Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  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 c
ountryside 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.