Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  * * *

  Early in September, the expedition reached the Great Salt Lake, and in November, Fort Vancouver, in Oregon territory. There its assignment ostensibly expired, but instead of turning toward home, Frémont led his men south to explore the Great Basin country between the Rockies and Sierra Nevada. Then, in a move that delighted Benton and his California-covetous colleagues, he took his party across the Sierras in January, 1844, and into Mexican California. They reached Sutter’s Fort in the first week of March, purchased forage, supplies, and pack animals, and rested for nearly three weeks. Frémont and John A. Sutter met frequently over food and wine and exchanged information and philosophical ideas. The convivial empresario of New Helvetia made certain that the explorer understood his dream of empire and how strongly he encouraged emigrants to his lands, particularly Americans. Sutter saw the future of California as an American province, and Frémont agreed.

  The expedition resumed its journey late in the month, this time heading south down the San Joaquin Valley and into the Mojave Desert, then northeast again, through Nevada, Utah, and back to Bent’s Fort on July 1.

  In August, Frémont returned to St. Louis, where he was reunited with Jessie and her parents. Soon after that, the family embarked by stagecoach for Washington, where the explorer and his beloved amanuensis set to work on his new report.

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  In his absence, Frémont learned, his father-in-law had been present—and nearly killed—in an awful explosion aboard the steam frigate Princeton while on a Potomac cruise. The calamity had occurred on the last day of February past, at the time the explorer and his men were making their way toward Sutter’s Fort.

  The Princeton was the navy’s finest steamship, the first to be driven by screw propellers instead of sidewheels, a man-of-war equipped with the most powerful gun battery afloat: twelve forty-two-pound carronades—blunt-barreled, short-range cannons—plus two monster guns, the biggest in existence, capable of firing a 225-pound iron round shot. Each of these cannons measured fifteen feet from butt to two-foot-wide muzzle, and each weighed fourteen tons.

  The commanding officer of the Princeton, Captain Robert Field Stockton, had supervised the ship’s construction in Philadelphia the year before, and in February, 1844, had taken four hundred Washington dignitaries on a Potomac cruise. Among his special guests were President John Tyler, Tyler’s son, daughter and son-in-law, cabinet members, the secretary of the navy, certain powerful members of Congress, including Senator Benton, and seventy-six-year-old Dolley Madison, widow of the fourth President of the United States.

  As the frigate steamed toward Fort Washington and Mount Vernon, the ship’s band playing “Hail, Columbia,” Captain Stockton proudly demonstrated his guns, firing twenty-one-gun salutes with the carronades and twice ordering the firing of the Peacemaker, one of the mammoth cannons, after which the guests went below to the officers’ mess for a lavish banquet and champagne toasts. When Navy Secretary Thomas W. Gilmer asked Stockton for one final demonstration of the Peacemaker, the captain went on deck to supervise it, followed by many of the Princeton’s visitors.

  Senator Benton with Senator S. S. Phelps of Vermont and other guests gathered at the starboard rail; Tyler’s secretary of state, Abel Upshur, and Secretary Gilmer among others watched from the port side. As the gun crew loaded the Peacemaker with a twenty-five-pound blank powder charge, the President and his family remained below, listening to the band.

  When Stockton shouted “Fire!” the great gun blew to pieces at a point about two feet from the breech, hurtling a one-ton chunk of steel backward, its shrapnel spraying the port rail and instantly killing Secretaries Upshur and Gilmer and four others.

  Stockton, standing at the gun, miraculously survived, though the blast singed the hair from his head and the beard from his face.

  Benton had escaped, shaken and in shock, but uninjured.

  A court of inquiry later cleared the captain of any responsibility for the tragic accident and determined that the source of the gun explosion lay in a metallurgical problem.

  Stockton, three months later, commanded the Princeton in the Gulf of Mexico and within a year and a half was promoted to the rank of commodore. His new assignment called for him to take command of the navy’s Pacific Squadron and to proceed on his new flagship Congress around Cape Horn to Mexican California.

  * * *

  With publication of his second book-length report, three times longer than the first and ten thousand copies printed and distributed, Frémont seemed to have reached the apogee of his career. Winfield Scott, commanding general of the army, had recommended him for promotion to a brevet captaincy (approved by President John Tyler just before he left office); the explorer had become a national hero, called “the Pathfinder,” his name a symbol of American fortitude, adventure, and spirit. He was dashing and handsome, exuding a Gallic charm and a Childe Harold-like mystery. He had at his side the beautiful and accomplished Jessie. He was as comfortable and confident mixing with men of power in the staterooms of Washington politics as journeying into the wilderness with such peerless frontiersmen as Kit Carson—who, as a result of the munificent praise in Frémont’s books, had his own fame and following.

  In June, 1845, within weeks of the meeting with the President in which he had spoken of the need for accurate maps of the trans-Mississippi West, Frémont left St. Louis for Bent’s Fort.

  The new expedition seemed conventional work for a captain of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. His mission was to explore the Great Basin, the vastness of mountain and desert running north to the Columbia Plateau, south to the Mojave and sandwiched between the Rockies and the Sierra range bordering California.

  In truth, he had a greater purpose. He served as westward agent for his forceful father-in-law, and he served an even more puissant master, the President of the United States, who intended making facts of the hopes and prophesies of Benton and his followers in Washington.

  Frémont’s ostensible duties lay in the Great Basin, with the secondary work of surveying and mapping a wagon road between Missouri and Great Salt Lake, then over the mountain passes to the Pacific. But although it was not mentioned in his official orders from the Bureau of Topographical Engineers, his real destination was California, “the road to India,” “the garden of the world,” as the great senator dreamily called it.

  * * *

  Frémont had most of his expedition members signed up by the time he reached Bent’s Fort in August. Army lieutenants Theodore Talbot, James W. Abert, and William Guy Peck considered it an honor to accompany their celebrated captain, as did the civilian artist-cartographer Edward M. Kern of Philadelphia. Among the French-Canadian hunter-trappers gathered in St. Louis were Basil Lajeunesse, Raphael Prou, and Auguste Archambeau. The “free colored man,” Jacob Dodson, was there, as were a gunsmith named Stepp; Denny, an Iowa half-breed; and twelve Delaware Indians recruited from a settlement near Westport Landing, on the Missouri River. The Delawares, remnants of the tribe that had been pushed ever westward since the 1750s, were led by chiefs Segundai and Swanok, who became Frémont’s colorful personal bodyguards. In the East, their tribal name was Lenni-Lenape, “real men,” and the explorer learned the truth behind the name in the months to come. Among Western tribes deemed enemies, the Delawares were killers and scalp-takers; at all times, they were utterly fearless and dependable trailbreakers and hunters.

  “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick had also signed the three-dollars-a-day contract, as had Lucien Maxwell, out of Kaskaskia, Illinois, a hunter-trader among the Utes and plains tribes, plus two other mountain legends, Joseph Reddeford Walker and Alexis Godey.

  Joe Walker, a forty-seven-year-old Tennessean, had been in the West since 1819, tramping and trapping from the high Rockies to the Rio Grande. During his Santa Fé Trail days, he had even been a prisoner of the Mexicans for a time. He had also served as the first sheriff of Jackson County, Missouri, and in 1833, with a party of forty free trappers, made a three-week crossing of t
he Sierra Nevada, and in November of the same year, discovered Yosemite Valley.

  In the twelve years since his first trek to the Pacific, Walker had become a hardened California hand, leading many parties to the Mexican province to trade horses and mules, and serving as guide for California-bound parties out of Fort Bridger, on the Green River of Wyoming.

  Walker had been with Frémont in ’42, as had Alexis Godey, another of the explorer’s prized trailsmen. Twenty-seven at the time, he came eagerly to join the new expedition. Godey had trapped with Jim Bridger in the Rockies and had made more than one trip as far west as the Mary’s River in Nevada. He was a close associate and friend of Kit Carson’s and earned Frémont’s high praise for his dependability and cool courage. These words also applied to another Carson crony, Richard “Dick” Owens, an Ohio-born mountaineer, a proficient hunter-trapper and Indian fighter. He had a special knack for stealing horses from the Blackfeet and Shoshone, and on at least one occasion, from the Mexicans in southern California.

  Frémont asserted that Carson, Godey, and Owens, had they served in Napoleon’s army, would have all been field marshals. He wrote: “Carson of great courage; quick and complete perception, taking in at a glance the advantages as well as the chances for defeat; Godey, insensible to danger, of perfect coolness and stubborn resolution; Owens, equal in courage to the others, and in coolness equal to Godey, had the coup d’ôeil of a chess player, covering the whole field with a glance that sees the best move.”

  Carson, when he returned to New Mexico after the 1842 expedition, had gone into partnership with Owens, and the two set up a farming operation on the Little Cimarron River fifty miles from Taos, where Kit built a cabin for his beloved Josefa. But he had promised Frémont that if called, he would come, and when the message arrived from Bent’s, he and Owens sold their ranch, for about half of what they had paid for it, Kit kissed Josefa good-bye, and the two men rode north to the Arkansas River.

  * * *

  They rode northwest out of Bent’s on August 16, 1845, Frémont and his sixty-two “experienced, self-reliant” men, heading a pack train of two hundred animals and a two-hundred-fifty-head cattle herd. In two months, this somewhat suspiciously overmanned and overarmed expedition crossed the Upper Colorado, trekked into the wastelands of eastern Utah, followed old Indian and trapper trails across the Green River, traversed the Wasatch Mountains, and arrived at the Great Salt Lake in October.

  They rode across the salt plain and through gray seas of sagebrush until, in late October, they reached the sluggish Mary’s River, which Frémont renamed the Humboldt after the German geographer Friedrich Alexander von Humboldt. At the camp on the river, on November 5, 1845, the explorer split his party into two topographical units, rendezvousing with them on November 27 at Walker Lake (named for Joe Walker). This stunningly pristine lake, a hundred miles northeast of the Yosemite Valley, was alive with cutthroat trout, the fish so abundant that the men could kick them ashore to be killed, cleaned, and roasted on the spot.

  On November 29, Frémont again divided his expedition. Most of the men, commanded by Talbot and guided by Joe Walker, marched south along the eastern escarpment of the Sierras and crossed into the San Joaquin Valley. Talbot was to map the eastern flank of the range and its passes and rendezvous in the south after the rest of the party reached Sutter’s Fort and reprovisioned. Frémont took Carson and fifteen men, including some of the Delawares, and struck out for the Truckee River. Six days were spent crossing the mountains through what later became known as Donner Pass to reach the south fork of the American River. From that point it was an easy march through the pine and manzanita country to the broad flatlands of the Sacramento Valley of Alta California.

  Frémont led his men into Sutter’s Fort on December 10, 1845.

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  Hawk’s Peak

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  Frémont and his men rode into the Sacramento Valley that winter in the wake of the latest efforts to stem the flow of American settlers in the province. Just a month before the exploration party arrived, the commanding general of Alta California, José Castro, had carried out orders from Mexico City by issuing a decree ordering all American emigrants in the northern province to proceed to Sonoma. There, at Colonel Vallejo’s direction, they were to swear an oath to obey Mexican laws and apply for a license to settle in the province. Those whose applications were denied would be banished from the country.

  In 1845, there were about eight hundred Americans in California, most of them distributed on small farms and homesteads in the north, within a horseback ride to New Helvetia. Some of the earlier arrivals had become Mexican citizens; the more recent emigrants had not bothered to take the oath and had not been pressured to do so.

  Castro’s procrustean orders produced little but dissension and anger among the Americans, only twenty of them showing up in Sonoma to apply for the settler’s license. The general and an escort rode north from Monterey to Sonoma to visit Vallejo on November 11 and to reinforce the decree demanding that the Americans come forth.

  Given the war clouds darkening over the Rio Grande, Castro’s orders from Mexico were a wise if belated attempt to identify the Americans who had entered California without sanction—which meant virtually all of the newcomers—and who might represent a threat in the event of war with the United States.

  Californios drew little distinction between them, these Americans being sorted out, but they were a disparate lot.

  William Brown Ide, a Massachusetts man, came to the Sacramento Valley to see if he could succeed at something. He had worked as a carpenter and farmer in New England, and even as an occasional schoolteacher in Ohio and Illinois. None of these endeavors proved very successful and at age forty-seven, a skinny, pious teetotaler with a wife and five children, he joined an emigrant train in Independence, Missouri, bound for Oregon. Near Fort Hall, Idaho, Ide, a Tennessean named John Grigsby, and several others turned their wagons south and made a harrowing crossing of the Sierra Nevada to Sutter’s lands.

  Ide may have failed in the East, but he was an industrious man, no stranger to hard work, and he soon found a tract of rich land north of New Helvetia, built a cabin, and began clearing and plowing.

  Besides Grigsby, there were several other squatters a day or two by horse from Ide’s place. Robert “Long Bob” Semple was a six-foot-eight Kentucky dentist and printer. Granville Swift, also from Kentucky, claimed descent from Daniel Boone and worked for the Swiss as a hunter. Peter Lassen, the Danish blacksmith, became a trusted Sutter lieutenant and a Sacramento Valley hunter and rancher. Moses Carson, older half-brother of Kit’s, was a veteran fur trader and Indian fighter who had become a Mexican citizen in 1836 when he settled in the Russian River area. Trappers in the waterways off the Sacramento included Henry L. Ford of New Hampshire, a twenty-four-year-old army deserter; William O. “Le Gros” (Big) Fallon, a burly Irishman who had followed beaver streams from New Mexico to California; John Neal, an Irish sailor and likely another fugitive from justice; and Samuel J. Hensley, a Kentuckian whom Sutter regarded as “of strong will and well-balanced mind, generous, temperate, and brave.”

  Another resident in the valley, William Todd of Illinois, had the distinction of being the nephew of Mary Todd, who in 1842 married a Kentucky-born lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Todd had been in California only a few months when, in April, 1846, he wrote home:

  If there are any persons in Sangamon who speak of crossing the Rocky Mountains to this country, tell them my advice is to stay at home. There you are well off. You can enjoy all the comforts of life—live under a good government and have peace and plenty around you—a country whose soil is not surpassed by any in the world, having good seasons and yielding timely crops. Here everything is on the other extreme: the government is tyrannical, the weather unseasonable, poor crops, and the necessaries of life not to be had except at the most extortionate prices, and frequently not then.…

  He added a prescient note: “The Mexicans talk every spring and fall of driving
the foreigners out.… They must do it this year or they can never do it. There will be a revolution before long.… If here, I will take a hand in it.”

  Among the most volatile of the emigrants, one who had shown up at Sutter’s doorstep in 1841, was a big, stuttering, excitable frontiersman with a bushy, tobacco-juice-stained beard, a mane of graying hair, and fierce bloodshot eyes. This specimen of a mountaineer, Ezekial Merritt by name, had a shadowy history. He hinted that he had been with Joseph Reddeford Walker in 1833 during the expedition that discovered Yosemite Valley. Historian Hubert H. Bancroft described him as “a coarse-grained, loud-mouthed, unprincipled, whiskey-drinking, quarrelsome fellow, well adapted to the use that was made of him in promoting the filibusters’ schemes.” And John Charles Frémont, who may have known Merritt before 1845, said he was “a rugged man, fearless and simple; taking delight in incurring risks, but tractable and not given to asking questions when there was something he was required to do.”

  Both Bancroft and Frémont were correct in their varied descriptions of this obstreperous man. In making a point of Merritt’s unquestioning nature, the explorer was describing the perfect Frémont man, and as events to come were to prove, Merritt became just that.