Sometimes her memoir clashed with known facts, and did so in revealing ways. This was the case when she wrote a story of Charles Preuss, the German mapmaker. She said Preuss was forced to miss one of John’s expeditions because “his wife—there are many such—resented his leaving his family often.” Preuss obeyed her selfish desire and stayed home, but was so depressed to have lost his “free manly life” that he wrote a farewell letter, went outside Washington, and “going to the Bladensburg woods near by, hanged himself.” This story, with all its shocking and specific details, was incorrect. It was true that Preuss took a break from travel at the request of his wife in 1845 and missed the conquest of California, but he suffered no known ill effects and rejoined John for the disastrous expedition of 1848 to 1849. He later left John’s service but worked on one of the government’s Pacific railroad surveys, continuing in the field until the strain of the work ruined his physical and, apparently, mental health. It was only in 1854, when he was in his early fifties, that Preuss became “deranged,” according to friends, and did hang himself. Rather than dying from any lack of travel, he seemed more likely to have died as a result of traveling so much, repeatedly going through horrifying scenes and near-death experiences of the kind that today are understood to be a factor in post-traumatic stress. Jessie’s reinterpretation of his death suggested what she needed to believe: it gave meaning to the lonely months and years that she had endured at home. She could tell herself that John’s work in the West had been so important and fulfilling that if she had ever asked him to spend more time with his family it would have killed him. And Jessie made clear in her memoir that she had never asked. Unpolished, meandering, at once unreliable and informative, her book was unfinished when Jessie, age seventy-eight, died on December 27, 1902.
Her estate included two paintings, which had hung over her writing desk in her final years. One was a portrait of Jessie as a young woman. The other was of John as an old man. She had loved this painting of him, weathered, bearded, and white haired. It had been made by a young artist to whom Jessie had become something of a patron: John Gutzon Borglum. The artist, a son of immigrants, had been born in 1867 at Bear Lake, Idaho, on land near the Oregon Trail that John had helped to open for settlement. Later his family moved eastward to Fremont, Nebraska. The artist was in his early twenties when he had the opportunity to paint the great explorer, and in Borglum’s hands the old man seemed gentle, vulnerable, his face translucent against a background of darkness. Afterward Jessie supported Borglum’s career—not with money, since she had so little, but by making use of her name to write him letters of introduction to the wealthy and famous. Borglum went on to live in Paris and New York and became known as a sculptor, who once created a six-foot bust of Abraham Lincoln. In 1927, invited to expand upon this theme, John Frémont’s former portrait painter accepted a commission to carve the faces of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt on the side of Mount Rushmore, a project that occupied the remainder of his life.
Today John Charles Frémont’s name is on two mountain peaks, one in Wyoming and one in California. If Borglum had ever considered carving Frémont into a mountainside, any sculpture true to life would need to show many faces. The faces would represent those who had buoyed him—men and women, white and black and brown, who together changed the country. The sculpture would show the men and women who roared his name in 1856, and laid the foundation for progress in defeat. It would show Basil Lajeunesse the French voyageur, the Delaware Sagundai, and the white runaway Kit Carson. Near them would be Nicollet the immigrant, broke and seeking a new life, Preuss the immigrant mapmaker, and the Sonorans who made John’s fortune. There would be Jacob Dodson, the son of black servants, holding steady while other men went mad in the snow. Above all there would be Jessie Benton Frémont, who worked to build John up until he seemed as large as those figures on Mount Rushmore—Jessie, who made the man she loved and then, little by little, lost him.
Jessie Benton Frémont.
John Charles Frémont.
John’s 1835 appeal to his mentor, Joel R. Poinsett, to “aid me with your influence” and help him get a job.
The mountains of California’s Yosemite Valley.
Kit Carson, western trapper, guide, and—when provoked—ruthless killer.
Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie’s father and a US Senator from 1821–51.
A contemporary drawing showing part of the explorer’s 1842 return from the Rocky Mountains.
A map meant to promote the riches of the Las Mariposas estate.
An artist’s depiction of the moment when Indians warned Frémont’s 1842 expedition not to continue.
Horace Greeley, of the New York Tribune, who was inspired by John Frémont’s western explorations and later promoted him for president.
Francis Preston Blair, counselor to presidents from Jackson to Lincoln, who became one of John’s campaign managers in 1856.
Astor House in Manhattan, the luxury hotel where Jessie faced black protesters in 1849.
The office where Frederick Douglass published the North Star, later Frederick Douglass’s Paper.
The Rochester, New York, building where Douglass published his newspaper in the 1840s and 1850s.
Douglass predicted a “powerful Northern party” would rise up to keep slavery out of western territories.
A campaign cartoon that was published before the 1856 election.
James Buchanan, whose life constantly intersected with that of the Frémonts, from Jessie’s teenage days through the 1856 campaign.
John Bigelow of the New York Post, who authored a Frémont campaign biography while allowing Jessie to ghostwrite the most sensitive chapter.
To pry away Frémont’s nativist supporters, Democrats accused him of being both Catholic and a foreigner—and a “Black Republican,” who not only opposed slavery but favored racial equality.
Republican voters in 1856 formed clubs to sing campaign ads, whose lyrics were found in songbooks like this.
The first page of the typescript of Jessie’s final memoir, written in 1902, the year of her death.
The Frémonts.
Jessie Benton Frémont, a behind-the-scenes political player who moved increasingly to the front of the stage.
Sources and Acknowledgments
Considering the Frémonts’ fame, not many writers have deeply explored them. For decades after the campaign biographies of 1856, no full-length biographies were published, and much of what was written about them during their later lives was brief, unflattering, or both. Civil War heroes such as Sherman made dismissive mentions of John in their memoirs. In the 1880s the philosopher Josiah Royce thoroughly examined the conquest of California, and even interviewed both Frémonts before writing that the conquest was a moral failure. John’s name came up in the popular press—newspaper features, dime novels, and half-true histories through which nineteenth-century young people absorbed the mythology of the Wild West. But he was not always a leading character. Kit Carson, with his longer and much bloodier frontier career, loomed larger and was the protagonist of works with titles such as “Kit Carson, King of Guides.”
Upon the Frémonts’ deaths, their personal papers gradually became accessible thanks to a few scholars who conducted a kind of relay across generations. The first to pick up the baton was Allan Nevins, a young New York newspaperman, who met the Frémonts’ son Frank in 1926. When Frank offered him access to some family papers—the few that hadn’t been burned by his sister, Lily, while housecleaning—Nevins used them and other sources to produce a 1928 biography of John called Frémont: The World’s Greatest Adventurer. The book was so admiring that it provoked a rebuttal in 1930: historian Cardinal Goodwin accused Nevins of buying the Frémont myth, and wrote his own biography damning John as a
drifter, “a vagrant by instinct—one might almost say a vagabond,” a man with no moral compass who took up one adventure after another and wandered by mistake into fame. Nevins later revised his Greatest Adventurer to make it more measured, describing its 1939 and 1955 editions as “chastened in style and much enlarged in content,” and retitled the work Fremont: Pathmarker of the West. He arranged for the papers he had collected to be placed at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and later became chairman of a committee that oversaw publication in book form of the papers from John’s expeditions. Nevins did not live to see the project’s completion, but handed the baton to editors Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence, who between 1970 and 1984 completed a multivolume set of letters and writings called The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont. Spence edited the last of these volumes alone, then passed the baton to one more scholar, collaborating with Pamela Herr to edit a volume called The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont in 1993. Although Expeditions and Letters do not include all known documents, they are extensive and richly footnoted, and the efforts to complete them over nearly seven decades are priceless for anyone studying the Frémonts.
Those who have undertaken that study include Catherine Coffin Phillips, who produced a biography of Jessie in 1935 by consulting the papers Nevins had gathered (as well as her own memory, having grown up next door to Jessie in Los Angeles). Pamela Herr, the coeditor of Jessie’s letters, published a thorough biography of Jessie in 1988. In 1991, Andrew Rolle said he “used psychiatric techniques” to compose a psychological portrait of John’s erratic decision-making, while Tom Chaffin completed a deeply researched biography of John in 2002. In 2007 Sally Denton wrote an exuberant biography of both Frémonts. My own explorations gained immensely from those who walked the trails before me, even when my emphasis or conclusions are different.
Beyond the biographies, the Frémonts’ sprawling lives make them characters in many books about California, westward expansion, transcontinental railroads, the war with Mexico, the American Civil War, and the creation of the Republican Party. It was through such works that I first learned of them, reading Time-Life books about the Old West that my parents, Roland and Judy Inskeep, bought for me growing up. These books were filled with illustrations and tales of adventure that made them descendants of those old Western dime novels. In later years I remembered the Frémonts, and realized that they could help me think more broadly about who is included in the American story.
The search for primary source material led me first to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Its manuscript collections include numerous papers of the Frémonts, Thomas Hart Benton, and others including Joseph Nicollet, Horace Greeley, Nathaniel Banks, and members of the Blair family. Librarians wheeled out cartons that held, among other items, Thomas Hart Benton’s 1813 letter describing his gunfight with Andrew Jackson; John’s letter to Joel Poinsett appealing for help with a job in 1835; journals Nicollet kept of his journeys with John in 1838 and 1839; and Jessie’s 1847 letter to President Polk seeking an army appointment for a friend. Studying 1856 campaign paraphernalia in the Frémont files brought the election to life. The library staff also guided me to digital newspaper databases that were not available to earlier generations of researchers; these made it possible to follow the Frémonts in the media with a degree of breadth and detail that, to my knowledge, had never been attempted. The result was new information about the mechanics of fame—how the Frémonts generated stories about themselves, what was said about them, and how those stories spread across the country. The databases also made it practical to seek out information about less famous characters such as Jacob Dodson.
The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, contains essential papers including drafts of Jessie’s unpublished writings. The California State Library still has a list of books that John contributed to start the library at the end of 1849. Charleston College dug into its archives to produce John’s academic and attendance records. Christine Ridarsky and Emily Morrow, of the Rochester Public Library, shared research on the life of Frederick Douglass there; Gabrielle Foreman, of the University of Delaware, provided guidance regarding Colored Citizens conventions. The Hathi Trust has curated digital versions of numerous nineteenth-century texts, turning any coffee shop or train into my research library; and the paper copies of many old volumes reached my home shelves from various sources. It was a delight to learn that someone had made a book-length study of accelerating travel times between various places in the United States prior to 1840, while another scholar had studied county-by-county results from the 1856 presidential election.
Some of the most satisfying research was conducted on the road, where I traced a few of John’s routes by car. One began at Klamath Lake in Oregon, where John was attacked and retaliated, and continued southward past Mount Shasta to the Central Valley and the San Francisco Bay. The landscape around the California-Oregon border is so sparsely populated and epic in scale that a modern traveler feels some of the wonder and dread that travelers of past generations must have felt. On another journey I started at Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border, and crossed westward over the Sierra Nevada by the approximate route that John’s party used in the winter of 1844. The high mountain pass they found is called Carson Pass now, and a two-lane road runs through it, with signs to alert drivers when it is closed in times of high snow. The log cabin visitor’s center in the pass cannot be far from the spot where John paused to boil water and estimate the altitude. From there I followed the road westward and downslope toward Sutter’s Fort. The fort is in a little state park—two city blocks of tranquil green in the center of Sacramento, which has grown all around it. Its white brick walls contrast with the glassy facades of the Sutter Medical Center across the street.
Fires, earthquakes, and new construction have long since swept away the San Francisco that the Frémonts knew, yet one may still walk the street grid they walked—including Stockton, Kearny, Fremont, and Vallejo streets. The streets of central Washington, D.C., are also the same. A federal courthouse occupies the block of C Street Northwest where the Benton house stood. The White House has been expanded and renovated, but its ceremonial rooms are not so different from those the Frémonts saw as they called upon presidents. As a journalist, it has been my fortune over the years to have visited those rooms and many other scenes of the Frémont story. The Battery in Charleston, South Carolina looks not so different than it did when John knew it. The site of New York’s Astor House, where Jessie confronted antislavery protesters, is now the location of the Woolworth Building. In St. Louis, much of the town the Frémonts knew was destroyed in the 1930s for a waterfront park where the Gateway Arch was eventually built. William Clark’s farm, where the explorer was served by slaves, is now covered by the racially diverse suburban neighborhoods of St. Louis County, and the site of his farmhouse is not far from Barack Obama Elementary School in Pine Lawn. Westport, Missouri, has been absorbed into Kansas City, while the landscape of Kansas is now dotted with spinning wind turbines. In Portland, near the end point of John’s first journey to Oregon, commuters cross the Fremont Bridge. Nantucket is more developed than when the Frémonts discussed their presidential prospects there, but is still an escape for the national elite, surrounded by the ocean that is at once unchanging and in motion. The Rocky Mountains, too, maintain their eternal grandeur, dwarfing the old mining towns, highways, and ski resorts that form the most visible signs of human habitation.
During the years that I lived with this story, friends and loved ones were compelled to live with it, too. Many politely asked how the book was coming and had to put up with the answers. Some became part of the work; Ava, Ana, and Molly went along on one of my rambling drives through California and Oregon—as did Carolee, whose strategic advice and critiques were priceless throughout this work, and whose forbearance during weekends and evenings of writing were beyond what any spouse and partner should have to bear. The strain on those c
lose to me was at least reduced thanks to three NPR managers: Sarah Gilbert, Kenya Young, and Chris Turpin, who graciously helped to arrange two brief leaves from my day job. My NPR cohosts David Greene, Rachel Martin, and Noel King performed extra work in my absence and never said a word about it. The tireless agent Gail Ross, her insightful colleague Dara Kaye, and my friend and colleague Nishant Dahiya read some or all chapters in their early versions and gave immensely useful commentary. The historian Jon Meacham also read the manuscript, while historian Candice Millard offered encouragement and an example to follow. My friends and former colleagues Madhulika Sikka and Michele Norris have been constant sources of inspiration and support.
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