Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  Benton had learned of a route through the Rockies to Oregon, crossing the Continental Divide at a gap in the mountains called South Pass. Fur traders, a few settlers, and missionaries had used it. If more Americans emigrated on this Oregon Trail to the Pacific, they would alter the facts on the ground: a significant population of Americans in Oregon would make it a de facto part of the United States. Emigrants would form a constituency demanding that the United States give them protection and formally annex the territory, and if it came to war with Britain, hardy and well-armed settlers could be turned into a military force. As Benton well knew, this was how the United States commonly expanded—not by overt invasion but through settlement. It was the way Benton’s onetime home of Tennessee became a state: white families carved out farms on land belonging to Indian nations and went to war when natives resisted. It was the way the United States captured the eastern portion of the state of Louisiana: American settlers seized this Spanish-controlled territory in 1810, and the United States swiftly annexed it. In 1836, American settlers in northern Mexico rose in revolt (as Benton had long wanted them to do) and declared the independent Republic of Texas. The Texans immediately requested annexation to the United States, which had not happened by 1842 but still seemed possible. Surely American settlers could work similar wonders in Oregon.

  To encourage emigration, Benton wanted to use the media. The onetime newspaperman had so much influence over the Washington Globe, the leading Democratic paper, that a critic claimed its editor, Francis Preston Blair, allowed Benton’s “undried copy” to be placed “directly into the hands of the compositor” to be set in type. Now Benton wanted to make John C. Frémont the leading character in a news story. He would send his son-in-law beyond the Missouri River, and Lieutenant Frémont would plan his expedition so that he was mapping the approaches to Oregon. His maps would define the trail more clearly. His advice on the availability of wood, water, and supplies would make travel safer and more practical. His story, well publicized, would make the route better known. The mere fact of a government-supported expedition up the Oregon Trail would imply federal support for settling Oregon. When they discussed this after dinner on New Year’s Day, John grasped it all. “Daily intercourse under [Benton’s] own roof had given me a familiar knowledge of Mr. Benton’s plans,” he said afterward. “I gave henceforward to him . . . unstinted devotion.”

  John received his appointment to command. Next Benton lobbied the army to send him on a route toward Oregon, though he did not mention Oregon by name. “I think it would be well,” Benton wrote Frémont’s commander, Colonel Abert, “for you to name, in the instructions for Mr. Frémont, the great pass through the Rocky Mountains [South Pass]. . . . It is the gate through the mountains . . . [and] will be a thorough fare for nations to the end of time.” If John set his course for South Pass he would naturally be on the Oregon Trail. Abert was opposed: he wanted John to survey the Kansas and Platte rivers, two major waterways of the Great Plains that were ripe for settlement, and felt that sending him to the mountains was too much for a single season. But knowing Benton’s influence, Abert reluctantly told Lieutenant Frémont to visit South Pass if he could do it without jeopardizing the river surveys. That was enough for Benton, who knew he could count on John to ride for South Pass no matter what. “Upon its outside view,” Benton said, the expedition was “the conception of the Government,” but in reality it was “conceived without its knowledge and executed upon solicited orders, of which the design was unknown.”

  * * *

  JOHN BEGAN ASSEMBLING EQUIPMENT. He borrowed a sextant and surveying instruments (to the annoyance of Colonel Abert, who said Frémont was not following procedure), and when spring arrived he made a shopping detour to New York. The transportation network had improved so dramatically in the past few years that it was possible to move the 230 miles or so from Washington to New York without ever riding a horse or carriage; it took a day or two on a relay of steam trains and ferry crossings. A boat carried John across the Hudson to the New York City docks by May 4, 1842.

  The New York weather was unpleasant (“Fickle, changeable, cold, and uncomfortable,” one of the newspapers complained) but the city was soaring. Trinity Church was under construction on lower Broadway, with a spire that was projected to rise nearly three hundred feet. Its builders looked down on a city of more than three hundred thousand, most jammed into lower Manhattan Island within a mile or so of the church. While John was in town, the American Temperance Union held a meeting that drew more than six thousand people, a crowd hard to imagine in any other place he had seen. He passed near the Broadway meeting hall, where spectators filled every seat, according to a newspaper, with additional “hundreds and hundreds standing all down the four broad aisles,” including “young, lovely, and most beautiful women.” The streets crackled with the energy of migrants from the countryside and immigrants from different corners of the world.

  In shops that lined the crowded streets, the twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant spent more money than he ever had, writing drafts for merchants to be reimbursed by the government. Ducking into a store off Wall Street, he paid three hundred dollars for a “first-class” chronometer, a precise clock that could go two full days without winding. Knowing the exact time would allow him to make navigational readings based on the position of the sun at certain hours. He paid ten dollars for a carrying case “with extra pillows, cushion, &c” to insulate the clockworks from bumpy rides. He bought a barometer in a leather case, and thermometers encased in mahogany. Strolling up Broadway, past the white stone city hall in its triangular park, he discovered a district of camera sellers. The “daguerreotype apparatus” was a popular new invention—a new form of art, it was said—which made images from life by exposing chemically treated metal plates to light. “It is sun-painting,” proclaimed an ad for a daguerreotype portrait gallery at Broadway and Chambers Street. John was convinced. He found a doctor selling cameras on the side, and paid $78.50 for a set with twenty-five plates. He planned to be the first western explorer who was known to try to illustrate the landscape with this new technology.

  He failed to follow army procedure, neglecting to obtain advance approval for his purchases. When his commander discovered these irregularities, he sent an angry letter down the road after him, but it was too late. Leaving New York, John struck out directly for St. Louis, and by the time the letters went in the mail he was far to the west and beyond recall.

  In Washington, Jessie knew John would be absent half a year. They had been married barely half a year, and she understood that his separation from her was a choice, not his fate. “It would have needed only a request from my father,” she said, “to obtain for Mr. Frémont duty which should keep him in Washington . . . but self-renunciation lies at the root of great work, and this was to be my part in being of use to my father.” So she bid John good-bye. “Mr. Frémont was gone into the silence and the unknown, how silent how unknown it is impossible to make clear.” He would pass beyond not only her touch and sight, but beyond even the reach of the mail.

  It would be especially hard because Jessie, not quite eighteen, was pregnant. Maybe he would be home for the baby’s birth and maybe not. All the hazards of the West lay ahead of him, and all the hazards of childbirth lay ahead of her. Death was common in labor or soon afterward, and the joy of pregnancy was mixed with foreboding. Medical science was baffled by the complications of childbirth, which killed so many that almost anyone could name a lost neighbor or relative. “Young women,” a scholar said after studying women’s letters from the era, “perceived that their bodies, even when healthy and vigorous, could yield up a dead infant or could carry the seeds of their own destruction.” Jessie had to contemplate whether the struggle might signal her final hours on earth.

  Realizing that his pregnant daughter needed some distraction, Senator Benton put her to work. He led her to his home library, telling her that he needed some “translations from Bernal Díaz’ Conque
st of Mexico, and this occupied my mornings.” Diaz was a Spanish conquistador, one of the men who invaded and took over the Aztec empire beginning in 1519. Jessie lost herself, as much as she could, in the story of the badly outnumbered Spaniards who approached the Aztec capital built on islands in a lake.

  Our number did not amount to four hundred and fifty, we had perfectly in our recollection the accounts we had received on our march, that we were to be put to death on our arrival in the city which we now saw before us, approachable only by causeways, whereon were several bridges, the breaking of one of which effectually cut off our retreat. And let who can, tell me, where are men in this world to be found except ourselves, who would have hazarded such an attempt?

  Jessie translated such drama while thinking of John’s even smaller force. The story was as close as she could come to joining his adventure.

  The pleasure of the story could not distract her for long. Her mother, Elizabeth, began suffering “an intolerable headache.” She summoned a doctor and submitted to the old-fashioned medical treatment of bleeding, and when it failed, allowed herself to be bled again. Jessie blamed the treatment, rather than the disease, for what happened next: Elizabeth suffered a “paralysis of the throat” that made it impossible for her to eat, and lay for days “looking dead.” Her condition improved, but she was never entirely right again, and wandered the Benton house with its English-made mahogany furniture, sometimes disoriented in her nightclothes. All this Jessie bore without her husband by her side. He was away on a prairie, or in the mountains, or dead—she had no way to know.

  John C. Frémont scaling “the highest peak in the Rocky Mountains.”

  Chapter Four

  MISERIES THAT ATTEND A SEPARATION

  Lieutenant and Jessie Ann Benton Frémont, 1842–1843

  St. Louis, the Oregon Trail, and Washington, D.C.

  On stagecoaches and steamboats to Missouri, John was accompanied by two people. One was Jessie’s brother, twelve-year-old Randolph, who was brought along for a priceless life experience. (He was also given a job: John assigned him to wind the chronometers.) The other was Charles Preuss, a mapmaker who had knocked at the Bentons’ door seeking work. Preuss, a German immigrant with “a shock of light curly hair standing up thick about his head,” had no wilderness experience. He would have preferred to stay home and draw maps from the information John gathered, but John said the German must see the ground that they would map together.

  Walking through the little river town of St. Louis—not so little anymore, for the 1840 census had found nearly seventeen thousand people, more than triple the number from a decade earlier—John sought out the Chouteau fur-trading family, who identified voyageurs to transport equipment and hunters to feed the party. (The Chouteaus also advanced him credit for supplies, although John again disregarded army procedure by failing to secure permission first, which triggered another protest from Washington.) About twenty men set out westward, taking the first leg of their trip by catching a commercial steamboat up the Missouri. On the boat, John hired one more man, a passenger on the same vessel by chance. “He was a man of medium height,” John said, “broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a clear steady blue eye.”

  Kit Carson was thirty-two, not far in age from twenty-nine-year-old John. He said he could guide Lieutenant Frémont wherever he wanted to go, and his background suggested it was not a boast. For sixteen years, ever since he had run away from his youthful apprenticeship with a Missouri saddle maker, Carson had been crisscrossing the West, mainly as a fur trapper and hunter. He climbed mountains and crossed deserts. He bought a house in Taos, in the Mexican province of New Mexico, and even accompanied a trading expedition that went all the way to Alta California, the Mexican territory on the Pacific. He battled Apaches, picked up Indian languages, married an Indian woman, and had a daughter by her. He was famous in the fur trade for both his knowledge and his ruthlessness, as a story about him illustrated. In January 1833 he was traveling in a group of trappers when men from the Crow nation stole some of their horses. Vowing to find the thieves, Carson joined eleven other men and tracked the Crows through the snow. Finding them asleep in a camp late at night, the trappers silently liberated their horses—a bloodless triumph, after which most of the men wanted to slip away. But Carson wanted “satisfaction for the trouble” of his hours in the snow. He persuaded his comrades to open fire on the much larger group of Crows, killing several and triggering a battle that lasted the rest of the night.

  With Carson on John’s payroll, the party disembarked from the steamboat at a fur-trading outpost called Chouteau’s Landing, at the western border of Missouri. From the trading post and surrounding settlements they gathered horses, mules, and more supplies. John made celestial observations to fix their starting point, and they rode across the prairie, a line of men and animals and carts who sometimes spread out to escape one another’s dust: the army officer from the East with his shiny instruments and nephew at hand; the quiet, watchful westerner Carson; and the immigrant mapmaker Preuss, who struggled to make sketches on horseback, slowing down the party until John ordered him to ride in one of the horse carts instead. The carts were driven by the French voyageurs, who included a black man named Johnny Auguste Janisse.

  John began the journey by following Colonel Abert’s instructions, surveying the Kansas River, which led them westward; but he was not hiding his true intention. Behind him in Missouri, a newspaper ran an item about him on June 14:

  IMPORTANT EXPEDITION.–Lieut. Fremont, of the corps of Topographical Engineers, left here under orders from the War Department, about ten days ago, with a party of 20 men, on a tour of the Rocky Mountains.

  The article said John was traveling to South Pass “with a view to the establishment of a line of military posts from the frontiers of Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia River.” His survey of domestic rivers had been redefined as a phase of the occupation of Oregon. It was even said that the survey was being made in support of the latest proposal in the Senate to authorize that occupation. This article also introduced the public to the dashing man at the head of the vanguard: Lieutenant Frémont, who, “though young,” had “much experience in surveys of this kind.” While the source of the story was not named, the timing and location suggested it was John, who had just passed through St. Louis, or his father-in-law, who knew St. Louis editors. The story quickly spread beyond Missouri in the way news items commonly did: newspapers in different parts of the country exchanged copies with one another by mail, and reprinted any articles they found of interest. Multiple papers printed John’s news until it reached the East Coast on June 26, in the New York Herald, the most powerful and widely read daily of the moment. Senator Benton’s goal of occupying Oregon was being advertised as if it was already in motion. This seeming fait accompli might encourage potential settlers to occupy Oregon. The act of saying it could make it come true.

  * * *

  THE EXPEDITION TRAVELED IN STYLE, thanks to the supplies John had purchased outside army rules. He had bottles of brandy. He had six pounds of “Dresden chocolate,” along with 148 pounds of tobacco. He had enough food supplies that on Independence Day, 1842, he halted his men on the prairie early to prepare a celebratory feast: “Our friends in St. Louis had provided us with a large supply of excellent preserves and rich fruit cake; and when these were added to a macaroni soup and variously prepared dishes of the choicest buffalo meat, crowned with a cup of coffee, and enjoyed with a prairie appetite, we . . . sat in barbaric luxury around our smoking supper on the grass.” Coffee was vital to the commander’s peace of mind. One day, while the group was fording the Kansas River, disaster struck: two men were nearly drowned and lost 150 pounds of coffee, almost the entire supply. The lieutenant mourned “a loss that none but a traveller in a strange and inhospitable land can appreciate.”

  In mid-July, after turning northward to leave the Kansas River Valley, they picked up the course of the Platte and
followed that river westward until they camped outside a fur-trading post called Fort Laramie. There they heard stories of Indian war parties in nearby mountains, stories that were serious enough that Kit Carson made out his will. John culled his party, ordering twelve-year-old Randolph to remain for safety at Fort Laramie, which was surrounded by adobe walls; the boy would wait until the expedition returned from South Pass. John also asked if any voyageurs wanted to be relieved of duty, and learned that one did. But having made this gesture, John treated the man as a coward: “I asked him some few questions in order to expose him to the ridicule of the men, and let him go.”

  Just as the remaining men were striking their tents to move ahead on July 20, a group of elderly Indians approached, appealing to John to wait a week until their village’s war party returned home. Otherwise their young men might attack the expedition by mistake. “The observations of the savage appeared reasonable,” John said, but having shamed another man, he could no longer take counsel of his own fears. He refused to wait, demanding instead that one of the Indians travel with them for several days to avoid any misunderstandings with the war party. Making their way forward through the mountains, they saw apparent signs of recent battles: the mapmaker Charles Preuss reported finding “a bloody pair of trousers pierced by a bullet; a pipe was still in the pocket.”