Snowbound and Eclipse (34 page)

But one May day the Pacific mail steamboat did appear, with great fanfare, and a welcoming shot from the shore battery. A virtual brawl ensued as to who would occupy its few berths. The ship could accommodate eighty in its cabins and finally embarked with hundreds more deck passengers, so jammed on board that each man's bedding ground was a chalked-off rectangle. I was given a narrow cabin, but in that small, dank chamber my lung fever returned, and I arranged to live in a tent hung over a mast on the quarterdeck, which I shared with Lily and another proper woman.
I felt better in the fresh sea air. I even came to enjoy the company of all those men as we sailed north, filled with hope and adventure. Actually, they all treated me with respect.

Still, those days were wrought with anxiety as well as hardship. There was not food enough on board to feed that mob, and the steward was lining his pockets by selling the ship's tinned food at exorbitant prices, so many on board sickened just as they had been in Panama. It was rumored, too, that the steamer hadn't enough coal to make San Francisco and might be set adrift or forced to use its spindly masts and pull out its canvas. Indeed, it was true. The ship reached San Francisco only by burning its deck planking.

Our first California stop was at the Pueblo de San Diego, and I so dreaded it and the news I might receive of Mr. Frémont that I reclaimed my old room and barricaded myself within, unable to face what I dreaded. But in time a knocking summoned me to the door, and with dread I received the news from the ship's purser, who had been asked to convey it from someone on shore. Mr. Frémont had arrived in California safely, though his frostbitten leg troubled him, and was even then making his way north to rendezvous with me in Yerba Buena on the bay of San Francisco. I accepted the news with a flood of relief that left me unable to stay upright for a while.

We reached San Francisco, as it was being called, June 4, 1849, steaming through the strait my husband had named Golden Gate, into a vast inland sea. A cold fog swirled over the scabrous little village on our right. Before me stretched a graveyard of bobbing sailing ships, their rocking masts a forest beside the shore. Their crews had decamped for the goldfields. There was no pier, and our sole recourse was the lighters that took us to the shore. Scores of little boats swarmed us, and I peered anxiously into the cold mist, hoping
to discover Mr. Frémont among them. But I was soon disheartened. Men everywhere, scarcely a woman in sight, but the colonel was not there.

The city climbed into hills just beyond, but all its vitality seemed to collect close to the water's edge, where mountains of supplies, wagons, tents of all descriptions, and hundreds of males were congregated. If Mr. Frémont should not be present, I scarcely knew what I might do; Lily and I would be at the mercy of a lawless and savage lot of people. The mail steamer suddenly seemed a safer and better place than this cold, wretched camp along the inner shore.

Then a stranger, in one of those bobbing lighters below, hailed me, pointed directly at me until I was sure he was addressing me.

“I'm here to get you settled, Mrs. Frémont. Your husband saw to it. William Howard's my name, and I've a room for you at Leidesdorff House. It's up that hill, and it's all there is for you.”

He helped us into his boat and took us to shore, where his hesitant and embarrassed sailors lifted us over the surf and settled us on the strand because there was no pier.

Mr. Howard did settle us in a single, well-furnished room in the private home. There was no wood for its parlor stove, and it was as cold and dank as any place I have ever been. I drew my shawl tight about me. But it had walls and a roof and was some distance from that fierce crowd below, and I accepted gratefully, thinking that Mr. Frémont had looked after his wife and daughter, even while some distance away. I was curious about the delay, how he could be elsewhere. Mr. Howard soon enlightened me.

“He went directly to Las Mariposas, madam. He needed to have a look at once, assess its value, and determine what to do if gold should be upon it. He'll be along soon.”

I thanked the man, who immediately hurried off. The
mail steamer was unloading cargo, and he needed to claim his own.

I learned that food was scarce, services impossible to find, firewood and lamp oil nonexistent, and I would have to fend for myself. Still, we were fortunate: in a canvas city, we had an adobe room and a roof over us, and I would see what I could see about food.

So Mr. Frémont was nearby. I did not yet understand the size of California and didn't know that the grant he had purchased through the consul, Thomas Larkin, was far distant and not easily reached. He had told me it was seventy square miles, a size beyond my fathoming. How could one person hold so much of the earth?

“Well, Lily, we're here; our trunks are here; we'll look for food if you wish.”

“All those men,” she said.

“All those men,” I said. We had scarcely seen a woman.

Fearfully, we ventured out into a maelstrom of life, knowing there was no law to protect us from whatever savagery might exist. We would depend entirely on the civility of those around us. Plainly, gold fever had created the frenzy we walked through. Men stared but never paused as we passed by. We found canvas gambling halls, and I hurried Lily past them, and there were drinking stalls and hardware stalls, all open-air or canvas, where things might be purchased at outlandish prices. There were thousands of males arriving and nothing to sustain them. We found at last a vendor who had a little rice, which he was parceling out to eager buyers at a breathtaking five dollars a pound. Reluctantly, I bought some and tumbled it in my reticule for want of a sack. It looked like we would be eating rice, if we could find enough wood to boil it. On our way home I salvaged some wood from packing crates to cook our dinner.

Thus did we occupy our first day with the sheer necessities.
I had only a small sum and dreaded that I might run out. Later, gentlemen callers arrived in great numbers, to my relief. The colonel had not been forgotten here, and many of them brought precious gifts of food, hoarded or garnered from somewhere. I swiftly learned that there was scarcely a young man in California tending herds, butchering meat, hoeing gardens, hauling produce to market, gathering eggs, feeding poultry, milling wheat, baking bread, cutting firewood, or milking cows. They had fled to the goldfields, leaving these tasks to old men and women, who were somehow carrying on and getting amazing prices for whatever foodstuffs they were able to deliver.

I learned to accept gratefully whatever was presented to us. We were soon entertaining army officers, diplomats, businessmen acquainted with Colonel Frémont, politicians, and strangers, some of them brandishing heavy leather sacks burdened with nuggets.

We endured day by day, in what surely was the coldest place I had ever lived, its fogs and skimpy sun laying an icy chill over the whole place, which was rapidly affecting my lungs, until I feared I would contract the lung fever once again unless I could escape.

Then one blessed day he appeared. I saw him walk quietly up the slope, survey the Leidesdorff House, and approach the door. My heart leapt. I wrapped a shawl about me and hastened to the door, admitting him into the house, into my arms, and into the quiet circle of my embrace.

Lily found us embraced, and I hastily retreated, my instincts always decorous. He paused, smiled at Lily, and clasped her hands in his own.

“You're a young woman now,” he said.

She stared uncertainly at this father she had not seen for almost a year.

As I examined this husband of mine, I discovered the
marks of his suffering. He was gaunt; his cheekbones seemed to protrude under parchment flesh. There were great pits below his eyes. His gray-shot brown beard, without a shred of gray before, now bore the streaks of hardship. He walked with a visible limp.

“I've heard you suffered greatly in Panama,” he said, his glance taking in the darkness that lingered under my eyes.

“She almost died,” Lily volunteered. “They blistered her chest. She's still sick, and this cold air isn't doing her any good.”

“Then we'll move at once to Monterey,” the colonel replied. “This is not a proper place for my family.”

We three trailed into our icy room, and my cough told me that this place was a menace to me.

There was so much catching up to do. “You went to Las Mariposas?” I asked.

“I did. I know this much. There's gold there. I hired some experienced men, Mexicans who know about these things, to prospect. And even while I was looking over this holding, they found gold everywhere.”

“Gold, gold?”

“Mrs. Frémont, I am going to be very rich.” He dug into his old coat and pulled out a small sack, and poured nuggets into my hand. Heavy, glimmering rounded bits of gold, cold to my touch. “This is from my land,” he said.

And that is how the news came to me.

I ached to hear his story, everything he could tell me about his harrowing journey across the continent. I ached to tell him my story, that odd, sinister trip from Chagres to Panama City, surrounded by parrots and monkeys and buzzing insects and serpents and a world I could scarcely fathom, in which we traveled in canoes propelled by near-naked men.

But within the hour, he was out the door. He said he
needed to see people, make arrangements, hire miners, talk to lawyers.

I buried my yearnings in my heart and let myself bask in the joy of our reunion. But somehow I grasped that things were different. That this man, my husband, was not the man I had left in Missouri, but I didn't know how or why.

Over the next days, I felt more than the chill of San Francisco Bay. I felt a growing chill that had settled around my heart. Mr. Frémont would gaze at me, smile as he often did, and yet he was not seeing me, not hearing me. His own gaze had turned inward, and I no longer knew what his thoughts might be, and he no longer shared his deepest yearnings.

We would sit at table, just the three of us, and he would say all the right things, thank me for the rice pudding, comment on the fog and cold, and yet nothing was the same. There were only two of us at the table, Lily and I. I did not know where he had gone. Was this the man I had eloped with? Was this the man who once lay beside me, talking through half the night? Was this the man whose journals I had transcribed day by day, sharing every moment? Was this my beloved?

I wondered if I would ever know this other Mr. Frémont, or whether he would ever love me as he once did. And I wondered what had happened in the San Juan Mountains that had taken him away from me.

AN AFTERWORD

The character of John Charles Frémont has fascinated me for years. Although I have read a great deal about him, he remains a mystery to me. He was a man of considerable courage and ability who nonetheless was constantly getting into grave trouble, often from lack of judgment.

His early biographer, Allan Nevins, did not look deeply into the causes of the Pathfinder's checkered career. But later biographers took a harder look at the man. Andrew Rolle, in his study of Frémont, concludes that Frémont was a narcissist. David Roberts describes a ruinous recklessness in the man. Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont's biographer, notes Frémont's inability to live within ordinary social boundaries, including those of marriage.

Frémont seemed indifferent to the needs and hopes of others, and yet his soldiers greatly admired him. He ultimately treated his wife badly, and yet she adored him. He could not bring himself to obey the commands of his superior officer in California and was court-martialed and convicted for it, and yet he became a national hero. He was involved in the shadiest sort of business dealings, and yet he was a reformist presidential candidate. He led his fourth expedition into desperate circumstances for no good reason, and yet most of those who went with him supported his leadership unconditionally.

In this novelization of Frémont's disastrous fourth expedition, I have attempted to draw Frémont as a man with all these conflicting traits at work in him. He remains, however, an enigma. Since he had failed to locate a suitable railroad passage over the Wet and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of central Colorado in the vicinity of the 38th parallel, why did he plunge into the far more formidable San Juan Mountains in the dead of winter? One thing is certain: he was not pursuing a railroad right of way, no matter that he continued to talk about it and use that as his rationale for crossing the mountains in winter.

But his fourth expedition makes no sense. I was tempted to look for other motives, such as his wish to acquire a reputation as someone who could do most anything or to show the army, which had disgraced him, what he was made of or even to enter politics. But at bottom all these rationales for his conduct fall short, and I remain as mystified by his reckless assault on the San Juans as I was when I first looked into the strange fourth expedition. He led ten members of his company to their doom, yet we find in him little sympathy for them or their families, virtually no regret, in any of his writings or utterances. He was somehow disconnected from everyone else, including Jessie.

For some reason, he could not fathom boundaries, no matter whether they were imposed by society or nature. These were impediments to his will, things to be surmounted. When the Bentons resisted his courtship of a very young Jessie, he eloped with her. When he commanded early topographic expeditions, he grossly exceeded or ignored his orders. When General Kearny arrived in California late in the conquest period and required the subordination of Lieutenant Colonel Frémont to his command, Frémont resisted. When Frémont was warned not to cross the Sierra Nevada in winter, he ignored the warnings and imperiled
his entire command. And even though he had lost ten men and a hundred and thirty mules in the calamitous fourth expedition, he attempted the same perilous winter trek over much the same territory in the fifth expedition, losing another man and escaping disaster only because some Mormon villagers rescued him. He was made wealthy by the gold on his huge California estate and yet managed to squander his fortune through mismanagement.