Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  Despite this disturbing sign, the danger to the well-armed expedition may never have been that great. Throughout the journey natives never harmed them, instead inviting the army lieutenant to dinner and approaching to ask curious questions about his “numerous strange instruments applied to still stranger uses,” especially the sextant and chronometer he used in “talking with the sun and stars.” Native people also traded with John; it was a mixed-race Indian who relieved the expedition’s most desperate shortage by selling them a fresh supply of coffee. The land was not as empty as it seemed: it had an economy, trade routes, and connections to the world. The coffee John bought had certainly come from some other country. The Indian who sold it to him may have obtained it in trade for furs that were shipped to yet another country.

  In August the men reached South Pass. It was anticlimactic. A rough wagon road ran through the pass on the way to Oregon, as if to emphasize that they were finding nothing new. The Continental Divide was so subtle, John said, that “we were obliged to watch very closely to find the place at which we had reached the culminating point.” He compared it to the modest slope of Capitol Hill back in Washington—the very point, some nineteen hundred miles away, toward which he was now obliged to return. But on all sides lay snowcapped peaks, and John decided on a more dramatic finish. Although the pass marked the limit of the expedition under his orders, he would continue.

  Leading his men northwest, he made for the nearby Wind River mountains: “A great part of the interest of the journey for me was in the exploration of these mountains, of which so much had been said that was doubtful and contradictory.” Old maps suggested the mountains were the source of several great river systems. John first thought he should survey the streams that flowed down the slopes, a project that would call for him to circle the entire mountain range, but he abandoned this quest for knowledge in favor of a quest for altitude. The tops of the Wind River Range rose alluringly above pine forests and lakes, and their jagged outlines were irresistible. “The air at sunrise is clear and pure,” he wrote of waking in camp on August 10. “A lofty snow peak of the mountain is glittering in the first rays of the sun, which has not yet reached us.” He resolved to climb the highest mountain in sight. Leaving men behind to guard the horses and supplies, he began the ascent in a group of fifteen, who mounted more durable mules. The mules picked their way through the forest and up sloping fields of broken rock, as John made note of torrential streams, hidden lakes, and “scarlet flowers” that “everywhere met the eye.” They arrived at a valley the mules could not cross—“a gigantic disorder of enormous masses, and a savage sublimity of naked rock”—and left the animals to graze while the climbers proceeded on foot. Thinking they were near the summit, they brought scientific instruments to calculate the altitude but left behind their food, blankets, and even their coats.

  It didn’t take long to understand that they had misread the ground ahead of them. What looked like a direct ascent concealed more valleys that they needed to navigate. They were reaching altitudes where snow covered the ground even in August, and one of the men nearly slid off a snowy slope and over a precipice to his death. He saved himself only by dropping flat on the surface to gain traction. Exhausted in the thin air, the party stopped for the night just below the tree line, around ten thousand feet above sea level. They tried to hunt a mountain goat for dinner and failed. They tried to sleep without their blankets on a slab of bare granite. Lieutenant Fremont began to experience severe headaches and to vomit.

  His leadership grew erratic the next day. He let his party lose cohesion as they clambered uphill across broken ground. They split into ones and twos, taking divergent routes through the rocks and snow, which meant they could not easily help one another. The mapmaker Preuss was walking alone at the top of a snowy slope when he lost his footing and began sliding. There was no way to stop. He continued some two hundred feet before he crashed into rocks at the bottom, and was lucky to somersault over the first rock in a way that broke no bones. Afterward Preuss was found by Johnny Auguste Janisse, the black voyageur, who brought word that Lieutenant Frémont was vomiting again, as were at least two others. The doubled-over Frémont had sent a message telling Preuss to try to reach the summit; Janisse had brought the barometer, expecting that he would accompany Preuss and help him determine the altitude.

  Preuss refused. He took a barometric reading where he was, and the two men descended to where Frémont was resting. Other men straggled into camp, and the party prepared to spend another night near the tree line. The day’s only success came when a few men went downhill and found a route to bring up mules laden with dried meat, blankets, and coffee. Refreshed by their first meal in nearly two days, the men rolled into blankets around their fires. Preuss expected that in the morning everyone would descend the mountain, but he woke to discover otherwise. John reminded him that they had brought a bottle of brandy: “Well, Mr. Preuss, I hope we shall, after all, empty a glass on top of the mountain.” That was the sick and dehydrated lieutenant’s way of saying that he intended to keep climbing.

  His men were exhausted. They had been in the saddle for more than a thousand miles. Their clothes were ragged and torn; Preuss sometimes wore two pairs of pants so that each would cover the holes in the other. Much of their equipment was a mess: one of John’s two chronometers was broken, and the barometer had cracked during a river crossing a few days before, forcing him to make an improvised repair. John had never been able to make the daguerreotype camera work, placing metal plates into the camera only to have them come out blank (“That’s the way it is with these Americans,” Preuss groused in his diary. “They know everything, they can do everything, and when they are put to a test, they fail miserably.”) For weeks the men had been eating whatever they could kill along the way: prairie chicken, turtles, buffalo, and polecat. The food they had brought from St. Louis was running low, and the coffee they drank that morning was some of their last. John acknowledged their haggard state, releasing some men to stumble down the mountain while he continued up with a few volunteers. Some who volunteered had mixed feelings. Preuss was writing cutting descriptions of the lieutenant in his diary—“foolish,” short-tempered, “childishly passionate,” and far too prone to headaches when under stress—yet the mapmaker did not take his opportunity to flee. Others who joined the attempt included Johnny Auguste Janisse, who was lugging the fragile wood-and-glass barometer. (Preuss assumed Janisse was not entirely a volunteer, saying that as a “mulatto,” he “had no privilege to choose.”)

  They ascended slowly, with frequent rest to make sure they were not sickened again. Though snow crunched beneath their feet, the summer air was above freezing, warm enough for the men to sweat in the sun from the effort of the climb. John put on thin-soled moccasins so that he could use his toes to help keep his footing. He chose to climb a steep rock slope that, thanks to its high angle in sunshine, was clear of snow. Near the top he was stuck beneath an overhanging shelf of rock before pulling himself up to level ground, where he discovered members of his party who had climbed by a less perilous route. Soon their goal was in sight:

  I sprang upon the summit, and another step would have precipitated me into an immense snow field five hundred feet below. . . . I stood on a narrow crest, about three feet in width. . . . As soon as I had gratified the first feelings of curiosity I descended, and each man ascended in his turn, for I would only allow one at a time to mount the unstable and precarious slab, which it seemed a breath would hurl into the abyss below.

  Raising his spyglass, John believed he saw the distant tops of the Grand Tetons, beyond which streams led toward the Columbia River and Oregon. Janisse brought up the barometer, and Preuss took readings of the air pressure and temperature. John later used them in a mathematical calculation to show an altitude of 13,570 feet above sea level. He decided that it must be the highest point in all of North America.

  They were not long on the summit, wanting to make it back to ca
mp by dark. No doubt the drink of brandy was hurried, and Preuss grumbled that the lieutenant was rushing him before he could properly finish his work. But they took time for a gesture, planting an American flag on the summit that had been specially designed for this journey. Among the twenty-six stars was the image of an eagle clutching a peace pipe, which was thought to be effective symbolism when encountering Indians. They let it “wave in the breeze where never flag waved before,” then furled and carried it down the slope.

  His party had not lost a single man.

  * * *

  ON THE LAST DAY OF OCTOBER 1842, when John returned from the West and stepped back into the Benton house in Washington, he still had the flag he’d hoisted atop the mountain. He carried it to Jessie, who was resting in bed, and she watched as he unfurled it and spread it over her. “This flag was raised on the summit peak of the highest point of the Rocky Mountains,” he said. “I brought it to you.” For Jessie it was a moment of joy, and of anticipation. When he draped the flag over her body, she was swollen and uncomfortable, her baby almost to term.

  She went into labor in mid-November 1842, barely two weeks after his return, and emerged from the ordeal without complications. But when the baby was delivered, the mother suffered a blow: the child was a girl. Jessie had been hoping to present a boy to her spouse, just as her father had once expected a boy when Jessie arrived. There was no evidence that John desperately wanted a boy, or that he especially wanted children at all—but she wanted to make an impression. He had just returned from a life-altering, horizon-expanding experience that did not include her. Sons were prized, and she was devastated not to have one. She was also beginning to have dark thoughts about a girl’s prospects in life. She had just experienced the limitations imposed on her gender in an especially galling way: she would have loved to travel westward with her husband, but her twelve-year-old brother went instead. Now she was bringing another girl into a frustrating world.

  She could console herself that John’s work was entering a phase in which she could participate: generating publicity for his achievements, of which there were many, including the mapping of the Oregon Trail, the journey to South Pass, and the scaling of “the highest point of the Rocky Mountains.” Jessie cared for her baby through the holidays—the girl was named Elizabeth after Jessie’s mother, and would come to be called Lily—and then, with a nurse to help, freed up time for work. John was supposed to write a report of his expedition. Army officers usually wrote such documents to be read by their superiors, but the Frémonts had a grander concept. They wanted to create an adventure story for the public. It was to be less bloody than Bernal Díaz’s tale of conquering Mexico, but infused with the same spirit.

  The story took the form of an ordinary bureaucratic document, and did not have a snappy title.

  A Report on an Exploration of the Country Lying Between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains on the Line of the Kansas and Great Platte Rivers

  Nor did it have an arresting opening line.

  Washington, March 1, 1843.

  To Col. J.J. Abert, Chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers:

  Sir: Agreeably to your orders to explore and report upon the country between the frontiers of Missouri and the South Pass in the Rocky Mountains . . . I sat out from Washington city on the 2d day of May, 1842.

  But it was the beginning of a chronological narrative in which the drama gradually built. John framed his journey evocatively, saying it began “on the verge of civilization,” as the men prepared for “the nomadic life we were about to lead.” Or maybe this was how Jessie framed it, because the opening pages of the report were written in her hand. She later explained that her husband was not in the right state of mind to work alone: “The horseback life, the sleep in the open air, had unfitted Mr. Frémont for the indoor act of writing.” He inexplicably began suffering nosebleeds. Because he was stymied, “I was let to try, and thus slid into my most happy life work.” She would write while John paced the room, dictating. He confessed that he wrote most easily this way; when writing by himself, he would dwell too long on each word, but “in dictation there is not time for this.” As he told the story he would study her face, “and get there at times the slight dissent . . . or the pleased expression which represents the popular impression of a mind new to the subject.”

  Eventually John’s condition improved, and Jessie became a more conventional editor of a narrative that constantly gave the reader the feeling of standing next to Lieutenant Frémont. On one page, John was fording the Kansas River through water so swift that two men were nearly swept away—this was the moment when they lost nearly all their coffee. On another page, John was waking to an inspiring view at dawn: “The long mountain wall to the east rising two thousand feet abruptly from the plain, behind which we see the peaks, is still dark, and cuts clear against the glowing sky.” Elsewhere, he was greeting curious Sioux who visited his camp:

  Now and then one would dart up to the tent on horseback, jerk off his trappings, and stand silently at the door, holding his horse by the halter, signifying his desire to trade. Occasionally a savage would stalk in, with an invitation to a feast of honor, a dog feast, and deliberately sit down and wait quietly until I was ready to accompany him. I went to one; the women and children were sitting outside the lodge, and we took our seats on buffalo robes spread around. The dog was in a large pot over the fire.

  This was typical of his encounters with Indians—he was often diplomatic and frequently made friends, but wrote unflattering descriptions when he returned home. He was civilized and they were “savage,” amusingly ignorant of his world. He seemed unconcerned that he was mostly ignorant of theirs.

  The mountain climb was described in dramatic detail, without hiding his decisions that exceeded his orders and put his men at risk. He even reported his own headaches and vomiting. This apparent humility made the narrator seem honest and relatable, even as he was making the extraordinary claim of having climbed the highest point on the entire continent. The Frémonts qualified the claim, indicating to the careful reader that it was a guess, but they still made the guess, instinctively grasping how meaningful that claim could be. Later exploration eventually revealed how wrong they were: close to a hundred Rocky Mountain peaks rose higher.

  On the return journey, they wrote, John stopped at Independence Rock, “an isolated granite rock, about six hundred and fifty yards long, and forty in height.” Past travelers to Oregon or California had carved their names in it, and John carved a cross in the stone, which he covered with “a black preparation of India rubber, well calculated to resist the influence of wind and rain.” Weeks later, reaching the Missouri River where it took in the waters of the Platte, he heard a sound that symbolized his return to civilization: “I rose this morning long before daylight, and heard with a feeling of pleasure the tinkling of cow-bells at the settlements on the opposite side of the Missouri.” As described in Report on an Exploration, western travel was noble, brave, romantic, and practical. The plains on the way to the Rockies, which had at times been described as a great American desert, had water, grass for animals, even trees. South Pass was a gentle slope. Oregon beckoned. Within weeks of its completion, the Report on an Exploration was bound for a printer and for the newspapers.

  * * *

  JESSIE DID NOT HAVE MANY MONTHS to keep her little family together in Washington. John had hardly submitted the report when it was time for him to say good-bye again; Senator Benton had arranged for him to command a second expedition. It was to be longer than the first, and more blatantly centered on Oregon—continuing through South Pass all the way to the Pacific. The official plan was simply to fill a gap in the military’s survey work, connecting past surveys of the interior with a recent US Navy survey of the Pacific coast. But no one could doubt the real purpose. Jessie of course supported the mission, but did not want to lose her husband again, and when he started westward in late spring, she resolved to accompan
y him as far as St. Louis. They brought an entourage: baby Lily, and likely a female servant to help with her; Mrs. Benton, who had recovered some of her strength; and two men who would join John for the expedition: the mapmaker Charles Preuss and Jacob Dodson, the eighteen-year-old free black son of Benton family servants. Jacob was eager to go west, and took on a role as John’s personal servant.

  In St. Louis the family had their evenings together while John spent his days filling out the expedition’s roster. He was forming a group “of many nations,” as he later said: “American, French, German, Canadian, Indian, and colored—and most of them young, several being under twenty-one years of age.” He was celebrating the polyglot nature of his young country, although his phrasing reflected a particular way of thinking about nationality and race. He described “colored” people as distinct from Americans, even though Jacob Dodson was American. The French were probably also United States citizens, even if they were of European descent. “Americans” were hazily regarded as a new “race”—white people, mainly of British descent, creating their own identity as they chased their destiny across the continent. A closer look at John’s own expedition would have given him a broader concept of Americans, including his trusted French companion Basil Lajeunesse; Kit Carson, who had married an Indian wife; Dodson; and two Indians. Both were Shawnees, “a fine-looking old man and his son”—with names showing their attachment to the new nation sweeping over their ancient one: the father, James Rogers, had named his son Thomas Jefferson Rogers.