A Nation Rising (22 page)

In 1776, while men were gathering a continent away in Philadelphia to debate Thomas Jefferson's words, another group of Serra's Franciscan priests had arrived in northern California, along with soldiers and settlers, to establish Mission San Francisco de Asís, named after the order's founder, Saint Francis of Assisi. Founded on the day before Good Friday (the Day of Sorrows), the mission was better known as Nuestra Señora de Dolores (Our Lady of the Sorrows). The settlement mission and the adjoining presidio, or military compound, would be known as San Francisco. By 1823 there were twenty-one missions stretching north as far as Sonoma.

The California missions—which are still very popular tourist destinations—comprised more than simply a single church building. They were more like a medieval cathedral town. Usually built near a presidio, or frontier military fort, and a pueblo, a farming village, the mission was “at once a church, town, military fortress, school, farm, factory, and prison, typically maintained by two missionaries and a few armed soldiers,” as the historian Joshua Paddison explains: “The padres attracted most of their Indian converts (called neophytes) through beads, food, and other gifts. Once baptized, however, neophytes could be held at missions against their will while padres attempted to regulate nearly every aspect of their lives, including sex, work, sleep, amusement, and religious practice.”
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Neophytes
who were late for Mass were routinely lashed with a heavy leather thong. Spanish soldiers routinely raped young Indian women.

In their zeal, Serra and his followers also brought a reign of disease and terror to California that would nearly wipe out the Native population.
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The number of Indians in California before and after the arrival of the Spanish can only be estimated. By 1845, their number was down to 150,000—many less than before European contact. The causes were influenza, smallpox, measles, typhoid fever, dysentery, and syphilis—along with forced labor, beatings, rape, and other forms of violence. In the first three years of Franciscan rule, one mission reported baptizing seventy-six Indians but burying 131. Figures at other missions were similar. As the scholar David E. Stannard writes, “Although the number of Indians within the Franciscan missions increased steadily from the close of those first three disastrous years until the opening decade or so of the nineteenth century, this increase was entirely attributable to the masses of native people who were being captured and force-marched into the mission compounds. Once thus confined, the Indians' annual death rate regularly exceeded their birth rate by more than two to one…. In short, the missions were furnaces of death.”
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Still, the methods
were efficient: the mission system actually required few Spaniards or Mexicans to control the enormous territory.

The fact that priests instead of soldiers led this settlement of California made little difference to the outcome. It was a conquest, and later critics would dub Father Serra “the last conquistador.”
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In 1834, the governor of California ordered a secularization of the missions, and much of the property was turned over to the neophytes. Under the new policy, private citizens could apply for land grants that allowed them to operate ranchos, large cattle farms supplying the tallow trade. That trade brought a Harvard dropout named Richard Henry Dana aboard ship to California. He wrote of his experiences in
Two Years before the Mast
(1840), a popular best-seller that awakened Americans' interest in controlling California.

Although the Spanish had secured a toehold in California, still more dreamers came. Russians had arrived on the California coast in 1811 and negotiated the rights to establish an agricultural community to supply their settlement in Sitka, Alaska. The Russians built Fort Ross on Bodega Bay, about 100 miles north of San Francisco. The community there never flourished, and in 1841 the Russians sold the site to a Swiss-born entrepreneur, Johann Suter—whose name was Americanized as John Sutter—for a note that he never honored.

Sutter had come to California in 1839 with his own dream: to create an agricultural utopia he called New Helvetia. Becoming a Mexican citizen, he negotiated one of those land grants with the provincial governor of Monterey; it would become Sutter's Fort, a massive adobe structure with walls eighteen feet high and three feet thick, located in present-day Sacramento. Under the terms of this grant, Sutter was supposed to “prevent the robberies committed by adventurers from the
United States, to stop the invasion of savage Indians and the hunting and trapping by companies from the Columbia.” Sutter's grant was intended by the California authorities to create a buffer against the mounting threats coming from American interests.

Despite this agreement over “American adventurers,” Sutter's Fort became a profitable way station for the influx of Americans moving to California in the early 1840s, many of them inspired by books they carried as their “bibles”:
The California Guide Book
or
Oregon and California
, writings by Jessie's husband, John Charles Frémont, repackaged for the gold rush trade.

 

B
Y THE TIME
she was sequestered in Panama City in 1849, unable to complete the trip to California, Jessie Benton Frémont was arguably the most famous woman in America.
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Born on May 31, 1824, near Lexington, Virginia, she was the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, a Democratic senator from Missouri who between 1821 and 1851 was one of the most powerful men in Washington and who rose to become the high priest of America's aggressive Manifest Destiny.

Born in North Carolina in 1782, the son of a wealthy planter and landowner, Thomas Hart Benton
^†
studied law briefly but left school at age seventeen to manage the family's estate. A few years later, he
moved to Tennessee, attracted by the opportunity to acquire land in the opening western territories. He then returned to law studies, was admitted to the Tennessee bar, and came under the wing of Nashville's leading citizen, Andrew Jackson. During the War of 1812, Benton became Jackson's protégé and aide-de-camp, and was dispatched to Washington, D.C., to represent Jackson's interests there. During this period, Benton became involved in the notorious 1813 gun battle with Old Hickory.

Largely out of fear of Jackson, Benton relocated in 1815. For the Bentons, Nashville was no longer safe. “I am literally in hell here,” wrote Thomas. “The meanest wretches under heaven to contend with: liars, affidavit-makers, and shameless cowards. All the puppies of Jackson are at work on me…. The scalping knife of Tecumseh is mercy compared to the affidavits of these villains. My life is in danger…for it is a settled plan to turn out puppy after puppy to bully me.”
¹⁰

Beating a hasty retreat from Tennessee, Benton moved to Missouri, where more new territory was being opened to American pioneers and speculators. Settling in Saint Louis, he set up a law practice while also editing the Missouri
Enquirer
. Benton's hot temper and the “code of the West” led to another duel in 1817, when a courtroom argument escalated into a challenge of honor. After an initial exchange of shots, Benton and the attorney Charles Lucas wounded each other. That first relatively harmless confrontation was followed by a exchange of insults over the duel, which led to a second challenge. This time, Lucas was shot in the heart and died. Although the story may be apocryphal, Benton supposedly later
said, “I never quarrel, sir, but I do fight, sir, and when I fight, sir, a funeral follows, sir.”

In 1820, when Missouri attained statehood, Thomas Hart Benton became one of its first U.S. senators. Once established in Washington, he repaired his relationship with Andrew Jackson, and later he campaigned for Old Hickory, eventually becoming the Senate leader of what had emerged as the dominant Democratic Party. Opposed to banks and paper currency, like Jackson, Benton argued for gold currency, earning himself the nickname “Old Bullion.” As the chief proponent of a policy of aggressive expansion into the western territories, Benton also sponsored the Homestead Acts, which gave settlers acres of western land in exchange for the promise to cultivate it. He was also one of the chief sponsors of congressional support for Samuel F. B. Morse's telegraph.

When Jessie, the Bentons' second daughter, was born, her father left no question that he had hoped for and wanted a son. He named her in honor of his own father, Jesse Benton. Raised in Washington, D.C., the strong-willed, independent Jessie was brought up as if she were a boy. A hint of the unusual personal qualities of this young woman came in a letter from the mistress of “Miss English's Female Seminary,” the preparatory school Jessie attended and derided as a “Society School”: “Miss Jessie, although extremely intelligent, lacks the docility of a model student. Moreover, she has the objectionable manner of seeming to take our orders and assignments under consideration, to be accepted or disregarded by some standard of her own.”
¹¹

There was a powerful bond between father and daughter. Ben
ton's wife, Elizabeth, was content as a mother and homemaker. But Jessie had, from childhood, the spark of her father's wild western spirit. As a teenager, while most other girls of her age and status were thinking about cotillions and debuts, Jessie often traveled with Benton, and the most powerful senator in America introduced her to the world of political hand-to-hand combat, which he then dominated. He also shared with his daughter the dream of a nation stretching from ocean to ocean. Standing at the nexus of American political power, Jessie blossomed into an increasingly indispensable asset to the senator. Fluent in French and Spanish, she assisted with the translation of government documents and Mexican newspapers, for reports on the impending crisis over Texas. She also served as her father's secretary and took dictation at meetings. Eventually, she even wrote some of Senator Benton's speeches. When she received a proposal of marriage from President Martin Van Buren, her father was prompted to “cloister her” in the rural Georgetown Academy, notes her biographer Sally Denton.
¹²

While she was home from school, at age sixteen, Jessie encountered Lieutenant John Charles Frémont, eleven years her senior. Fresh from an expedition as a surveyor mapping the territory between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young officer found himself reporting to the senator most interested in expanding America's empire. The senator and the surveyor developed a mutual admiration, and Frémont must have known that Benton represented the hope of advancement. But Jessie and Frémont shared a very different feeling. When he went home that night, Frémont told a friend, the astronomer and geographer Joseph Nicollet, “I have fallen in love at first sight.”
¹³

Faced with her parents' disapproval of the relationship, Jessie eloped with Frémont; and a Catholic priest, the only willing clergyman they could find, secretly married them in October 1841. (That fact would later be used in the presidential campaign as evidence of Frémont's supposed Roman Catholicism.) In time, Jessie reconciled with her parents. Once his relationship with his daughter was repaired, Benton found in John C. Frémont a son-in-law who was uniquely willing and qualified to help him realize his vision of Manifest Destiny.

With Benton pulling strings to force the necessary appropriations through the Senate committees, Frémont had the complete backing of his father-in-law as he undertook command of his first expedition to mark the trails west.

Frémont set off in May 1842, leaving behind his young wife, who was pregnant. When he returned on October 29, he had crossed the Great Plains to reach the Rockies and had surveyed the South Pass, gateway to the Oregon country. A few weeks later, on November 15, 1842, Elizabeth Benton (“Lily”) Frémont was born in Washington, D.C. Jessie and the infant Lily stayed with her parents, and Jessie was at home when her mother suffered a disabling stroke late in 1842. (Elizabeth Benton died twelve years later.)

With the legendary guide and trapper Kit Carson, who was thirty-two years old when they first set out, Frémont went on to command two more journeys of mapping and exploration: The second was to the Oregon Territory in 1844; and the third was to the Great Basin, the Sierras, and California in 1845. Intensely interested in the details of her husband's expeditions, Jessie became his recorder, making notes as he described his experiences. Adding human-interest touches to John's military-style reports, she edited the stories of the
adventures Frémont had while exploring the West with Kit Carson. These narratives became sensationally popular and made Frémont famous as the “pathfinder of the West.”

“They were inseparable and synergetic, and their teamwork turned the expedition into a wonderful adventure and a best-selling book,” writes Denton. “They brought the characters alive—Kit Carson, Arapaho Indians, mountain men, fur traders and scouts—and gave drama to the landscape John had mapped and charted. On the page, the unshaven, rough-hewn explorers became heroes on a visionary quest.”
¹⁴

Having married into the family of Washington's greatest power broker, Frémont had traveled a long way from a childhood marked by poverty and scandal. His mother, Anne Beverley Whiting, was the youngest daughter of a socially prominent Virginia planter, Colonel Thomas Whiting, who had died when Anne was an infant. Her mother remarried, but Anne's stepfather soon exhausted most of her father's estate. To escape the family's financial problems, Anne moved in with an older married sister. In 1796, a marriage was arranged for the seventeen-year-old Anne with a wealthy, sixty-year-old Revolutionary War veteran. In 1810, Anne's husband hired Charles Fremon, a French immigrant who had fought with the Royalists during the French Revolution, as a tutor for his wife. Fremon and Anne were soon having an affair, and in a scandal that shocked genteel Richmond, the couple left together in July 1811.