Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  In the end, Frémont grudgingly obeyed orders: the horse herd was surrendered, the California Battalion was mustered out on April 19, Mason sailed to Monterey to assume command of the Tenth Military District—now the official army name for California—and soon afterward, the explorer followed with what remained of his original topographical party.

  * * *

  On May 13, Kearny notified the adjutant general of the army in Washington that he would soon be returning to the East with Lieutenant Colonel Frémont, whose conduct in California, he said, “has been such that I shall be compelled on arriving in Missouri to arrest him and send him under charges to report to you.” He did not say that Frémont had yet to be informed of the impending action against him.

  Toward the end of May, at about the time he learned from Washington dispatches that General Scott had captured Vera Cruz and was marching on Mexico City, Kearny met with Frémont and the Topographical Corps men and had orders read that they were to proceed east under his command on May 31 and that any who sought to be discharged from the service would be permitted to remain in California.

  Frémont had several requests to make of the general. He asked for time to locate two of his original expedition men, Ned Kern, the artist and one-time officer in charge at Sutter’s Fort, and Henry King, a veteran of the explorer’s western treks. This was refused. He asked if Kearny would authorize payment of financial obligations that Frémont had incurred as governor and was told no. He asked that members of the California Battalion who did not join the army receive back pay due them and this was denied. He asked permission to return to St. Louis, even if at his own expense, by either the Gila River in the south or the Salt Lake in the north and the answer was no. He asked for time to gather up his geological and botanical specimens and scientific instruments left in Yerba Buena, and this too was denied.

  He was required to turn over what surveying equipment he had to Kearny aide Lieutenant Henry W. Halleck, and in a particularly galling order, was instructed to camp outside Monterey with his men while awaiting the return home.

  3

  On May 31, 1847, General Kearny, with Colonel Cooke and sixty-two men plus a mule pack train and small horse herd, marched out of Monterey, capital of the new United States Territory of California, on the trail north to New Helvetia. Six months had passed since he and Kit Carson had led his small, trail-weary dragoon force into Warner’s Ranch.

  Among those in the Kearny column were Lieutenant Colonel Frémont and nineteen of his original topographical force, including his Delaware escort. Eighteen months had passed since he had led his small and exhausted exploring party into Sutter’s Fort.

  Frémont and his men were posted a mile or two in the rear, as if in quarantine, “compelled to trail eastward at the chariot wheels of the General,” as the explorer’s biographer, Allan Nevins, put it.

  The collection of indignities devised by Kearny for the pariah in his assemblage were numerous and uniformly petty. When the group arrived at Sutter’s outpost on June 13, the hospitable Swiss greeted the general with a salute from the fort’s cannon and invited him and his officers to a dinner he had prepared in their honor. Frémont was not invited, a circumstance entirely agreeable to Sutter, who still smarted over the explorer’s commandeering of his fort during the Bear Flag revolt and over the jailing of General Vallejo and the other prisoners there.

  Another calculated insult arose when the company departed New Helvetia for the long journey east and it was learned that Kearny had hired Le Gros Fallon as his guide through country well known to Frémont and any number of his veteran explorers.

  As the final irony in the journey home, Commodore Stockton and his party of fifty officers (including Archibald Gillespie), sailors, and marines departed from Sonoma about a month behind the Kearny column. Thus, with Kearny in the lead and Stockton in the rear, Frémont was once again sandwiched between the rival conquerors of California.

  * * *

  The single memorable event on the return journey was the arrival at Truckee Lake on June 22, where Kearny and his company saw the pitiful remains of the Donner party, a rubble of bones, remnants of wagons, scattered goods and clothing and shattered crockery, rickety, fire-blackened cabins and lean-tos. The essentials of what had happened to the emigrants during the past winter were known, and Sutter, among others, told the story often about how the Missouri farmers George and Jacob Donner and their emigrant train had reached this place at the end of October, 1846, four months out of Independence.

  They had abandoned the proven California Trail after being told of a shortcut to the Sierra foothills, and by the time they reached the Humboldt River in September and Truckee Lake a month later, the Sierra winter had locked them in. They had rested for five fatal days before attempting to cross the mountains, allowing their surviving livestock to wander and become buried in snow. They had not gathered sufficient firewood; there was no game. They camped in cabins on the lake and in tents and brushwood arbors and huts at Alder Creek. There were eighty-seven of them, nearly half small children, and they were reduced to eating brush mice, powdered bone, bark and twigs, and boiled rawhide. A group of fifteen of them started on December 16 from the lake camp to cross the Sierras on makeshift snowshoes with six days’ rations. Their travail lasted thirty-two days. Eight of them died in the snow and two Indian guides were shot. The corpses were eaten by the survivors. The dead were also cannibalized at Truckee Lake. Once word finally reached Sutter’s Fort and ranches around New Helvetia, relief parties were sent out through the snowbound passes to rescue the survivors. Of the eighty-seven Donner party emigrants, forty-eight reached California.

  Kearny’s and Frémont’s men buried what bones they found and burned the remains of the cabins, then moved on to the Truckee River, the Humboldt Sink, the Humboldt River, across the Snake and on to the Oregon Trail. South Pass was reached on July 24 and Fort Leavenworth on August 22, ending a sixty-six-day march of nearly two thousand miles.

  Frémont had no time to enjoy the journey’s end; indeed, he barely had time to find billets for his men and smack the trail dust from his hat before being summoned to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Clifton Wharton, the post commander. There he found Kearny waiting in the ominously familiar arrangement of having a witness on hand. In Wharton’s presence, the general read a document instructing the explorer to turn over all horses, mules, and other public property to the Leavenworth quartermaster, to arrange for the accounts of his nineteen men to be paid, and “having performed the above duty,” Kearny intoned, Lieutenant Colonel Frémont “will consider himself under arrest, and will then repair to Washington City, and report himself to the adjutant general of the army.”

  Although he certainly suspected that he faced some kind of official reprimand—his exile at the rear of Kearny’s party and similar affronts signaled that—the pronouncement of August 22 was the first that Frémont knew of Kearny’s plan, formulated six months before, to place him under arrest. And he had enough familiarity with the procedures of military justice to know that “arrest” was but a step removed from court-martial.2

  Frémont claimed that after news of his arrest spread, none of the officers at the post would speak to him or extend to him or his men any of the courtesies that were normally commonplace. He said that when he brought the horses and mules up for delivery to the post quartermaster, he, his men, and the animals were forced to wait in the sun five hours before they were officially received.

  Stockton, Gillespie, and the commodore’s party arrived at Fort Leavenworth a few days after Kearny, and in the last week of August, Frémont boarded the steamer Martha for the short voyage south on the Missouri to Westport Landing, where Jessie waited.

  Twenty-seven months had passed since they were last together; Lily was just a baby when he had left. Jessie noted the graying of her husband’s beard and was delighted at his garish Californio outfit of broad hat, fancy trousers, and red sash.

  The Frémonts took the Martha downriver for a reunio
n with Senator Benton before moving on to Washington.

  Kearny preceded them and by the time they reached St. Louis, the general was en route to Washington for a meeting with President Polk.

  22

  Court-martial

  1

  Frémont returned to St. Louis a conquering hero. A mob of well-wishers hoping to catch a glimpse of him and the always-luminous Jessie greeted the Martha at the pier-head and clamored for a speech; invitations poured in from the city’s social and political elite. But the explorer made only a few innocuous remarks referring to his California adventures and attended no parties. He could not linger in St. Louis; he needed to move on to Washington to clear his name of the grave charges Kearny had leveled against him. What time he had he spent with his family, giving Jessie, and especially her father, the history that had led to his arrest, from the fatal January 17 meeting with the general in Los Angeles to the August 22 arrival at Fort Leavenworth, where he had been placed under arrest.

  Benton and Jessie had learned some of the story before the Martha docked and their hero stepped ashore. Frémont himself, in the infrequent letters he wrote home, had told of the Stockton-Kearny feud and his ordeal between the two men, and there had been other sources of information out of California as well.

  In June, Major William “Owl” Russell, the explorer’s close friend and, during his brief governorship, his secretary of state, came through St. Louis. He brought the unsettling news of Kearny’s assumption of power in California and was carrying to Washington petitions signed by many influentials in the southern part of the Territory beseeching federal authorities to reinstall Frémont as governor.

  (Neither Russell nor the explorer knew it at the time, but anti-Frémont petitions and letters were also arriving in the capital, said to have been gathered by disgruntled former California Battalion volunteers “clamorous for their pay.” Other letters opposing Frémont were written by his mortal enemy, Richard Mason, by Thomas Larkin, and by certain arribeños who had not forgotten the murders of José Berreyesa and the De Haro brothers at San Rafael in June 1846.)

  Newspapers were another source of information, mostly dubious, on the controversy. The New Orleans Picayune, Louisville Journal, and St. Louis Republican, among others, carried peculiarly skewed reports and first-person “columns” giving readers the scenario that Kearny was the honorable professional soldier trying to do his duty, thwarted at every step by the power-hungry amateurs, Stockton and Frémont. Since some of the unsigned newspaper work contained details known only among Kearny’s intimate circle of officers, the authors were suspected to be Colonel Richard Mason, Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, and Lieutenant William Emory.

  Kit Carson, Edward Beale, and Alexis Godey had also preceded the explorer to St. Louis and brought news to Senator Benton of the dire events in California—Kearny’s seizing of the command primacy in Stockton’s absence, his usurpation of the governorship, his humiliating initiatives against Frémont.

  Carson had arrived in St. Louis in May and told what he knew. Benton, his always volatile temperament by now roiling over his son-in-law’s predicament, took Kit and Jessie with him to Washington to make a personal visit to the President.

  On June 7, 1847, at the time Frémont and his nineteen men were camped in exile at Sutter’s Fort awaiting the departure east, Jessie escorted the celebrated frontiersman to the President’s office. Polk was charmed by Carson and they chatted at length, the President acknowledging the scout’s services in the war by awarding him a commission as a second lieutenant “of Mounted Rifles” at a monthly pay of $33.–33 plus $24 for rations, $16 for forage for two horses, and a servant at $16.50—a total of $89.83 a month. Kit thus happily left the capital to return home to Taos and his wife Josefa.

  Jessie held Polk in much less thrall. He listened with as much patience as he could summon, giving her the same courtesy he extended to her powerful father, whose several visits on behalf of the California intrigues had taxed the presidential patience. The man who, with his cabinet secretaries, had created the command commotion in California, noted in his diary, “Mrs Frémont seemed anxious to elicit from me some expression of approbation for her husband’s conduct, but I evaded. In truth, I consider Colonel Frémont was greatly in the wrong when he refused to obey the orders issued to him by General Kearny. I think General Kearny was right also in his controversy with Commodore Stockton.”

  * * *

  On September 16, three days after General Winfield Scott’s victory at Chapúltepec, the final battle of the war in Mexico, Frémont arrived in Washington and reported to Adjutant General of the Army Roger Jones. He asked for a thirty-day delay in his trial in order to amass his papers, make a study of newspaper reports, and await Commodore Stockton’s arrival in the capital.

  “I wish a full trial, and a speedy one,” he wrote in a letter for the record to General Jones. “The charges against me by Brigadier General Kearny, and subsidiary accusations made against me in all the departments of my conduct (military, civil, political, and moral) while in California, if true, would subject me to be cashiered and shot, under the rules and articles of war, and to infamy in the public opinion.” He said it was his intention to “meet these charges in all their extent and for that purpose to ask a trial upon every point of allegation or insinuation against me, waiving all objections to forms and technicalities, and allow the widest range to all possible testimony.”

  Frémont, aware that Kearny had preceded him to Washington and had been closeted with high-ranking army officers, the War Department, and the President, made certain that the adjutant general understood the indignities he had suffered before charges were made against him, as well as the circumstances of his arrest. He said bitterly, “Brought home by General Kearny, and marched in his rear, I did not know of his design to arrest me until the moment of its execution at Fort Leavenworth. He then informed me that among the charges which he had referred were mutiny, disobedience of orders, assumption of powers, etc.…”

  * * *

  In late October, a few days before the court-martial was to open, Benton paid a final visit to the President and, in a fireplace lecture, made a virulent argument against his one-time friend, Stephen Watts Kearny. Polk, true to his custom, was exasperatingly noncommittal. The President considered Kearny “a good officer and an intelligent gentleman” and, after a visit with the general on September 11, recorded in his journal that neither man had talked about the “difficulties” in California. “I did not introduce the subject and I was glad that he did not,” Polk noted.

  As to Benton’s importunities, the President wrote, “I have always been on good terms with Senator Benton but he is a man of violent passions and I should not be surprised if he became my enemy because all his wishes are not gratified.…”

  2

  After a day of preliminaries, the trial opened on the overcast Indian-summer Wednesday of November 3, 1847, at the Washington Arsenal, a shabby wooden building dimly lit by sunlight filtering through windows up near the high-domed roof. The court consisted of fourteen officers—three colonels, five lieutenant colonels, and four majors—led by Brevet Brigadier General G. M. Brooke of the Fifth Infantry and Major John Fitzgerald Lee, judge advocate. Eleven of the fourteen officers had thirty or more years of army service; four were graduates of the military academy at West Point.

  In the audience there were newspapermen, congressmen, a miscellany of Washington bureaucrats and hangers-on, and Frémont faithfuls such as Alexis Godey and Dick Owens (Kit Carson had returned to California). Jessie was there, dressed in a lovely wine-colored dress, her striking oval face shaded by a burgundy-velvet bonnet, and her sister Eliza, in a gay blue ensemble. Eliza had suggested they dress in black for the occasion, but Jessie rejected the idea as too funereal.

  Frémont sat with his advisors. At the prosecutor’s table were General Kearny; his Army of the West second in command, Captain Henry S. Turner; and Major Lee, the judge advocate.

  After the a
dministering of oaths, the explorer requested of the court permission to have his brother-in-law, William Carey Jones, an attorney married to Jessie’s older sister Eliza, and Senator Thomas Hart Benton as counsel at his defense table. This was granted under military rules, which permitted civilian attorneys to serve in advisory roles but did not allow them to cross-examine witnesses. In this, Frémont would have to serve as his own defense lawyer.

  Following various courtesies and questions, the hushed audience heard the judge advocate read the charges against John Charles Frémont.

  The first and weightiest of these was the charge of mutiny, the allegation that Frémont had refused to obey orders of his superior, Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny, beginning on January 17, 1847, when he declared that he would continue to “report and receive orders, as heretofore, from the Commodore [Stockton]” and that he would continue, against contrary orders, as “Military Commandant of the Territory of California,” which title he had employed in signing his letter to Kearny.

  There were eleven specifications under the mutiny charge, with documents supporting them dating between January 17 and May 9, 1847, the latter date approximating the dispute with Colonel Mason in Los Angeles.

  The second charge, “Disobedience of the Lawful Command of his Superior Officer,” contained seven specifications between the same dates, and the third, “Conduct to the Prejudice of Good Order and Military Discipline,” carried five specific charges.