John C Fremont and the Fourth Exploration Journey

I mentioned in a previous essay that in the Kit Carson home in Taos, NM, I happened to see a January 27, 1849 letter written by the "Pathfinder" John C. Fremont to his wife Jessie. Fremont had been the "guest" at Carson's home for several days that month, and he wrote the following words to his wife from the comfortable confines of that large (seven-room, one-floor) home.

"This morning a cup of chocolate was brought to me, while yet in bed. To an overworn, overworked, much fatigued, and starving traveller, these little luxuries of the world offer an interest which in your comfortable home it is not possible for you to conceive," quoted in Nevins, Fremont: The West's Greatest Adventurer, vol. 2, p. 415.

Fremont had known Carson for a few years, having selected him for the guide of his second Western exploration trip, and trusted his judgment immensely. But the tone of the letter from Fremont to his wife makes it seem that he was not just "visiting" Carson for a few days. In fact, Fremont was recuperating at Carson's home, having just endured the most disastrous exploratory journey of his career, one in which 10 of his 35 (or 33, depending on the source) explorers died from exposure and cold and where all of the 120 or so mules likewise perished. But why would Fremont have been engaged on such a trip in the dead of Winter? And, where, precisely, had he been? These questions were ringing in my mind as I drove through Southern Colorado by Routes 159, 160 and then 17 north to Salida. Though I managed to enjoy immensely the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve and then the town of Leadville on June 21, I had to "get to the bottom" of this letter I saw in Kit Carson's home. Here is what I found.

A Word on Fremont's and his Exploratory Journies

Time would fail to tell of the exploits of this vain, ambitious and driven explorer, scientist, naturalist and politician. Though he was from South Carolina and thrown out of the College of Charleston in his late teens (he was born in 1813), he managed to work his way up to Washington DC where he asked for and was granted the hand of Jessie Benton, daughter of powerful Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858), in marriage. Benton's goal was to see the "West" settled, and he quickly glommed onto the idea of "Manifest Destiny" as a guiding principle for the settlement of the West. Though Benton at first only saw the US reaching to the Rocky Mountains, by the mid-1840s he began to think that American destiny was to reach to the Pacific Ocean.

With his powerful position in the US Senate, Benton was just the right person to oversee the rapid development of his son-in-law's exploration career. Three trips to the West in the early 1840s, all of which have been extensively described by scholars, not only made Fremont one of the most knowledgeable Western explorers but led to his international renown as a friend of science. Thus, by the mid-1840s, the 32 year-old Fremont's name was a household word throughout the states. His reports on his journeys circulated widely.

New Directions for Fremont

The mid-1840s both threatened and gave new impetus to Fremont. The threatening thing that happened was a military court-martial trial he underwent from Nov. 1847- Jan. 1848 allegedly for disobeying the orders of Stephen Kearny, of New Mexico fame, when Kearny was sent to CA during the struggle for obtaining CA from Mexico. In his long trial Fremont, supported by his father-in-law as counsel, claimed that he wasn't deliberately insubordinate, but this claim was to no avail. He was court martialed from the army, even though President Polk would pardon him by early March 1848. Nevertheless, Fremont refused to re-enter the army, choosing instead to settle in CA on a ranch he had bought for $3,000.

Fremont was now nearly penniless and looking to set up shop on the Pacific Coast with his wife and two small children (his son would soon die in infancy). Then, a new opportunity arose. Again, it came through the offices of his father-in-law. It seemed that since 1844 there was a growing desire to discuss and fund the construction of a transcontinental railroad. This wouldn't actually happen until shortly after the Civil War was over, but the idea had been noised about as early as 1844 by the scion of a wealthy Connecticut family, Asa Whitney, who asked for Congress to grant him what amounted to millions of acres to construct such a railway from Michigan to the West Coast. However, in 1844 the US Congress was in no position to fund such a venture. Why? Well, CA was still officially in Mexican hands and the Pacific NW was not yet dislodged from the British. By 1848, however, things had changed. The historic Bear Flag had been raised two years earlier by a group of Americans in CA in the revolt against Mexican rule. Also, in 1846, the joint occupation arrangement in the NW had given way to American rule, with Oregon being received as a Territory in 1848 and WA in 1853. Thus, by 1848 the time was "ripe" to explore the transcontinental railroad idea again.

Senator Thomas Hart Benton had just the man for the task--his son-in-law. However, ever since the court martial trial of Fremont, and even though President Polk had pardoned Fremont, relations between Benton and the White House were frosty. Thus, Benton was unable to acquire Congressional Funds to explore a transcontinental railroad. But he desperately wanted it to originate in St. Louis, then the most thriving City on the Mississippi north of New Orleans, and head relatively straight Westward into CA. In fact, just as various latitude lines of earlier days, such as "54'40'' or fight" or "36'30'' as the north latitude of the Missouri Compromise were common currency, so the Senator wanted a 38'00'' line along which the railroad would go to the Pacific. He used his considerable influence to get private St. Louis funding for Fremont's venture to explore this 38'00'' latitude for the proposed railroad.

Conclusion

Now we have the background information to understand why Fremont was tapped to lead such an expedition. But I close this essay with the query. Why did Fremont set off for the trip in October 1848, stopping to resupply in Pueblo, CO late in November 1848 before plunging into the unexplored and forbidding land of 14,000' peaks in December 1848? Well, the simple answer is that the Senator wanted a 'year-round' railroad, and thought that an exploration party would have to be able to weather such a storm before expecting an actual train to go through that territory in the dead of winter. From the comfort of a Washington DC Senatorial office this made a lot of sense. But, from the howling wilderness of the CO Rocky Mountains--either the Sangre de Cristo range in the East or the San Juan Range in the West--this plan was ludicrous from the get-go. The next essay will show how ludicrousness led to death and, ultimately, to the simple letter on the wall of Kit Carson's home in Taos, NM.

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