed gauche. But fame could be like gold. “The leaders of fashion are ever on the watch for every fresh celebrity,” said the Times correspondent. Mrs. Frémont was welcomed at the regular reception of the Duchess of Derby, the wife of the prime minister, and shook the hand of the aged Duke of Wellington. Both Frémonts were taken to dinner with the leader of the Barings banking house, and welcomed at the home of the head of the Royal Geographical Society. Jessie, dressed in a gown of pink satin with blond lace, attended a reception where she kissed the hand of Queen Victoria.

Fame also attracted less flattering forms of attention. On April 7, the Frémonts were stepping out of the Clarendon on their way to another elegant dinner when four policemen appeared. As Jessie watched, the policemen arrested John and led him into custody. He had been seized, the policemen said, for nonpayment of a debt. It was the $19,500 he had borrowed from a California merchant during the war, now alleged to have grown to $50,000 with interest—the money that the merchant had demanded from the Senate the year before. When Congress did not act, the merchant sold the debt to British investors, who saw their chance to collect when the newspapers announced John’s presence in London.

The policemen took John to a “sponging house,” a holding facility for debtors, which he described as the “ante-room to the jail.” He spent the night there. Jessie spent the night racing through London in search of bail money, no doubt still wearing the clothes in which she had planned to go out that evening. One of her visits was to David Hoffman, John’s long-suffering agent, with whom John had grown so disappointed that he had suspended their business. She found his home and demanded to see him after nine o’clock at night. Hoffman—an American from Maryland, a onetime law professor turned land promoter—was in his late sixties and suffering from a cold. Summoned from his bed by a servant, he stumbled out of his bedroom to meet Jessie in the parlor of his home. She was accompanied by one of John’s business associates, but she did all the talking.

“My husband is arrested,” Jessie said.

“I am grieved to hear it,” Hoffman replied.

She held up one of Hoffman’s letters. “You say [here that] you are still loyal to Colonel Frémont.”

“I certainly am,” Hoffman said, and then asked if Jessie had read the remainder of the letter, which warned John that his contradictory acts were endangering his hold on the Mariposas.

“Oh no!” Jessie said. “It’s too long.”

Moving on, Hoffman gestured toward a chair. “Do be seated.”

“No. I want no words. I have no time for that. I want four thousand pounds and I must have it.”

Hoffman said he didn’t keep that kind of money at his house. “I have but six hundred pounds.”

“Oh don’t tell me that,” Jessie said. “I know all about it. I know you have money there. I was told so. I must have it.”

Jessie believed that Hoffman had collected funds from Mariposa investors. Hoffman answered that it would be improper to turn over investors’ money if he had any, and John owed him money for expenses. “Colonel Fremont is my debtor—not my creditor.”

“Do you know who I am?” Jessie took out a pen and wrote her name at full length, so that Hoffman would see both Benton and Frémont. The agent replied that he did not doubt who she was, but that he did not have bail money.

“You are a great rascal,” Jessie said as she left. “My father says so.”

Hoffman, the obsessive letter-writer, afterward set down all the dialogue he could remember, preserving a picture of Mrs. Frémont in furious defense of her husband. He sent the dialogue in a letter to Mr. Frémont, apparently to show his own innocence as well as to inform John of Jessie’s imperious behavior. It was a long letter, and it was not clear if John ever read it.

Jessie reached out to other associates of her husband, and John spent only one night in custody before an American merchant in London arranged his bail. The great explorer finished his business meetings as though nothing was wrong, and when news reached the United States the press took his side. “The arrest, from all accounts, was outrageous,” a New York paper said.

The Frémonts moved on to Paris as planned. But from Paris, John wrote Thomas Hart Benton to say, “I have reason to believe that many others of these liabilities will be urged upon me.” He thought the various notes he had signed during the war could total more than one million dollars with interest, and none had been reimbursed by Congress. “If I was [as] great a patriot as you,” John said, “I would go to jail and stay there until Congress paid these demands . . . but my patriotism has been oozing out for the last five years.” He asked if Benton could help find him a job with an American embassy while in Europe, so that he would be protected from arrest by diplomatic immunity. The job would also “help pay expenses.” He was apparently spending enough of his fortune to worry about the cost of travel.

WHILE THE FRÉMONTS WERE AWAY, first on the Pacific coast and then in Europe, a literary sensation was sweeping the country. It began on June 5, 1851, when a story took up more than half the front page of a Washington, D.C., newspaper called the National Era. It was the beginning of a novel. The opening chapter featured a slave trader, “a short, thick-set man,” with “a gaudy vest of many colors” and a “swaggering air of pretension,” bargaining with a Kentucky plantation owner to purchase a four-year-old slave. The headline of the story read:

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN:

OR,

LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY.

By Mrs. H.B. Stowe.

The story was serialized in the paper throughout the remainder of the year. Readers followed, week after week, as the slave child escaped with her mother, while the title character, Uncle Tom, was sold down the river to New Orleans, sold again to a sadistic master in the Red River Valley, and beaten to death.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was a member of a prominent New England family. Her father, Lyman Beecher, had been a Calvinist minister who in the 1830s moved from Boston to Cincinnati hoping to win the West for Christ. Harriet’s older sister Catharine Beecher was a girls’ educator who once had secretly coordinated a women’s campaign in defense of Cherokee Indians. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was an enormously popular Brooklyn preacher who had grown fiercely critical of slavery. Now Harriet made her own contribution to public affairs. Her newspaper serial was not unique; so many slave narratives, both factual and fictional, had been published over the previous two decades that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s story seemed to have been loosely based on earlier works. But coming as it did after the Compromise of 1850, her novel reached a public that was ready for the subject. The serialized “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published in book form on March 20, 1852. The first edition sold out in four days, and the publisher had such trouble keeping up with demand that the reviewer for Frederick Douglass’s newspaper in Rochester was compelled to write an article based on the earlier newspaper version. “The [book] has not yet reached us,” the reviewer confessed, but given its power, “we are not surprised at the delay.” The reviewer predicted that Uncle Tom’s Cabin would “rise up a host of enemies against the fearful system of slavery.” It was the first of many articles Douglass would publish about the book.

He had changed his paper’s name from the North Star to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, a shift that reflected his increasing prominence. He saw in Uncle Tom’s Cabin another opportunity to engage Northern public opinion, and when he received a letter from the author saying she would like to meet him, he traveled from Rochester to Andover, Massachusetts, for the conversation. Stowe asked his advice “as to what can be done for the free colored people of the country,” and he suggested a focus on education (“I am for no fancied or artificial elevation, but only ask fair play”). Nothing concrete came of their meeting, but it reflected Douglass’s strategic goal: engaging white Northern allies in the fight against slavery. Not every antislavery activist felt the same way; in 1852, one of Douglass’s former colleagues on his newspaper, the black activist Martin Delany, published his own book that called on African Americans to rely on themselves and ultimately to leave the United States—an emigration like the “Exodus of the Jews from Egypt,” to colonize some corner of the Americas. But Douglass saw the answer within the United States, as he wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe: “The truth is, dear madam, we are here, and we are likely to remain.” This meant they must gain relief through the democratic process.

When the Democrats and Whigs nominated their presidential candidates in the election year of 1852, Douglass was unimpressed. He viewed the Democrat, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, as a hopeless captive of Southern interests. The Whig, General Winfield Scott, a hero of the recent war, kept some distance from the party’s Southern wing, which was “an encouraging sign of the times.” But Scott was still no abolitionist. Douglass believed the Whig Party’s “destruction is necessary to the abolition of slavery.” If the Whigs fell apart, it would free more genuine antislavery Whigs such as William Henry Seward to form the “new and powerful Northern party” that Douglass had spoken of for some time.

That summer Douglass attended the national convention of an antislavery party. They were known as the Free Democracy, and their three hundred delegates met in the Pittsburgh Masonic Hall, where Douglass, among other speakers, held the floor while a committee offstage drafted a platform. Their slogan was “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men!” They supported the free distribution of public lands to “landless settlers.” They promised immigrants a “cordial welcome” and an easy path to citizenship. They demanded the abolition of slavery, “a sin against God, and a crime against man, which no human enactment or usage can make right.” They nominated a presidential candidate, John P. Hale, who had been elected to the Senate from New Hampshire by the very sort of Northern coalition that Douglass was hoping for—a coalition of antislavery Whigs and Democrats combined with hard-core abolitionists. Nobody thought Hale could win the presidency, but it was possible for Douglass to look out over the Pittsburgh convention and imagine what could someday be.

IN THIS POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL FERMENT, the Frémonts played no part. Despite their antislavery views, neither was deeply engaged in the antislavery movement. Both seemed unready to return to politics. (Shortly before leaving for Europe, Jessie had written her friend Lizzie Lee, “I should dissolve the Union sooner than let Mr. Frémont go away a year to Congress.”) By the time of the 1852 conventions, they were settled in Paris at number 61 Champs-Élysées, the grandest boulevard in the city. The Arc de Triomphe was visible a few blocks down the boulevard in one direction; in the other lay the Tuileries Garden. They were renting one of the homes of an English nobleman, Thomas Cochrane, the Earl of Dundonald. Now their journey became more like the promised vacation; French-speaking Jessie was introduced to high society and observed the changing urban landscape. The local prefect, Baron Haussmann, was cutting new boulevards through crowded ancient quarters, and she disapproved of the “frenzy for building and speculating in city property.” The closest the Frémonts came to trouble was when Lord Dundonald wrote to ask that they be better about keeping the gate closed against burglars. (“Give instructions to the porter and his wife to attend to the only duty they have to perform.”)

In Paris they received news of the 1852 elections, which were largely good for them. Pierce, the Democrat, won in a landslide, and Thomas Hart Benton won too. After losing his Senate seat in 1851, Jessie’s father had run for the House from St. Louis, and the voters returned him to Washington, back to his home on C Street and the green-domed Capitol, where he remained a man to reckon with, still with unmatched knowledge of the government and the leader of a faction of Missouri Democrats called “the Benton Democracy.” News also arrived that Congress would pay the creditors who’d had John arrested in London, thanks to the intervention of his former Senate colleague William M. Gwin. John wrote Gwin a letter of thanks, and added a complaint: a federal land commission had not confirmed his title to Las Mariposas, which still frustrated his drive for European investment. His anxiety was evident: “My counsel promised me the ratification by several mails back, but we have been disappointed & have not heard a word by the last several mails.” European money was increasingly drawn away from chaotic California and toward a gold strike in Australia. At the end of 1852 the land commission confirmed John’s title, but he still faced an appeal of the decision as well as European investors’ well-earned distrust of the whole project.

John’s feet grew twitchy again. In early 1853, the new president appointed as secretary of war his fellow Democrat Jefferson Davis, who organized three expeditions to explore the best possible routes for a transcontinental railroad to California. Davis gave the command of each expedition to a serving military officer, bypassing John C. Frémont, but John would not be deterred, resolving to finance his own expedition for what he said was the public good. He intended to find a route along the same line of travel that had led to his disaster in the expedition of 1848 to 1849. “Above every other consideration,” he explained to a scientific journal that took an interest in his journey, “I have a natural desire to do something in the finishing up of a great work in which I had been so long engaged.” He intended to depart from Missouri in the fall of 1853, traveling due west once again near the 38th parallel, venturing into the same mountains in the same season as before.

The family returned to New York on a steamer called the Asia, arriving just after midnight on June 16 in a country that was celebrating its prosperity. Workers in Manhattan were completing an enormous building of glass and iron, New York’s Crystal Palace—a vast octagon, topped by a dome, with walls and roof entirely of glass plates on an iron frame. Built at Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street at the northern edge of the city, the see-through building was finished just in time to hold the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. Thousands paid the fifty-cent admission or purchased ten-dollar season tickets to study sculpture, agricultural products, and industrial machinery from Europe, the Ottoman empire, and Mexico. A writer for the New York Herald said the hundreds of products from the United States were “impossible to mistake” for those from any other country because of their “utilitarian characteristics,” and this was true; some of the most significant American items were familiar from their increasing use in everyday life. There were steam engines. There was railroad track. Railway cars and wheels made of steel. Advanced rifles and pistols. Daguerreotype cameras. Gas meters, gas lights, and gas burners. There was an exhibit of “Morse’s patent electric telegraph apparatus in operation,” which was now such a common feature that the telegraph set in the Crystal Palace was connected to the network of wires stretching as far west as New Orleans and St. Louis; the Crystal Palace was just another telegraph office. There was a “printing telegraph,” which spat out characters on paper tape. Americans saw the display as further evidence of the miracle of their country, and a writer for the New York Times observed that several European powers were at war, “while we, thanks be to the Providence that has so favored us, [are dedicating the Crystal Palace as] the divinest temple to Peace that ever shadowed American soil.”

There were nonetheless hints of history moving in a less placid direction. When John woke in New York on August 22, that day’s Herald offered reactions from Latin America to a proposal that the United States should purchase Cuba from Spain. Southerners wanted the island for slavery. An inside page of the same paper contained the headline IS THE WHIG PARTY DEAD? There was also a revealing item in the column called “Theatrical Intelligence”: a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “still attractive at the National. How much longer it will run we could not say, as the houses now are as full as ever.”

If John picked up the Herald that day in 1853, he left no record of it. He was absorbed with preparations for what he viewed as his own contribution to history. Preparing for his expedition, he went through the crowded streets in search of a photographer. For his 1842 journey he had bought a camera in New York, but his images never came out; now he wanted a professional. At a photo studio on Broadway he met Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who at thirty-eight was two years younger than John, with carefully coiffed hair and a fringe of beard along the bottom of his jaw. He was a son of immigrants, a Portuguese-American Jew. Like John, Carvalho had grown up in Charleston, where his father played a role in founding the first Reform Jewish synagogue in the United States. Their lives had since diverged, as Carvalho became a denizen of eastern cities with no wilderness experience. But John was unlikely to find an experienced outdoor photographer and offered Carvalho a job. “A half hour previously,” Carvalho said, “if anybody had suggested to me, the probability of my undertaking an overland journey to California . . . I should have replied there were no inducements sufficiently powerful to have tempted me.” Yet Carvalho was unable to refuse the famed explorer. “I impulsively, without even a consultation with my family, passed my word to join [the] expedition . . . with the full expectation of being exposed to the inclemencies of arctic winter. I know of no other man to whom I would have entrusted my life, under similar circumstances.” He consulted other photographers about how to make his daguerreotype camera function; the chemical processes worked best around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and Carvalho had been warned to expect temperatures ranging “from freezing point to thirty degrees below zero.” He started for the West still uncertain if the experiment would work.

JOHN’S MEN GATHERED THAT FALL at the regular point of departure on the western border of Missouri. The familiar plain was changing. The region west of Missouri was becoming known as Nebraska, although Congress had not formally recognized it as a territory. The Indians of the Wyandot Nation, forced to relocate from Ohio some years earlier, were building towns by the mouth of the Kansas River; they commonly dressed like white people, attended a Methodist church, had joined a Masonic lodge, and governed themselves with written laws. They were leading the movement to organize Nebraska Territory, electing one of their own as a provisional governor. In the fall of 1853 they were preparing to send a delegate to Congress to make their case for recognition, and politicians from neighboring Missouri had taken an interest. One visiting politico was a representative of Thomas Hart Benton, who favored a Nebraska free of slavery; all the Nebraska land lay north of the historic Missouri Compromise line dividing free and slave territory. Benton’s representative was opposed by men linked with Senator David Atchison, his proslavery archrival, who claimed that Benton was plotting to create a new state that would make him a senator. They were like rival colonial powers, the proslavery and antislavery Missourians, making their first moves to capture the land beyond the state’s border.

Refusing to be distracted by this political tension, John’s expedition made its final preparations. Now that John was financing the expedition, he planned to travel with a smaller party than in the past. That party would also be easier to feed when supplies grew scarce in the snow. Twelve men—nine white Americans, one American of mixed race, and two Mexicans—formed the bulk of the group. He made arrangements for ten Delaware hunters to meet them well out on the prairie, where he would pay the Indians two dollars per day. The roster was mainly notable for who was absent: there was no Carson, no Godey, no Owens. No Preuss, no Kern, nor the voyageurs he knew best, nor the Delaware leader Sagundai, nor Jacob Dodson. Although at least one of the men had traveled previously with John, the heroes and stalwarts of his past expeditions were gone. Some were dead, some worn out. At least three had signed up with a government-sponsored railroad expedition that was, in effect, competing with his own. Others had passed into new phases of their lives, leaving John as the one who had not let go. The photographer Carvalho formed a low opinion of the men who signed up this time. When hungry they pilfered food from one another, and when thirsty they stole alcohol he had brought to use in his daguerreotype process. John himself did not seem to trust them. He told them that no one except he should talk with reporters about their work, and asked that no one keep a journal of the expedition. He was determined this time to control the public relations.

The men were just starting west when their leader fell ill with rheumatism, an inflammation of the joints, causing pain so intense that it spread to his chest, throat, and head. It was, at age forty, the strongest sign his body had yet sent him that it would not forever endure the demands he made on it. He decided to return to St. Louis for treatment, and told his team to proceed to their prairie rendezvous with the Delawares; he would catch up.

At Westport he was able to send a telegram to Jessie in Washington, and she received his message in time to meet him in St. Louis. On a relay of trains and boats, she spent the time in “undefined dread,” unsure of his true condition as she watched the scenery pass. Reaching the waterfront at St. Louis, she plunged into the city, embracing her husband and consulting doctors. The first physician could do no good. A second doctor, a homeopath, “soothed the pain, uprooted the inflammation,” and though her husband was “greatly shaken,” the doctor helped him get “literally ‘on his legs.’” Jessie had been hoping he would call off the expedition; before leaving Washington, she was likely the source of a newspaper report suggesting he had already abandoned it. Instead, as he started west once again, Jessie wrote her friend Lizzie Lee, “I can’t say I am satisfied.” Although it felt “mean-spirited” to put it into words, “I would rather have Mr. Frémont at the fireside taking care of himself, writing out what he has done & enjoying the repose and happiness of our quiet home, than getting all the stupid laurels that ever grew. I think he has done enough—but he does not. If this ends well, I shall be glad for his sake that it was done for he would have always regretted it—but nothing it can ever bring can reward either of us for its cost in suffering to him & anxieties to me.”

Two of his men were waiting at Westport to escort him back to the main party. The prairie had caught fire in his absence, filling the days with hazy smoke, and lighting the nights with “a horrid, lurid glare, all along the horizon.” The flames didn’t stop him. He had been seeing prairie fires for fifteen years now, ever since the voyageurs under Joseph Nicollet had taught him to survive by staying in burned areas. He rode onward with his escorts, evading the flames along the Kansas River until they caught up with the main party at the start of November.

There would have been only a limited record of the expedition except that the photographer Solomon Carvalho skirted the prohibition against keeping a journal. He composed notes in the form of a series of letters to his wife, and in this way kept track of his experiences. (He occasionally slipped up while writing, and referred to his letters as “my journal.”) As an amateur in the wilderness, he noticed essential chores of daily life that were new to him—like the hour he might spend chasing down a mule that had been turned out to graze and did not care to be caught. When the men began climbing into snowy mountains, where temperatures sometimes fell to 30 degrees below zero, they faced the nightly labor of gathering enough firewood to last until dawn. One man might return to camp “with a decayed trunk on his shoulder,” while others teamed up to drag in an entire fallen tree. Conditions often made it impossible to pitch tents. Each man had two India-rubber blankets, and would lay one rubber sheet atop the snow and then wrap himself in cloth blankets on top of it, finally pulling another rubber blanket over everything. “We generally slept double [and] communicated warmth to each other. . . . During the whole journey, exposed to the most furious snow-storms, I never slept cold, although when I have been called for guard duty I often found some difficulty in rising from the weight of the snow resting on me.”

John veered slightly north of the route that had brought him grief in 1848 and 1849. At high altitude one bitterly cold day, he pointed Carvalho toward mountains some forty miles distant and, “in a voice tremulous with emotion,” said that those were the mountains on which so many of his men had died. The photographer solemnly set up his camera and took a daguerreotype of the distant snowy range. A few days later, on December 14, they reached their objective, the Continental Divide, crossing through Cochetopa Pass, which led between snowbound peaks at an altitude of 10,160 feet. John was triumphant—on the day they crossed, he noted only four inches of snow on the ground. Nearby the men observed the stumps of recently felled trees, and a wooden cross. The pass had been used, at least in warmer months, by travelers for many years. Unbeknownst to John, it had also just been used by the United States Army; one of the three government-sponsored railroad studies had crossed this way two months earlier.

The pass was the beginning of their trouble, as they descended into deeper wilderness with dwindling food supplies. Wild game vanished as the snow grew deeper. Men sank to their waists or even higher. The animals began to die. A butchered horse or mule produced enough meat for about six meals per man; each man was given his share and told he must make it last until the next horse died. Each dead animal also meant a man had to walk, until all were on foot and the surviving animals carried only baggage. Carvalho, suffering from a frostbitten foot that made it excruciating to move, began to fall behind the rest of the men each day. After sunset one evening, he was so far behind the others that he was left guessing which way to walk in the dark. No one came to look for him. In terror of death, he staggered forward alone until he spied the campfires around ten o’clock. John came to stand by the haggard photographer as he warmed himself by a fire, and said he had been certain that Carvalho would make it; left unsaid was the reality that so few strong men or animals remained that it would not have been easy to mount a search party. “Col. Frémont put out his hand and touched my breast, giving me a slight push; I immediately threw back my foot to keep myself from falling. Col. Frémont laughed at me and remarked that I had not ‘half given out,’ any man who could act as I did on the occasion, was good for many more miles of travel.”

One man died in the mountains. He fell behind the others, his feet blackened with frostbite. This time John did send a search party, which brought back the man, Oliver Fuller, barely alive, but he never recovered. Given one of the dwindling supply of mules to ride, he had to be helped onto the animal and was finally found dead in his saddle. The slowly starving survivors abandoned all excess supplies, freeing enough pack animals that all the men could ride, at least until more animals died; Carvalho had to bury his daguerreotype equipment, although he escaped with the metal plates holding the images he had captured. John also preserved his instruments for celestial navigation, as well as his curiosity; one evening he announced that he expected an “occultation” that night, meaning that the moon would pass in front of a star. He wanted to see it. He engaged the photographer as his assistant, and the two men walked by lantern light to a patch of open ground, “almost up to our middle in snow,” as John made observations “for hours” until the occultation took place.

In the morning he told Carvalho that he was certain there was a small Mormon settlement on the far side of the next snow-covered mountain range. They were in Utah Territory now, and the settlement, well south of Salt Lake City, was called Parowan. John had already sent one of the Delawares, known as Wolf, to scout the way ahead; Wolf returned with news that there was no way to ride their animals over the mountains, so steep was the slope and so deep was the snow. “That is not the point,” John replied; “we must cross, the question is . . . how we can do it.” They did it on foot, leading their animals by the reins. Though many of the men no longer had proper shoes, they wrapped their feet in rawhide and climbed over rocks and snow. Within a few days they staggered down the far side of the range and into the Utah settlement, which was exactly where John had promised them it would be. It was February 8, 1854. Since crossing the Continental Divide they had spent eight weeks traveling some five hundred miles over country so snowy, harsh, and remote that, except for a few Ute Indians near the end, they never saw another human being.

The men rested in Parowan, a town of about four hundred. It was only three years old, a product of the Mormon migration to the region in the late 1840s. Had the expedition failed to locate it, there probably was no other town near enough for them to reach. Writing a letter to Benton, John said that “the Delawares all came in sound, but the whites of my party were all exhausted and broken up, and more or less frost-bitten.” John released two men who did not want to continue, including the photographer Carvalho—lame, exhausted, suffering from diarrhea, and without his daguerreotype equipment. Upon reaching the town, Carvalho was sent to the house of a Mormon family, and saw their “three beautiful children. I covered my eyes and wept for joy to think I might yet be restored to embrace my own.” He caught a wagon bound for Salt Lake City, planning to return home by the emigrant route when his health and the weather improved.

John planned to resume his survey as soon as he could resupply his men, which proved to be difficult. He had failed to bring enough cash to buy fresh animals. He offered to pay with drafts against Palmer, Cook and Company, his financial agents in San Francisco, but his checks were of little value to people living so far from a bank. He was lucky to discover almost the only person in the territory who was in a position to help: Almon Babbitt, a senior figure in the Mormon church, who was also the secretary and treasurer of Utah Territory, an aide to the territorial governor Brigham Young. Babbitt was about to travel on territorial business to San Francisco and Washington, D.C. He arranged for a Mormon bishop to buy horses for the expedition using money from church tithes; in exchange, Babbitt would accept John’s notes and cash them in San Francisco in the name of Brigham Young. Without Babbitt, John said he would have faced “the alternative of continuing on foot.”

Reaching the Pacific coast by mid-April, John publicized the route he had traveled, writing letters to newspapers in San Francisco and Washington, but his case for the railroad line was not persuasive. When at last it was built, more than a decade later, the line would follow a different route several hundred miles farther north. The most concrete achievement of this, John’s final expedition, was Carvalho’s daguerreotypes. No one had photographed such wilderness scenes before, though the images were scant compensation for the suffering. Maybe the true purpose of the expedition was the suffering. John could say, in the words of the oration he had memorized and recited as a youth, that he and his men were achieving “mental and moral greatness” by overcoming the western landscape, whose “awful grandeur” proclaimed “the residence of freemen.” At the beginning of his ordeal he had been so ill he could barely get started; by the time he reached San Francisco he said he felt restored and energized, writing in a letter that he was “well and so hearty that [I am] actually some 14 pounds heavier than ever before.”