John Charles Fremont - A Biographical Sketch

© 1998 Jerry Dwyer

John Charles Fremont was a young fatherless Southerner whose career would probably have gone nowhere had it not been for the actions of two powerful government leaders of the 1830s and 40s: Joel Roberts Poinsett and Thomas Hart Benton.

Fremont was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1813 and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina where he attended college. Joel Roberts Poinsett, former South Carolina Congressman, first US Ambassador to Mexico and resident of Charleston got Fremont his first full-time job, that of mathematics instructor to the midshipmen on board the USS Natchez, which soon embarked on a two-year cruise to South America. When Poinsett became Secretary of War for President Van Buren, he managed to get Fremont a commission in the Army's Corps of Topographical Engineers. Poinsett passed on to his protégé both his interests in botany and his Unionist political point of view.

While working with his mentor, Joseph Nicollet, on a map of the territory between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Lieutenant Fremont met his second benefactor, Thomas Hart Benton, US Senator form Missouri and visionary of manifest destiny. Benton was also chairman of the Senate Military Committee. With Benton's guidance Fremont would embark on a total of five expeditions to the West, all ostensibly for military and scientific reasons but also to help satisfy Benton's dream of connecting St. Louis to the West Coast of North America and beyond. In 1841 Fremont married Jessie Benton, his benefactor's favorite daughter. Fremont's intellectual and political life was further molded by his wife's and her father's pursuits in history, literature and languages and their strong anti-slavery position.

Fremont's rise to fame resulted from his first two expeditions to the West as a topographical engineer for the US Army. On his first expedition he followed the Oregon Trail to the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, one of which he climbed. His second expedition brought him to Oregon and California. His reports on these expeditions, enhanced by his wife Jessie's romantic vision and writing skills, were an immediate sensation. Benton made sure that the government published thousands of copies of his reports. Several private publishers printed many thousands more and many immigrants on the Oregon and California Trails during the 1840s and 50s used his reports as guides.

On his third expedition in 1845 - 47 Fremont, now a Captain in the topographical Corps, got involved in the American conquest of California and was elevated to the position of Lieutenant Colonel, in charge of the California Battalion of mounted riflemen. The battalion was mostly comprised of his mountain-man and Indian expeditionary force together with Americans who had recently become California settlers.

In September 1846 Fremont visited the site where a city would be named after him 110 years later and camped near Mission San Jose. "This is a pretty place, this mission" he wrote in a letter to Thomas O. Larkin, US Consul to California when California belonged to Mexico. Larkin was in 1846 working as a Confidential Agent for the US Government. Fremont had appointed Larkin to be his private agent and turned over $4,000.00 to him to buy some land in the San Francisco Bay area. He went on in his letter to describe both the Mission San Jose area and another piece of property near Mount Diablo as desirable purchases. He even pointed out that Juan B. Alvarado, an ex-governor of California, owned an orchard near the mission. But in February, 1847 Larkin purchased for Fremont another piece of property that was also owned by Alvarado but many miles from Mission San Jose: the Las Mariposas rancho in the Sierra foothills south of the Merced River.

Caught up in a political battle between army and navy, Fremont took the side of Commodore Stockton who had appointed him governor of California. But Stockton soon capitulated to General Kearney and Kearny brought Fremont back to Washington toward the end of 1847 where he was tried and court-martialed for mutiny and insubordination. President Polk pardoned him, however, and in 1848 Fremont went on a fourth expedition to the West which winded up a disaster in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado where ten of his men perished in the deep snows. Fremont left six more of his men in New Mexico and continued on to California, following the Rio Grande, crossing the Sonoran desert south of today's border with Mexico, and picking up the Gila River trail in Arizona. Along the way Fremont's group met up with a group of Sonoran miners on their way to the California gold fields. He petitioned 28 of them to go with Alex Godey, his trusted companion who had accompanied him on three of his four expeditions, to his Mariposa property and see what gold they could find there.

On his arrival in California in 1849 Fremont immediately got caught up in the Gold Rush and he made California his mainstay for the next twelve years, living at different times in San Francisco, Monterey and Mariposa Counties as well as occasional stays in Washington and New York. The first California Legislature elected him US Senator in November 1849 and he spent most of 1850 in Washington waiting for California to become a state. He returned to California in 1851 and commenced on many business ventures including land speculating, cattle raising and gold mining.

During the 1850s Fremont often traveled to Mission San Jose where he visited with his friends E.L. Beard and Joseph C. Palmer. Beard's close friend from Indiana, Rufus A. Lockwood, was chief counsel for Palmer's bank, Palmer, Cook & Co. He was also Fremont's chief lawyer for six years during Fremont's ten-year struggle for legal ownership of his Mariposa Estate. Lockwood was plagued with rheumatism and on his frequent visits to Mission San Jose, Beard would often drive him to the Warm Springs resort where a bath would sometimes alleviate his aches and pains.

In 1853 Fremont began his fifth and last expedition to the West, looking again for a central railroad path between St. Louis and California. As in the winter of 1848- 1849, he met up with severe weather problems but this time he found his pass in the San Juans and the group pushed on all the way to Parowan, Utah. In Parowan friendly Mormon settlers revived them and they continued across the Nevada desert and California Mountains. After the fifth expedition Fremont's attention again turned to politics and in 1856 he was the first presidential candidate for the Republican Party, losing to Democrat James Buchanan. After the election Fremont refocused his attention once again onto his Mariposa property and his family settled in Bear Valley in April 1858. Jessie soon tired of life in the Sierra foothills, however, and in 1859 Fremont bought her a house in San Francisco on a hill named Black Point. Black Point overlooks both the Golden Gate, which Fremont named in 1846, and Alcatraz Island, which he bought in 1847 for $5,000.00, one of the actions that brought upon him the charge of mutiny at his court-martial.

In 1861 President Lincoln commissioned Fremont a major general and placed him in charge of the Army of the West with headquarters in St. Louis. Fremont had paid $42,000.00 for his home in San Francisco. While he was away during the Civil War the Army took over Black Point, tore down his house, and built Fort Mason. The government claimed that Fremont's title was not legitimate and he was never recompensed.

Fremont's 100-day reign over the Army of the West was generally ineffectual and he was replaced, mostly because Lincoln was tired of hearing about Fremont's feud with the powerful Blair family. Francis Blair, former editor of the Washington Globe, was a close friend of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Benton. His son Montgomery was Lincoln's Postmaster General. Francis wanted Fremont to name another son, Frank Jr., currently a Missouri Congressman, a general and to give most of the lucrative government contracts for fortifications around the city of St. Louis to his Missouri friends. But Fremont ignored Blair and gave most of these contracts to his California friends, Palmer and Beard, who had followed him to St. Louis. The last straw for Lincoln was Fremont's decision to free all the slaves of Missouri landowners who were sympathetic to the Confederacy. The president ordered Fremont to renounce his emancipation proclamation. In 1862 he was given another command to head one of three armies in the Mountain Department campaign of West Virginia. He soon got into trouble, however, when he failed to arrive at Strasburg in time to join up with another army headed by General McDowell and cut off Stonewall Jackson's retreat. When Lincoln decided to merge these three armies under one command he selected the leader of the third army, John Pope, an archenemy of Fremont's from his days in Missouri, and Fremont asked to be relieved of his command. Lincoln never gave him another command and he resigned from the army in 1863.

Fremont sold his Mariposa estate in 1863 and with the proceeds ventured into various railroad schemes, all of which eventually failed. He lived for a time as one of the rich and famous but by 1873 he was penniless and his two New York mansions with all their furniture and belongings were auctioned off by his creditors. Jessie became the family breadwinner, writing stories and articles that were mostly about her husband's career. In 1877 President Hayes appointed Fremont governor of Arizona, a post which he held until 1881 when he was forced to resign for spending more time prospecting and speculating than governing.

In 1887 the family moved to Los Angeles and in 1889 Fremont traveled east to petition for a military pension and for compensation for the Alcatraz and Black Point land taken from him by the government many years before. Congress granted him a pension in May 1890 but he died in New York two months later at the age of 77. Jessie kept up the fight for re-compensation but never received a penny for her efforts. She died in Los Angeles in 1902. Her daughter Lily, lifetime companion to her mother, renewed her mother's Black Point campaign but was also unsuccessful. She died in Los Angeles in 1919. John Charles Fremont II graduated from Annapolis and had a distinguished naval career, rising to the rank of admiral during the Spanish-American War. He died in 1911. Frank Preston Fremont graduated from West Point, got as far as major in his army career but was court-martialed for insubordination in 1907. He spent most of his remaining life in Cuba as president of a munitions factory there. He died in 1931.

Fremont is considered a major enigma in American History. There are many questions about his life -- what really happened and why did he do what he did -- that will probably never be answered. One day shortly after her mother's death Lily Fremont went through her parents' papers and burned everything that she thought damaged her father's reputation. He was basically a shy person and definitely not as socially oriented and most likely as politically ambitious as his wife Jessie. He and Jessie were both fluent in French and Spanish and some of his best friends, including the French Canadian voyageurs on his expeditions and his Californio landowner neighbors, spoke only those native tongues. Most of the men who accompanied him on his expeditions and in his Civil War campaigns adored him and were proud to have served under him. But he was also quick-tempered and often made brash decisions. His regular army officer associates, mostly West Point graduates, were envious of his promotions and despised him. He was discrete about his extra-marital affairs but Jessie must have known about some of them. Yet she always presented their marriage as perfect bliss. He was unscrupulous in some of his business dealings and overly fair and charitable in others. He was cruel to some California Indians but kind to others and his faithful Delawares worshipped him. Over the years he had falling-outs with some of his closest friends and relatives but sometimes was able to make peace with them. His hero was Alexander von Humboldt, the famous scientific explorer, and he renamed Mary's River in Nevada after him. In 1856 he was offered the Democratic nomination for President but he could not accept the party's pro-slavery platform and he refused. Jessie often claimed in later years that he could have been president.

The poinsettia is named after Fremont's benefactor, Joel Poinsett. The Fremontia Californica is named after Fremont, along with many rivers, mountains, schools, counties, hospitals, and towns across the land. In 1956 five towns in southern Alameda County -- Niles, Centerville, Irvington, Warm Springs and Mission San Jose -- incorporated to become the city of Fremont, now the fourth largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Last updated on June 24, 2008