Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  * * *

  On the evening of October 30, 1845, while Zachary Taylor and his army were waiting on the Nueces River, and as Thomas Larkin in Monterey was assimilating his secret instructions from the State Department, and Captain Frémont’s new exploring party had reached the Great Salt Lake, the President made note in his diary of what became a momentous meeting with a minor military officer: “I had a confidential conversation with Lieut. Gillespie of the Marine Corps, at eight o’clock P.M., on the subject of his secret mission on which he was about to go to California. His secret instructions and the letter to Thomas O. Larkin, United States consul at Monterey, in the Department of State, will explain the object of his mission.”

  The marine had been selected for the assignment by Navy Secretary George Bancroft and while the details and purpose of his mission were never adequately explained, Lieutenant Archibald Hamilton Gillespie, who would soon leave Washington loaded with mysterious papers, was destined for a role in the unfolding events that was far more significant than that of courier.

  A tall, red-haired career officer with a stylish, pointed beard and an air of self-importance, Gillespie was thirty-three at the time he met with the President. A native of Pennsylvania who had been orphaned at a young age, he enlisted in the marines at age twenty, rose to the rank of sergeant, then received a commission upon reenlisting. His superiors regarded him as a dependable, intelligent officer and a natural leader. He had had seagoing experience in the Pacific and, key to his new assignment, he spoke fluent Spanish.

  Before departing Washington, the ambitious lieutenant wrote Secretary Bancroft: “I cannot say what I would wish at a moment like this, setting forth on an adventurous enterprize, but I can assure you, you will not regret having named me for this service.”

  When Gillespie boarded a commercial steamer bound for Vera Cruz on November 16, he carried with him instructions for Consul Larkin (which he subsequently memorized and destroyed); orders for Commodore John Sloat of the United States Pacific Squadron at Mazatlán; a letter to Captain Frémont of the Topographical Engineers, who had departed five months earlier on a “surveying expedition” to California; and a packet of letters to Frémont from his wife Jessie, daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and from the senator as well.

  He traveled in mufti, posing as an invalid Scotch-whiskey salesman with interests in California. He planned to cross Mexico in a diligencia (stagecoach) to Mazatlán, rendezvous there with Commodore Sloat, then proceed to Monterey to meet with Larkin and to find Frémont.

  * * *

  The President’s final duty of 1845 involved yet another mission—a peace feeler to Mexico. To carry out this difficult if not impossible task, he appointed a former Louisiana congressman named John Slidell to travel to Vera Cruz. As Minister Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Slidell was to attempt to negotiate a boundary between the two countries, specifically the Rio Grande, with Mexico ceding all the territory east and north of the river for a sum of money yet to be determined. If Mexico demonstrated a willingness to sell New Mexico and California, the United States would offer up to forty million dollars for them.

  Slidell’s timing was unfortunate. He arrived on the Mexican coast at the end of the year, just as one government fell and another rose. In January, 1846, the new regime, headed by the anti-Yankee army general Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, not only refused Slidell an audience, but rejected all points of the proposed negotiation. There would be no recognition of the annexation of Texas by the United States, no boundary agreement, no sale of Mexican territory. Indeed, Paredes announced that he intended to march to the Rio Grande and defend Texas.

  Eighteen forty-five thus ended. Texas was admitted to the Union on December 28, Mexico was preparing to send an army north to the Rio Grande, Zachary Taylor’s army was poised to meet that army, and John Charles Frémont and his rough crew were marching into California.

  6

  Frémont

  1

  When John Charles Frémont led his buccaneer’s band of buckskinned mountain men, French-Canadians, and Delaware Indians down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada and into Sutter’s Fort in the winter of 1845, he had been six months on trail out of St. Louis. He loved the trail and camp, loved riding with a stalwart company of frontiersmen whose loyalty he prized above all things. In the prairies, deserts, and mountain passes, he had a singleness of purpose; in remote places, he found serenity in work, none of it too routine. Finding good game, graze, wood and water for making camp became a small daily triumph. He relished such chores as ordering cook fires started and tents pitched, and assigning pickets in two-hour shifts to watch the hobbled horses and pack animals, and to listen for unfamiliar sounds. He delighted in working into the night on his papers under the flickering light of a bull’s-eye lantern, and rousting the men at daybreak to cook meat and boil coffee for breakfast and to break camp. He found satisfaction in supervising the packing of mules and rolling stock for resuming the march at no later than six-thirty; he found solace in jotting, sketching, mapping, and making astronomical observations.

  He was never happier than in journeying–the going there rather than the getting there. The trail brought out all his gifts. He had a cool daring in times of peril. He was decisive—pointing the way, saying yes or no. He innovated, added to his assignment, and returned to his superiors with more than they had bargained for.

  Above all, he had a singular facility in commanding diverse and difficult men. He had experienced classrooms and drawing rooms, danced at balls and galas, sat in the sanctums of men of wealth and power, spoken confidently to the President of the United States. Yet he easily inspired the loyalty of men who knew nothing of social graces, were suspicious of education, wealth, and power, who could not name the President of the United States.

  The men who rode with him into Sutter’s Fort knew no rules or laws except the natural ones that governed the wilderness and their ability to survive in it. To all else, they were utterly independent and insubordinate, yet Frémont, time and again, led them.

  The trail’s end revealed another John Charles Frémont. On the journey, he could keep his balance while teetering between mountaintop and desert. But when he arrived at his destination, he resembled a sailor suddenly cast ashore, confounded by surer footing. In places shared by a citizenry and the trappings of civilization, the master of all the exigencies of the journey became a moody, directionless figure. Those he led and who enjoyed his company at the campfire and in the command tent now found him uncompanionable—peremptory, worried, humorless, quick to perceive a slight.

  He was an essential adventurer and man of action, and inaction confused and braked his racing mind and turned it toward ruinous matters, such as politics and ambition.

  He was an impatient man who believed that his destiny for greatness had been preordained and writ large in the celestial record. He had known for many years that his fate lay in the trackless lands west of the Mississippi and now, riding into the Sacramento Valley in December, 1845, a month from his thirty-third birthday, Frémont saw his destiny in finer focus. He had sensed it eighteen months ago when he first laid eyes on Sutter’s Fort.

  2

  Frémont’s father, John Charles, Senior, whose history is sketchy, was a royalist who fled from Napoleonic France, took ship to Santo Domingo, was captured by the British and spent some months in a West Indies prison before being permitted to emigrate to the United States. In 1808, he appeared in Richmond, Virginia, and there, while teaching at a private academy, met Anne Whiting Pryor, wife of an elderly horse-breeder and former military man. Anne and Charles ran away together and settled in Savannah, Georgia. On January 21, 1813, their first child, John Charles, was born and not long afterward, upon the death of Pryor, the couple married.

  After Charles Frémont died of pneumonia in 1818, Anne took her son and her two other children to Charleston, where she subsisted on a small inheritance and by taking in boarders. In his early teens, John attended Charleston College, excelli
ng in math and sciences, and although expelled at least once for habitual absences from his classes, he earned enough credits to land a teaching job in the city. Soon afterward, through the intervention of a family friend, Frémont, not yet twenty, was given a post as math instructor on the USS Natchez, embarking on a two-year cruise to South America.

  Frémont’s patron was Joel Roberts Poinsett, a Jacksonian politician who became the first American minister to Mexico (and the man who introduced to the United States the red tropical flower bearing his name). In 1837, as secretary of war in President Martin Van Buren’s cabinet, Poinsett again used his influence on Frémont’s behalf and was able to obtain for his protégé a commission as a lieutenant in the newly formed U.S. Topographical Corps. This appointment, and the subsequent posting to two surveys of the territory between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, sealed Frémont’s future. In the Minnesota and Dakota Territory, he worked alongside the eminent French topographer Joseph Nicollet, a man he loved as the father he had never known and whom he characterized as his “Yale College and Harvard,” and he saw his life’s work lying before him like one of Nicollet’s magnificent maps.

  Poinsett, stirred by the young man’s brilliance, manners, and natural charm, bestowed one other favor on his friend. This, the most significant gift in Frémont’s life, occurred in Washington when his patron introduced the lieutenant to the man who, more than Poinsett, or even more than Nicollet, would touch and transform his life. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri was the supreme expansionist leader in Congress and the principal supporter of government-sponsored surveys and explorations of the West. Frémont began dining often at the Benton home. He was held in thrall by Benton’s table talk—the huge, craggy-faced senator was a polished orator no matter the size of his audience—and by Benton’s lively and beautiful teenage daughter, Jessie. She in turn fell instantly in love with the handsome, articulate, Gallic-mannered Southerner.

  When Benton learned of their romance, Frémont felt the full fury of the senator’s notoriously volcanic temper and saw the map of his future turn to ashes. Benton forbade any contact between his beloved daughter and the penniless upstart who had betrayed his hospitality and trust. Soon after their confrontation, Poinsett, probably at Benton’s instruction, sent the lieutenant off in the summer of 1841 on an expedition to survey Iowa Territory.

  His three-month exile from Washington did nothing to cool the young couple’s ardor, however, and Frémont and Jessie Benton eloped and married that October. Benton’s wrath subsided after Jessie threatened to abandon him completely, and thereafter, with one future parting, the senator and his son-in-law became partners in their shared ambition to “open the West” and make it American.

  3

  In 1842, Benton and his expansionist political brethren muscled a thirty-thousand-dollar appropriation from Congress to survey the Oregon Trail, the growing route for emigration to the Pacific. The plan called for Joseph Nicollet to lead the expedition, but the Frenchman fell ill and Frémont, who had been assigned to serve as second in command, led the party. They journeyed to the fabled South Pass on the Continental Divide in Wyoming Territory—a saddle in the central Rocky Mountains, the great overland gateway to the Pacific—and the four-month venture inspired a detailed map and survey, and a splendid report. It also produced the first meeting between Frémont and a small, freckled, stoop-shouldered mountain man named Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson. This unprepossessing figure would eagerly share his deep and hard-won knowledge of the Western wilderness with the man he called “the Colonel” and follow Frémont—guide him, yet follow him—unstintingly in the years of adventure and conquest ahead.

  Of the great inspirations in Frémont’s life—his mother, Joel Poinsett, Joseph Nicollet, Thomas Hart Benton and Jessie Benton—Carson occupied a special niche. Frémont loved the little gray-eyed Kentuckian and came to regard him, and write of him, as the very apotheosis of the Western frontier, one whose name ought to be linked to those of Ulysses, Jason, Hector, Nimrod, the Norse heroes, and the knights of the Round Table.

  Carson had been orphaned at a young age and had run away from home at sixteen to work as a wrangler on the Santa Fé Trail. Over the next decade, with the town of Taos, the fur-trade center eighty miles northeast of Santa Fé in Mexican New Mexico, as his pied-à-terre, Kit found work as a teamster. In 1828, working with Ewing Young and his fur brigade of forty men, he made his first expedition to California. In this venture, he was involved in a fight with Klamath Indians as the trappers made their way north along the Sacramento River.

  Over the years before he met Frémont, Carson trapped with such fabled frontiersmen as Jim Bridger, Joe Meek, and Tom “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick, fought Crow, Blackfeet, and Comanche war parties, and traveled the rivers and mountains from Missouri to the Pacific, from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande. He fought a duel with a French trapper at the Green River trappers’ rendezvous in the summer of 1835 in which he “got his hair parted” and wounded his adversary. He married an Arapaho girl and after she died, “took up” with a Cheyenne woman. He trapped and hunted for the Hudson’s Bay Company on the Mary’s River in Nevada and on the Madison in Wyoming, traded among the Navajo, and worked as a hunter out of Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas.

  In May, 1842, on a steamer headed up the Missouri, he met Frémont and they struck up an enduring friendship. On the deck of the riverboat, Carson, then thirty-three, volunteered to join the explorer on the Oregon Trail journey and, as he later remembered the moment, said, “I told him that I had been some time in the mountains and thought I could guide him to any point he wished to go.”

  Frémont made some inquiries and hired Carson as scout and guide at a hundred dollars a month.

  The Oregon Trail expedition ended in the late summer of 1842. Carson left Frémont at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and in January, 1843, traveled on to Bent’s Fort, then to Taos. In February, he converted to Catholicism and married María Josefa Jaramillo, age fifteen. She was the daughter of a prominent citizen of Taos and sister-in-law of Charles Bent, who had opened Bent’s Fort in 1833. Seventeen years earlier, Charles Bent had hired a then-sixteen-year-old runaway named Kit Carson as a horse wrangler on a trading expedition to Santa Fé.

  * * *

  Frémont returned to Washington in October and worked furiously with Jessie, dictating to her in numbing detail the facts of the journey. Jessie took her husband’s data and observations and transformed them into a work of literature—lustrously written, as exciting as an adventure novel, filled with descriptive passages, lore, colorful anecdotes, and advice to overland travelers. The report, something entirely new among the normally labored prose of government documents, was printed in an edition of ten thousand copies and made available to the public. The book appeared in the spring of 1843, and despite its ponderous title, 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, it won instant acclaim in the press.

  Thomas Hart Benton, the chief Oregon Trail and westward emigration boomer in Congress, was thrilled with the work of his son-in-law, and vindicated in having pushed him to succeed Joseph Nicollet to lead the expedition. The senator jumped on the success of the Oregon Trail report and engineered a follow-up mission for Frémont. This time, the exploration would continue on over the South Pass and to the mouth of the Columbia River, in Oregon territory.

  In May, 1843, Frémont organized his party in St. Louis. Among the thirty who signed on were men who had followed or guided him to South Pass the year before, and others who would be notable Frémont men in years to come. Kit Carson joined the party at Bent’s Fort, and Kit’s friend Tom “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick also came aboard. This big Irishman had trapped and traded among Blackfeet, Crows, Arikaras, Pawnees, Cheyennes, Shoshones, Arapahos, and Sioux since 1816, and had guided a wagon train from Missouri to Oregon in 1841. His hair had turned snow-white after a run-in with a Gros Ventre war party in 1832, and h
is left hand had been maimed in the dim past when a firearm exploded.

  Other expedition members, trusted trailsmen, included the voyageurs Basil Lajeunesse and his brother François; Theodore Talbot, a Kentucky senator’s son who became Frémont’s loyal lieutenant and second in command; and an eighteen-year-old free black man, Jacob Dodson, one of the Benton family’s servants.

  In St. Louis, Frémont obtained permission to draw some breech-loading, smoothbore Hall muskets, carbines, and gunpowder from the city’s army arsenal. The request was approved by an officer who would reenter Frémont’s life in years to come. This was Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, commander of the Third Military Department. A longtime friend of Senator Benton’s, he had known Jessie since her childhood.

  When Frémont first met him at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Kearny, not yet fifty years old, was a thirty-year army veteran whose first battle had been at Queenston Heights, above the Niagara River in Canada, in the War of 1812. Since 1836, he had commanded one of the army’s elite units, the First Dragoon Regiment, headquartered at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and in 1843, in St. Louis.

  He was a stiff, humorless, ploddingly unimaginative professional soldier with a reputation as a martinet. He was also courageous and dependable, an officer whose life had followed a single path, that which connected the orders of his superiors to his prompt and exact execution of them.

  Kearny greeted Frémont cordially at Jefferson Barracks and no doubt asked about Senator Benton, Jessie, and the Frémonts’ newly born daughter. Then he signed the application for arms and powder and does not seem to have questioned the request for a brass howitzer, which Frémont thought would be useful in the event of Indian attack. The gun, its thirty-three-inch brass barrel mounted on a large-wheeled carriage, had been patterned after the French cannons used by mountain troops in Algeria and the Pyrenees. With its range of a thousand yards, the twelve-pounder (from the weight of the iron ball it fired) was the lightest piece of army artillery. For a peaceful, exploratory expedition, it was an odd and cumbersome weapon to choose, but Frémont was oblivious to the possibility that a cannon might look warlike to the Mexicans, some of whose territory he would need to cross, or to the British, who held Oregon territory in a fragile joint sovereignty with the United States. These fears did occur to those in command of the Topographical Corps and the Ordnance Department in Washington, but no orders to return the howitzer to the armory were received by the explorer before he and his party departed St. Louis on May 13. The cannon, and its powder and ball, was dragged over some three thousand miles of wilderness until abandoned many months later in a Sierra snowdrift.