Jessie

by Judy Alter

  "By then it had been over sixteen days since Williams and his men had left, and they should have been back with help. I decided I simply had to set out myself, so I took three of my best men, including Godey, and started down the river, leaving orders for the men to push after me as best they could. I told them to hurry if they wished to see me, for I'd be going on to California. I thought it would give them heart.

  "On the sixth day after I left, a friendly Ute Indian led me to Williams and two of the three men I'd sent with him—the fourth had starved to death, and, Jessie... I can barely tell you this, but they had... they had... eaten... You know what I'm trying to say. Carson later said to me, 'In starving times no man who knew him ever walked in front of Bill Williams.'

  "Just a minute... I'll get my composure back....Anyway, the others were nothing but skeletons. The Ute gave us horses, and I put the men on them and made for the settlement of Taos, reaching it ten days after leaving camp. I immediately sent help back for the men I'd left behind, but, oh, Jessie! we lost ten of them—ten men—in the mountains. And the others were wrecks, hardly men at all. Some of them had to be lifted on mules to be taken to Taos.

  "It was Williams's fault, of course. I should never have listened to him about that pass. Carson even suggested that he may have deliberately led us astray so that we would leave baggage behind, which he could retrieve in the spring. And to this day I have no idea why he missed the trail back down the river.

  "I recovered at Carson's home. This one leg was badly frostbitten, and they tell me I was nearly snow-blind, but I have no recollection of that. I know I tried to join the relief party, but Carson held me back. But once I was able to travel, it was time to head for California. Most of the surviving men came with me—Godey and the others. They had not lost their courage, I'm glad to say."

  I bowed my head, unable to comprehend the horror of what he told me. That was the closest he ever came to mentioning the cannibalism of which I'd heard, and I would not ask more.

  Trying to lighten the tension I felt in John, I recounted our adventures crossing Panama. Now, safely in his arms, I could describe them with a slight amount of humor. Still, John vowed that I would never again undergo such an ordeal alone, and I basked in his protection.

  "Jessie? You remember the land Larkin bought?"

  "The Butterflies?" I murmured. "Yes. Have you gotten your money back? Can we get the land by the sea?"

  He smiled ruefully. "Larkin has that himself now. But, Jessie, there's never going to be gold by the sea. It's in the mountains... and it's all over Las Mariposas. The mother lode runs through there. And I've found twenty-nine ore-bearing veins."

  It was more than I could comprehend.

  "We're rich, Jessie, richer than you ever thought of being."

  Rich, to me, meant the comforts of Cherry Grove in Virginia. "As rich as the McDowells?" I asked.

  He laughed aloud, a sound to delight my ears. "Richer by far, Jessie, by so much we can't count it."

  The habits of a lifetime die hard, and I certainly did not begin to act like a rich lady—nor to feel like one.

  Within days we moved to Monterrey, which was closer to Las Mariposas. "It's still too dangerous for you and Lily to go there," John said, "but from Monterrey I can come and go without being away from you too long." And while he was away, John had hired a large group of Sonoran men to work the mines, collecting all the surface gold they could.

  The governor's house in Monterrey was occupied by the governor's widow—Madame Castro—except for the ballroom, which was storage for crops. But the house had two long arms that reached back toward the enclosed patio and gardens, and we were soon ensconced in one of them. The entire place was of smooth soft-colored adobe, with tile floors inside, and hedges of rose of Castile lining the garden walls and walks and giving the air a fragrance sweeter than I'd ever imagined.

  It was my first house of my very own, and my first experience at housekeeping but hardly a fair trial. We had no meat, fowl, eggs, butter, potatoes, greens, or herbs. What we had was whatever could be put up in tins and glass—lots of potted meat—and more rice than I ever thought I'd eat.

  "I shall," I told John, "write a cookbook entitled How to Do Without."

  "But," he murmured, "you do so well."

  We ate squirrel and dove, brought to us cooked on a campfire by Juan and Gregorio, two Indians who worked for us. We ate guisado that they made, a combination of bird, squirrel, red pepper, and rice that inevitably cost the dish in which it was made.

  "The dish, senora, it broke itself," they would say in Spanish, and I would groan again. John had sent French and Chinese china of great value from San Francisco, but it meant little to my two helpers, who stood, sombreros on their heads, and handed me the broken pieces without any sense of guilt.

  "I sent extra pieces to allow for their destruction," John told me with a laugh when I complained.

  Madame Castro always provided a daily cup of milk for Lily, from the cow she'd kept to feed her own children. Once, thinking to return the kindness, I gave a coin to her youngest daughter. The child came back shortly, saying in Spanish, "My mama says if it is a present, si. If it is payment for the milk, no!"

  As John returned from various trips to Las Mariposas, we began to accumulate gold in inconvenient quantities—lumps, dust, rich bits of rock, all of it in hundred-pound sacks worth about $25,000 each. "Where will we put it?" I asked, amazed at the quantity and slightly bewildered by its value.

  "In the trunks," he said calmly.

  "The trunks? Where will our clothes go?"

  "On shelves."

  And that is just what happened. Juan and Gregorio built shelves, none too stable, for our clothes, and the trunks became our depositories.

  We also began to accumulate household goods. From his various trips to San Francisco John shipped Chinese satins, French damask stuffs for drapings and hangings, and wonderful inlaid Chinese furniture, richer than anything I had ever lived with in the house on C Street. We covered the matted floors with bearskin rugs, and I marveled at the blend of cultures represented in the richness of my new home.

  Returning from one trip to San Francisco, John dragged with him a man who looked for all my mind like a frontiersman. "Jessie, this is Mr. Johnson. He has a proposition for you." John's eyes glinted with amusement, and I knew that I was in for some kind of trouble.

  "I'm pleased to meet you," I said evenly to our guest, waiting to hear his proposition.

  "I got this mulatto," he said, his very voice giving away his crudeness. "I'll sell her to you cheap."

  Controlling my temper, I asked, "Is she a good worker?"

  "The best," he swore. "Clean, honest, good cook. Sure would take a load off you having to do all this." He glanced around, and it was plain he thought it beneath me to be caring for my own house.

  "I will pay her wages," I said firmly, "but I will not buy her."

  John sat back in his chair, watching in silent amusement, and I sent him a look that said, I hoped, I would get my revenge for this.

  "Naw," the man said, "I got to sell her. Don't do me no good to let her work for wages."

  "Mr. Johnson," I said clearly, "I do not believe in owning people."

  "And you a Virginia woman," he said wonderingly as he departed.

  When I turned to John in fury, he held up his hands. "I wanted him to hear it for himself, Jessie, and I wanted him to take the message back to San Francisco. Besides," he added, "you're so convincing."

  I chased him with a skillet until he caught me and threw the skillet away so that my arms were free. Then, kissing me passionately, he said, "I don't think there's another woman in the world quite like you, Jessie. Surely not one that would suit me as well."

  I'd have given up the Seven Wonders of the World for that.

  Shortly after that our china was saved from Juan and Gregorio. An Englishwoman appeared, through the machinations of Madame Castro. Sailing from Australia, she was on a ship where there was a mutiny,
and the captain was forced to put in at Monterrey. She and her husband were stranded, and while he went to work for John at Las Mariposas, she needed a place to stay.

  "I'll keep your house clean and neat for you," she promised earnestly, "if me and my baby can stay here."

  If nothing else, the healthy baby convinced me of Mrs. Maclarty's honesty, and she became a part of our household. Juan and Gregorio went back to the horses, where they were much more comfortable.

  "Mrs. Frémont, Mrs. Frémont." Juan came running from the stables. "The colonel's horse is down with colic." From his description I soon learned that it was one of the California horses that John prized highly.

  Colic? In horses I knew it was even more serious than in children. "What can you do?" I asked, John being away at Las Mariposas.

  "Smoke it out," he said in his halting English. "Need linen to burn."

  Linen? I wanted to ask if cotton would not do as well, but I saw from Juan's intense expression that he was serious. "You really need linen?"

  He nodded.

  "Wait just a moment." Inside I went to the shelves that held our clothes and took two linen petticoats, pieces that had been embroidered for me back in Washington. With a loving last pat I thrust them at Juan, who went triumphantly away, calling to Gregorio and waving his treasure high in the air. I thought he could have been a bit more subtle.

  The horse lived, but I doubt John ever knew the extent of my sacrifice—and embarrassment.

  Mrs. Maclarty didn't last long with us. One day she came to me to say, "Missus, there's a party in town tonight. I thought I'd as like to wear that green silk gown."

  "The green silk?" I echoed. It was a new and very expensive gown that John had sent from San Francisco, and I'd had no occasion to wear it. It had occurred to me that I might never have occasion until I returned to Washington, but I surely didn't want my housekeeper to inaugurate the dress for me.

  "Yes, ma'am, the very one."

  "I am not ready to part with it, Mrs. Maclarty. It's... it's a new gown."

  "Oh, I'm not asking ye to give it to me," she intoned in her deep British accent, "just give me leave to wear it the one night."

  When I refused, as tactfully as I could, she left in high dudgeon, and from there our relationship went downhill. It was as much my fault as hers, I admit, for I was offended with her familiarity, and she was angry at what she saw as my superiority. Within a week she announced that she would leave for San Francisco, after all, and I wished her well with relief.

  While most Californians went about the countryside in heavy carretas—clumsy oxen-driven vehicles with heavy wooden wheels—I went about in a wonderful carriage that John had ordered and had sent around the Horn for me. Because of business concerning Las Mariposas, he determined that we should go from Monterrey to San Francisco, and that I should ride in my carriage. Lily and I, he said, would sleep in the boot, and the men of the party could sling hammocks between trees or, in the absence of trees, sleep in their blankets on the ground.

  "I won't go unless the carriage is pulled by a reliable horse," I said practically.

  "Jessie! I wouldn't think of anything else," he protested. "A fellow has brought me a mare from Oregon—gentle as a lamb, he says. I know those Oregon horses—they can't be beat."

  The mare, hitched up to the wagon, proved anything but lamblike. She rose on her hind legs when she felt the drag of the carriage, then trembled violently and shied in every direction. I praised the saints that John was testing her and I was not in the carriage.

  "Oregon horses...," I began.

  "I know, Jessie, I know. She's not gentle enough." Then, drawing himself up a little, "She's not like any Oregon horse I ever saw."

  A few days later a man brought a California gelding, no longer young but guaranteed gentle. John hitched up the horse, and they started gaily off down the road. All of a sudden the creature began to buck wildly, then came to a dead standstill. At a loss, John finally unhitched it, only to have the animal nearly collapse on the spot, probably from exertion too great for its age.

  "Did you check its teeth to see how old it is?" I asked from my safe point on the sidelines.

  He gave me a withering look but said nothing.

  "John? I want a pair of mules."

  "Mules! What kind of a man lets his wife go about the country in a carriage drawn by mules?"

  "A man who cares for her safety," I replied serenely.

  And that's how I went. Two Indians tied riatas to a pair of mules and guided them while they pulled the wagon. A second pair waited their turn, and we traded them off at least once a day.

  In this fashion we meandered like nomads from Monterrey to San Francisco, through the valleys of the coastal range, where wild oats were turning yellow and live oaks grew so thick as to look like an orchard. We started early each morning, as the sun peeked over the mountains to the east, then stopped for breakfast about ten and came to a halt for the day in midafternoon.

  Our food came from local ranches. Sometimes it was a leg of mutton, but on less plentiful days we often secured a handful of soup herbs or a small sack of pears. Once our messenger came roaring back from a ranch, waving his arms to indicate a great prize, only to have his horse trip in a gopher hole. The three precious eggs he had brought shattered on the ground, and I could not help but laugh at the tragedy.

  Occasionally we stopped at the ranches, and I found the women always wanted to meet me and thank me for John's kindness. They seemed to feel that he alone was responsible for the peaceful takeover of California, for the fact that their men had not been killed and they themselves had not been violated. I will always remember one dignified matriarch, ninety-five if she was a day, who gathered four generations of daughters about her to meet me. The little ones bowed most formally, and the middle-aged ones were diffident, but she, the grande dame, was regal, even in her gratitude. "We felt," she said in Spanish, "that we were safe because of him." And when I answered in Spanish, she positively beamed.

  "Jessie, you're a different woman from the one I married."

  We sat on the ground, apart from our entourage, at the end of a blissful day. "In what way?"

  "You're... you're more game than I knew you would be. I..." He looked with studied thought at his pipe, as though avoiding me. Then, finally, "I worried a great deal about bringing you out here. I wasn't sure you'd survive without your father."

  "And I have," I said.

  "It's not just that," he said, reaching for my hand. "You... you've left your mother's manners behind." He said it haltingly, as though the words didn't quite express what he meant.

  "My mother," I said with laughter, "would not have crossed Panama nor ever have kept house in an adobe without servants or what she considered real food. I did what I had to so that I could be with you."

  "Why?" He was not being coy. There was an intensity behind the question that almost frightened me.

  "Because, John Charles Frémont, I love you, I believe in you, and you are the most important thing in my life."

  "Did you ever..." He paused, considered, then rushed on. "Did you ever think of asking me to do something else—something that would hold me in Washington so that your life could go on the way it always had?"

  "Yes. Father and I even talked about the other jobs you could have had. But it would not have been you, and I would not have wanted half the man." I thought, then, that he would gather me in his arms, oblivious of the men around us and of Lily, who sat some distance away, watching us with undeniable curiosity.

  Instead he gazed out toward the sea. We were camped on the crest of a foothill, from which a valley spread below us and then the blue expanse of the ocean. "And if you had, we would not be here in God's country," he said. Turning solemnly to me, he said, "Thank you, Jessie." And then he jumped up and began to organize everyone so that we could move on.

  Sometimes he was a frustrating lover.

  * * *

  There was no suitable hotel in California, none that Joh
n believed safe for Lily and me. So he bought a ready-made Chinese-built house.

  It fitted together like a puzzle, the doors and walls sliding into grooves. Inside, Lily and I slept in hammocks, while outside, John took over the carriage that had been my bed all up the coast.

  "John? Do you not..." My voice trailed off. I was not good at speaking frankly of the intimacies of marriage, and yet I knew that such intimacies had been missing in our marriage of late. For all that, we'd had an idyllic time, but we were rarely together as husband and wife. "Could you not share my hammock?"

  "Doesn't sound very comfortable to me," he said brusquely, and then, softening, "but you could share my carriage."

  The logistics of it amused me. I could see that a hammock would not be convenient for connubial relationships, but neither was the process of waiting until everyone was asleep and then sneaking out to the carriage. Yet that is just what I did, night after night. I was rewarded with a passion so intense that I wondered that John had not been more insistent on our privacy while we traveled. It was not, however, for a wife to question her husband—or so I thought—and I said nothing.

  "You must not," he once said to me, "become the aggressor."

  I puzzled long over that.

  While we were in San Francisco, some of the Sonorans came down from Las Mariposas and announced, with some embarrassment, that they needed their share of the gold. They had to return to their families. The gold was in those trunks back in Monterrey.

  "John, it will be such a long ride for you, there and back," I complained.

  "I'm not going," he said. "I shall send a message to Madame Castro to allow them access to the trunks, and they can measure out their half of the gold."