Authors: H.W. Brands
Frémont’s unstated purpose was probably no less important. Publicly humiliated, deprived of his livelihood, he was determined to demonstrate that his career was not over, but just begun, that his heroism defied the slings and arrows of his outrageous misfortune. The very arguments against attacking the Rockies in midwinter became, by Frémont’s inner calculus, reasons for making the assault. The greater the danger, the greater the glory.
After leaving the Missouri, Frémont and his men ascended the Arkansas River to Bent’s Fort and Pueblo. It was early December, and the snows of winter already cloaked the peaks and clogged the passes. Trappers, traders, and other veterans of the mountains shook their heads on hearing Frémont’s plan. To try the mountains in winter meant certain death, they said. But Frémont had ignored the pessimists who told him the Sierras were impassable in winter, and his success had taught him to trust his own judgment.
He needed a guide, a man who knew the mountains. Kit Carson would have been his first choice had Carson been available, but Carson had other obligations. Instead Frémont chose Bill Williams. “Old Bill” was legendary, first for his age, which was uncertain but obviously advanced for one of his hazardous profession; second for his knowledge of the southern Rockies, which surpassed that of any other white man and most Indians; third for his eccentricities, which included an awkward style of walking that made
him appear constantly drunk (he
was
drunk often, but not constantly, and not in the mountains), a ludicrous manner of riding a horse, which made Ichabod Crane appear a professional jockey, and a wardrobe off-putting even by the casual standards of cleanliness common in the mountains; fourth, and finally, for his instinct for survival, which had gotten him through more winters and other hard times than he could count. (While some doubted Williams could count very well, he was sufficiently educated to have been a Methodist preacher in earlier life.) Frémont relied on Williams’s survival instinct, although others preferred not to. Kit Carson later commented, “In starving times, no man who knew him ever walked in front of Bill Williams.”
From Pueblo the party entered the mountains. The initial ascent was difficult but exhilarating, and not a little frightening. One of the men, describing the view backward and forward from one of the first passes, wrote, “The sight was beautiful, the snow-covered plain far beneath us, stretching as far as the eye could reach, while on the opposite side frowned the almost perpendicular wall of high mountains.”
Into those mountains they plunged, and almost immediately discovered why the neighborhood regulars were so skeptical. The snows were deep and grew deeper daily; the drifts mocked the men’s efforts to move forward and defied the mules to find forage. At one point the party spied what seemed to be grass pushing up through the snow where the wind apparently had blown away the drifts; on closer inspection the tufts proved to be the tips of tall trees buried to nearly their full height. The cold intensified with the increasing elevation and the advancing season. The wind shrieked through the passes and sliced through the clothing of the men. All the elements assaulted the expedition, which began to look like a ruined military column. “The trail showed as if a defeated party had passed by: packsaddles and packs, scattered articles of clothing, and dead mules strewed along,” Frémont wrote Jessie.
Conditions only deteriorated. The storm became a constant blizzard. Williams lost the way, leading the group into a maze of mountains from which there appeared no exit. Frémont unwisely determined to save the baggage rather than leave it and evacuate the men as rapidly as possible to
a lower elevation. He dispatched a party of four, including Williams, to the settlements of northern New Mexico, there to acquire fresh provisions and mules to replace those now dead in the snowdrifts. He himself remained in the mountains with the rest of his men.
Christmas came while Frémont and the others awaited relief. “Like many a Christmas for years back,” he wrote Jessie, “mine was spent on the summit of a wintry mountain, my heart filled with gloomy and anxious thoughts, with none of the merry faces and pleasant luxuries that belong to that time. You may be sure we contrasted much this with the last at Washington, and speculated much on your doings and made many warm wishes for your happiness.” Frémont intended to commence a career in law once he and Jessie and Lily were established in California; to this end he had brought some books on the expedition. “You remember the volumes of Blackstone which I took from your father’s library when we were overlooking it at our friend Brant’s? They made my Christmas amusements. I read them to pass the heavy time and forget what was around me. Certainly you may suppose that my first law lessons will be well remembered.”
Days elapsed, then weeks, with no return of the relief party. Rations ran low, and the men’s spirits sank even lower. One man, perhaps irrational from cold and hunger, perhaps simply weighing his options, deliberately chose to let himself freeze. “In a sunshiny day, and having with him the means to make a fire, he threw his blankets down in the trail and lay there till he froze to death.”
Frémont decided he could wait no longer. The relief party might have lost the trail or been ambushed by Indians. Selecting a small group, and leaving the others with the baggage, he set out in the same direction as the first party. For several days the group struggled along before discovering a thin column of smoke wafting above a stand of trees. This must be the rescue party, they thought, and they hastened their painful steps toward the smoke. “We found them—three of them, Creutzfeldt, Brackenridge, and Williams—the most miserable objects I have ever seen. I did not recognize Creutzfeldt’s features when Brackenridge brought him up to me and mentioned his name. They had been starving. King had starved to death a few
days before. His remains were some six or eight miles above, near the river.” (Unknown to Frémont at the time he wrote Jessie, the three survivors had eaten part of King’s body.)
After obtaining horses from friendly Indians, the Frémont group and the three survivors hurried on to the New Mexican settlements. Though Frémont didn’t detail it to Jessie, by the time he reached Taos he was nearly dead: utterly exhausted, frostbitten (one leg was threatened by gangrene), almost snow-blind. Unable to travel farther, he dispatched his most trusted lieutenant, Alexander Godey, to lead a party back into the mountains to rescue the men who remained there.
What the rescuers discovered was a human catastrophe. The two dozen men had waited for a week, then decided they must find their own way out. One by one they fell by the trail. “Manuel—you will remember Manuel, the Cosumne Indian—” Frémont wrote Jessie, “gave way to a feeling of despair after they had travelled about two miles, begged Haler to shoot him, and then turned and made his way back to the camp, intending to die there, as he doubtless soon did.” Ten miles from camp another man surrendered to fate, threw down his gun and blanket, and tumbled into a drift to die. Overnight a man went crazy from hunger, wandered off from the main group, and was never seen again. Another man died quietly the next day; a companion, snow-blind and himself at death’s door, stayed behind with him and soon succumbed also.
Frémont spared Jessie few of the grim specifics.
Things were desperate, and brought Haler to the determination of breaking up the party in order to prevent them from living upon each other. He told them “that he had done all he could for them, that they had no other hope remaining than the expected relief, and that their best plan was to scatter and make the best of their way in small parties down the river. That, for his part, if he was to be eaten, he would, at all events, be found travelling when he did die.”…At night Kern’s mess encamped a few hundred yards from Haler’s, with the intention, according to Taplin, to remain where
they were until relief should come, and, in the meantime, to live upon those who had died, and upon the weaker ones as they should die.
How much cannibalism actually occurred, no one cared to discover. When Godey arrived with relief, he was content to load the living onto the mules he brought and leave the dead to the snows and whatever nonhuman scavengers might find them.
In all, Frémont lost ten men of his party of thirty-three. Yet he expressed no remorse, no questioning of his judgment in the mountains, no doubt as to whether the goal had warranted the sacrifice. Perhaps he felt that his own close call released him from self-criticism, in that he had suffered alongside his men. Perhaps he felt that those who died simply weren’t as strong as he.
In any event, he turned his face to the west and the future. He told Jessie he would soon continue to the coast, where they would be together again. “When I think of you…”he concluded his letter, “I feel a warm glow at my heart, which renovates it like a good medicine, and I forget painful feelings in a strong hope for the future….I make frequently pleasant pictures of the happy home we are to have, and often and among the pleasantest of all I see our library, with its bright fire in the rainy, stormy days, and the large windows looking out upon the sea in the bright weather.”
T
HE SHOCK OF READING
of her husband’s ordeal was more than Jessie could stand. The emotional strain of caring by herself for Lily, the physical toll of the journey from New York and across the isthmus, and now the psychological trauma of reliving the near-death of her husband culminated in a collapse she attributed to “brain fever.”
Debating doctors fought over her treatment. The favorite of the family she was staying with prescribed the Spanish practice of bleeding, the avoidance of drafts and all other fresh air, and the application of hot water inside and out. An American doctor en route to California prescribed an
abundance of fresh air, the application of ice to the skin, and iced drinks. “These two, with their contradictory ideas and their inability to understand each other fully, only added to the confusion of my mind, and became part of my delirium,” she wrote. The one thing they agreed on was croton oil, obtained with difficulty from a visiting British man-of-war to treat congestion in her lungs.
Her illness elicited a repetition of the pleas of those around her that she return to New York. In her weakness she entertained the idea once more. But then, in the dark hours before dawn on May 6, a cannon’s report announced the arrival of the steamer
Oregon
, long awaited from San Francisco. By coincidence, a second Pacific Mail steamer, the
Panama
, arrived within the same hour after a voyage around Cape Horn. Finally the thousands of stranded travelers felt deliverance at hand. En masse they stormed the harbor where the vessels anchored, each argonaut demanding to be taken on board and transported to the goldfields. A full-scale riot threatened as it became clear that even the two ships together couldn’t transport anywhere near the number clamoring to leave. Bribes were offered, blows exchanged. The situation was resolved by the only method able to command a consensus: a lottery. The winners danced gleefully at their deliverance; the losers waited sullenly for the next vessel.
Once again Jessie’s connections came to her aid. The steamship company withheld a few berths from the lottery; one of these went to the senator’s daughter. Ushered to the head of the line of embarkation, she and Lily were hoisted onto the
Panama
by the makeshift of an oversized bucket attached to a boom. The ship had been built for eighty; four hundred crowded aboard. Although Jessie and Lily were assigned a cabin, its stuffiness aggravated her cough and drove her above decks, where she rigged a tent out of a large flag. By now all knew who she was, and what she had gone through. “Everybody contributed something to make me comfortable; one a folding iron camp bedstead—some, guava jelly—some, tea—while one of my fellow passengers gave me from his own private stores delicate nourishing things which brought back my strength.” Even the tent on deck was a comparative luxury; most on board could claim no more than a rectangle for sleeping, sketched on the deck in chalk.
The fresh ocean air healed her lungs (confirming the prescription of the American doctor), so that by the time the
Panama
reached San Diego, she was tolerably well. Yet the nearer she approached to California, the more she feared bad news that would say her husband hadn’t made it safely to the coast. As the ship dropped anchor in the bay of San Diego and everyone else crowded to the rail, she went below, anticipating the worst and not wishing to hear it.
Her situation and Lily’s had engaged the emotions of the entire ship; many of the passengers were nearly as anxious as she to learn the outcome of Colonel Frémont’s journey. From behind her closed door she heard a rising commotion in the passageway outside; gradually the commotion became comprehensible. The colonel had arrived! He was safe in California! He had been seen at Los Angeles and would meet her at Monterey!
Jessie’s relief overwhelmed her. After all he had endured, after all she had endured, they were finally to be reunited. A few days more, another week perhaps, and the new chapter of their life—the chapter that brought and kept them together at last—would begin.
On January 12, 1848, while James Marshall and John Sutter watched the American River rise and wondered whether the waterworks at Coloma would hold against the flood, half a world away the people of Palermo revolted against Ferdinand II, the longtime king of Naples and Sicily. Six weeks later, after the discovery of gold but many months before the news reached Europe, Paris exploded in revolution. Louis Philippe was forced to abdicate, and the Second Republic was proclaimed. The unemployed who formed the backbone of the Paris mob demanded work; when the new government proved unable to provide it, the mob attacked the new government. June saw some of the bloodiest street-fighting in European history; casualties were too many to count but were estimated at ten thousand. Meanwhile revolution spread across Europe, engulfing Austria, Prussia, most of the lesser German states, and large swaths of the rest of Italy. Amid the upheaval, two German émigrés living in London, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, gave voice to the radical disaffection in their landmark polemic, the
Communist Manifesto
.