Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Francis Parkman, a handsome, long-nosed twenty-three-year-old Bostonian and Harvard man, came through the town in May 1846, en route to Fort Laramie and the writing of his enduring classic, The Oregon Trail. He had taken passage on a steamer out of Saint Louis, in a throng, he said, of “Santa Fe traders, gamblers, speculators, and adventurers of various descriptions,” the boat’s steerage “crowded with Oregon emigrants, mountain men, negroes, and a party of Kansas Indians.” Thus laden, the steamer struggled upriver for seven or eight days2 against the rapid current of the Missouri, “grating upon snags, and hanging for two or three hours at a time upon sandbars.” Close to the landing place he began to see “signs of the great western movement that was taking place. Parties of emigrants with their tents and wagons were encamped on open spots near the bank, on their way to the common rendezvous at Independence.”

  Parkman watched a train of emigrant wagons from Illinois pass through, saw children’s faces peeping out from under the wagon covers, and “Here and there a buxom damsel was seated on horseback, holding over her sunburnt face an old umbrella or a parasol, once gaudy enough, but now miserably faded.” He allowed, however, that not all the emigrants were of such innocent stamp. “Among them are some of the vilest outcasts in the country,” he said.

  He, too, made note of the noise: “A multitude of shops had sprung up to furnish the emigrants and Santa Fe travelers with necessaries for their journey and there was an incessant hammering and banging from a dozen backsmiths’ sheds, where the heavy wagons were being repaired, and the horses and oxen shod.”

  Added to the anvil and animal sounds, the red-clay streets of Independence pulsed with the shouts, curses, buzz, and laughter of its swarming transient populace. J. Quinn Thornton, an observer there at the height of the Oregon Trail migration, called the town “a great Babel of African slaves [probably black stevedores], indolent dark-skinned Spaniards [Mexicans], profane and dust-laden bullwhackers going to and from Santa Fe with their immense wagons, and emigrant families bound for the Pacific, all cheerful and intent in their embarkation upon the great prairie wilderness.” He omitted to mention the Indians, mostly Kaws and Shawnee, but also wanderers from other tribes from all points of the compass; and Mormons, soldiers out of Fort Leavenworth, mountain men searching for guide work, and a miscellany of drifters, drunks, and gamblers hanging around the groggeries and camps looking for somebody to rob. Some of the transients, Bernard De Voto said, had as their only motive in being on the edge of nowhere “was to see the elephant3 wherever the elephant might be.”

  There were plenty of idlers in Independence, but not among those who intended having a pretty fair and lingering view of the elephant. The emigrants, many of them farmers who had scraped together every dime they could find for the journey, had no time to waste. They unloaded their dismantled wagons, their animals, chicken coops, plows, furniture, bales, and boxes of supplies at the steamer landing, then reassembled the wagons, hitched their teams, and snaked them to the high ground three miles south of the Independence town square. Some brought their precious cash and sparse belongings and bought their rigs in the town; some, satisfied that they had everything they needed, avoided the town and searched out the rendezvous points, camps with names like Fitzhugh’s Mill, Indian Creek, Elm Grove, and Sapling Grove, to await others coming in. At these places the trains were organized, captains and other “officers” elected (often with heated debate), and guides and emigrant leaders pored over their maps and inspected the wagons, ensuring that the draft animals were shod and fed.

  Independence and its neighboring outfitting places had their busiest season in April, May, and early June, and for a distinct and critical purpose. The idea was to await the greening of the prairie grass before kicking off the wagon brakes and lurching northwest toward the Platte River. The journey to the Pacific was a 2,000-mile treadmill on which the pioneer family and its ox- and mule-drawn wagon averaged fifteen miles a day—barring disasters. Five months out of Independence to Oregon or California was an excellent pace and leaving later than the first week of June was perilous: There were mountains to cross, and winter closed suddenly and with a vengeance in the passes.

  3

  While the general outline of the Oregon Trail had been emerging for thirty years before John C. Frémont made his first expedition to the Rocky Mountains, he clarified it, popularized it, and dispensed with certain tenacious myths about it.

  When he set out from Saint Louis with his exploring and mapping party in June 1842, he was but twenty-nine years old, a barely tested army topographical engineer yet to inspire poets such as Whittier, Longfellow, and Joaquin Miller as Daniel Boone had inspired Lord Byron. Yet even at twenty-nine he had a record of accomplishment, and he now had powerful forces behind him. For one thing, maybe the main thing for his present purposes, he had married well.

  The son of a French adventurer and a pretty American teacher, Frémont’s unmarried parents moved from his birthplace in Savannah, Georgia, to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1813, and within days of their arrival there occurred one of our history’s momentous coincidences: Within a few days of taking rooms in Nashville’s City Hotel, baby John Charles received a pistol-shot introduction to a future president of the United States, to his future father-in-law, and to his future wife’s namesake.

  In the lobby of the hotel that September day, General Andrew Jackson, fresh from his battles against Creek Indians, and the Benton brothers, Jesse and Thomas Hart, both Tennessee soldiers who had fought with Jackson in the late war with Britain, engaged in a gunfight. The origin of the fracas remains obscure, but Jackson had recently served as “second” for a close friend in a duel with Jesse Benton and while neither duelist had been seriously injured, the Benton brothers saw Jackson’s participation as a personal affront and betrayal. In the City Hotel lobby, after some insults and challenges were issued, guns were drawn and Jackson took a ball in the shoulder, following which the general’s retinue got into the fight, as did former militia colonel and Tennessee state senator Thomas Hart Benton. More wild shots were exchanged, but somehow order was restored and there were no further casualties.

  In the Frémonts’ upstairs room, a stray bullet is said to have knocked plaster off the wall where the baby, John Charles, lay sleeping. His mother fainted.

  The affair was a splendidly bizarre curtain-raiser for an adventurer’s life.

  The elder Frémont died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1818, leaving the family in poverty. John Charles, exceptionally bright, managed to attend Charleston College briefly at age fifteen (he was expelled for “incorrigible negligence”) and through the efforts of a family friend, the botanist and statesman Joel Poinsett, won appointment in 1838 as lieutenant in the army’s newly organized Corps of Topographical Engineers. In Washington three years later, Frémont was introduced to Senator Thomas Hart Benton, one-time Tennessee politician, soldier, and hotel-lobby fighter. Now representing Missouri, he was among the most persuasive voices in Congress for the exploration of the trans-Mississippi West, known for bellowing “The facts! What are the facts?” when he rose to challenge what he considered a dubious senatorial issue. He had another noteworthy feature: his towering egocentrism, so pronounced that a journalist described it as “so part and parcel of the man, that it is not at all offensive, but a sort of national institution in which every patriotic American could take a just pride.”

  Whether the two men exchanged notes on the matter of their peculiar 1813 propinquity is not known, but they became friends, Benton seeing in the dashing lieutenant the pattern of youth, boldness, intelligence, and ambition ideal for an agent of expansionism.

  Their long association and friendship faltered seriously only once, when Frémont fell in love with Benton’s tomboyish daughter Jessie, second of his six children. She was seventeen and Frémont twenty-eight when the two eloped and married on October 18, 1841. Jessie soothed her father’s anger and John Charles was welcomed into the family.

  In Washington, the Frémon
ts met and charmed the capital elite—Senator Lewis Linn, Benton’s expansionist partner; Senator Daniel Webster; General Winfield Scott; and President John Tyler among them. At the time, Tyler was not friendly toward the idea of any government-sponsored move into the Oregon Country; he wanted no confrontation with England to interfere with the matters receiving his closest attention, such as the issue of annexing Texas. Even so, he did not oppose a bill sponsored by Benton, which appropriated $30,000 for a topographical party to be led by the brilliant mathematician and cartographer Joseph Nicollet. The expedition’s mission was to reconnoiter the opening stretch of the overland route for Oregon-bound emigrants from western Missouri through South Pass in the Rocky Mountains.

  Nicollet had been Frémont’s mentor in 1839 during a survey of the Minnesota and Dakota territories, and when the frail scientist’s health failed on the eve of his departure to South Pass, his protege was given the command.

  In June 1842 Frémont set out from Saint Louis with twenty-eight men, twenty of them listed as voyageurs, together with a German cartographer, Charles Preuss, and, as guide, the Kentuckian Christopher Houston Carson, who in his thirty-two years had tramped and trapped the West from Santa Fé to California, from the Gila River to the northern Rockies. The Frémont-Carson partnership, which would be sustained through many more expeditions and tribulations in the future, would be compared to that of Lewis and Clark, Burton and Speke, Stanley and Livingstone.

  The explorers followed the Kansas River and moved northwest to the Platte, thence up the North Platte toward the Rocky Mountains. On August 8, averaging twenty miles a day, they reached South Pass. Frémont was disappointed in this unprepossessing saddle at the Continental Divide, comparing its ascent to climbing Capitol Hill, and hastened on. His instructions from his superiors at Topographical Corps headquarters in Washington called for him to turn back after reaching and mapping the pass, but, not for the last time, he ignored orders. The party pushed on northwest and set up camp in the Wind River Mountains.

  On the return trip, Frémont gathered six of his men in a rubber boat to shoot some Platte River rapids, a foolish venture that came to near disaster when the boat hit a submerged rock and flipped over, taking all his scientific papers to the bottom. Fortunately, duplicates of the journals and maps were carried by the main party.

  The expedition reached Fort Laramie at the end of August and Saint Louis in October. In Washington, with Preuss turning out a map and meteorological table, Frémont collaborated with his wife in writing a hefty report to Congress. When it was published and offered to the public, it became a sensation, thanks to Jessie Benton Frémont’s literary gifts and her husband’s voluminous and meticulous observations and eye for poetic detail. Instead of the customary dusty, officious, fact-foundered explorer narratives of the past, Frémont’s A Report of an Exploration of the Country Lying Between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains on the Line of the Kansas and Great Platte Rivers gave the Twenty-seventh Congress something no Congress had received before: a book, beautifully organized and written. It contained lovely descriptive passages such as the rendering of the Wind River Range as “a gigantic disorder of enormous masses, and a savage sublimity of naked rock, in a wonderful contrast with innumerable green spots of rich floral beauty, shut up in their stern recesses.” Even the text’s data on terrain, weather, soil and water, vegetation and wildlife were lively, as was its advice on where forts should be built, and where good campsites might be located. The book also disproved the “Great American Desert” myth of the Great Plains favored by Major Stephen H. Long in 1819–20.

  By the time the Report was published in March 1843, Frémont had packed his telescope, sextant, and pocket chronometer and was deep in preparations for a return to South Pass, this time to push on to the Oregon Country. He had thirty-nine men, including Kit Carson again as guide and Charles Preuss again as cartographer, and they started west in May 1843, on what became a fourteen-month milestone in American exploration, the most significant expedition since Lewis and Clark.

  Frémont’s party followed the footsteps of the 1842 journey to South Pass, then turned south and east toward the Great Salt Lake, arriving there on September 9. After a stopover at Fort Hall, they followed the Snake River to Fort Boisé and reached Fort Vancouver on November 8, 1843, where they observed a small but steady stream of emigrants arriving on the Columbia and moving south to the verdant valley of the Willamette.

  As was his often near-fatal habit, Frémont ignored orders to lead his men home after reaching the Pacific. In mid-January 1844, he and his men reached an enormous (188 square miles in size, it turned out) and stunningly pristine lake in western Nevada, which he named Pyramid Lake for the rock formations around it, and there planned to cross the mountains into Mexican California. Whether this decision was his own alone or inspired by his father-in-law and the public clamor for information on California, it was a dangerous idea that must have bothered even such a loyalist as Kit Carson. It was winter, and the Sierra Nevada’s cold savagery nearly cost them their lives. Their horses slipped on the icy trails, many died of hunger or were slaughtered for food (of their 104 mules and horses, thirty-three survived); their Indian guides wisely deserted them; they suffered from starvation, snowblindness, and frostbite. They were fortunate: That Sierra winter was a mild one, and on February 6, 1844, Frémont and a scouting party climbed on snowshoes to the top of a promontory south of Lake Tahoe. “Far below us, dimmed by the distance,” the explorer wrote, “was a large snowless valley, bounded on the western side, at a distance of about a hundred miles, by a low range of mountains, which Carson recognized with delight as the mountains bordering the coast.”

  The overlook gave them a panoramic view of the Sacramento valley and they reached Sutter’s Fort, the oasis at the juncture of the American and Sacramento Rivers, in early March. John Augustus Sutter, the Swiss emigré who had built the fort on the land granted him by the Mexican government, welcomed Frémont and his men, as he did all Americans. Of their arrival, he recorded, “The starvation and fatigue they had endured rendered them truly deplorable objects.”

  Among the expedition’s accomplishments was the exploration and the Preuss map of what Frémont named the “Great Basin,” the vast tract of mountains, deserts, and plains between the Wasatch Mountains of Utah and the Sierra Nevadas; the navigation of the “magnificent object,” as Frémont called the Great Salt Lake (explored in a leaky rubber boat at a time when the party was reduced to eating stewed skunk); and the first dependable map and description of the surrounding Bear River basin.4 They had mapped the waterways, vital to California-bound pioneers, that rose in the desert and then vanished in the sand before ever reaching the ocean: the Humboldt, which meandered across southern Utah before disappearing into a swampy lake bed Frémont named the Humboldt Sink; and the river that flowed easterly from the Sierras to its terminus in the Carson Sink, named for the expedition’s scout.

  (Frémont named the Humboldt—formerly called Mary’s River—but only rediscovered it. In 1833, Joseph Reddeford Walker, another of the Tennessee brotherhood of mountain men and at the time an associate of Benjamin Bonneville, led a trapping party of forty men to the river and made an arduous three-week crossing of the Sierra Nevada, descending between the Merced and Tuolumne Rivers. In the same expedition, Walker and his men discovered Yosemite Valley and were the first Americans to see the giant sequoia trees. Frémont was aware of the accomplishments of those who had gone before him and did not claim the “Pathfinder” title overly romantic writers bestowed on him.)

  The expedition reached Saint Louis in August 1844.

  Frémont would make many westward journeys in his tumultuous life, but his second expedition remained the most momentous, and his second Report even more widely read and admired than the first. For the Oregon-bound, Frémont’s new book, published in 1845, added an immense amount of data on the emigrant route there: topography, Indian inhabitants, game and plant life, and an optimistic view for the country
. “Commercially, the value of the Oregon Country must be great,” he wrote, “washed as it is by the north Pacific Ocean—fronting Asia—producing many of the elements of commerce—mild and healthy in its climate—and becoming, as it naturally will, a thoroughfare for the East India and China trade.”

  He had not discovered the Oregon Trail, but for the westering folk gathering in camps and rendezvous places around Independence and Westport Landing, he had mapped it, fixed on paper its waterways and landmarks, and made a perilous journey safer by telling everything he had learned about it.

  PART FIVE

  MEDICINE ROAD

  19

  Toward the Elephant

  “NOTHING IS WISE THAT DOES NOT HELP YOU ALONG.…”

  1

  Getting to Oregon took more than a route, a guide, grit, and work; it took money, and by 1840s standards, and the wage of the average emigrant, a lot of it. Sailing-ship passage was out of the question for most people. It was too expensive, too inaccessible, and too nightmarish for a farm family to contemplate. A thousand dollars was not an unusual fare for the 13,000-mile voyage out of New York or Boston, and the price was not much less from New Orleans. Either way, it was going to take five or six months on a converted merchantman butting the terrifying seas off Cape Horn to the Pacific. In 1846 a treaty opened a shortcut across the Isthmus of Panama, cutting the journey by two months’ time but adding new horrors: Passengers had to travel the malarial Chagres River by dugout canoes, the last miles by muleback or on foot to Panama City on the Pacific side, and then wait and hope to catch passage on a vessel heading for the Sandwich Islands, or the Alta California or Oregon coast.