Fremont's First Visit in 1843
Fremont's First Visit in 1843
© 2000 Jerry Dwyer
John Charles Fremont led five expeditions
into the American West in the 1840s and 1850s. He visited Oregon's
Klamath County on two of these trips: on his way home from reaching
the end of the Oregon Trail during his second expedition in 1843; and
again on his third expedition in 1846 while stalling for time waiting
for the Mexican War to begin. In this first of two articles we will
focus on his first trip to the Klamath area in the winter of 1843.
Lieutenant Fremont left what is now Kansas City on July 15, 1843 with orders to connect his land exploration with another expedition, that of Charles Wilkes, USN who had already sailed off on his voyage to map the Oregon coast. The majority of Fremont's 40 men were either French Canadian or French Creole voyageurs. There were also a couple of adventurers who signed on as passengers, plus two Shawnee Indians, a father-son duo named Rogers, hired to hunt deer and buffalo (Fremont says they were Delaware but the two appear in several Shawnee registers over the succeeding years). Other members of the party included Thomas "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick, the group's guide; Charles Preuss, the expedition's cartographer; Theodore Talbot, Fremont's accounting assistant; and Jacob Dodson, a young Black servant from the Thomas Benton (Fremont's father-in-law) household. Filling out the expedition were a large number of horses, mules and cattle plus one 12-pound howitzer. The requisition of a howitzer caused quite a brouhaha in bureaucratic Washington and Fremont's boss, Colonel J. Abert, actually ordered him to return to Washington and face charges on why he needed a howitzer for a non-military mission. Fremont's party was on their way, however, before any orders could reach him.
On his first expedition in 1842, Fremont
mapped the Oregon Trail from Kansas City to the Wind River Mountains
in Wyoming. On this, his second trip, he skipped this first half of
the trail and cut a path straight west through Kansas and Colorado,
following the Republican and South Fork of the Platte to Fort St.
Vrain, just north of present-day Denver. He then explored the Pike's
Peak region of Colorado and traveled all the way to the present town
of Pueblo, adding along the way two old companions, Kit Carson and
Lucien Maxwell, to the group. Back at Fort St. Vrain, Fremont
discharged the two Shawnee hunters who wished to return to their
homes and hired Alex Godey to take their place. Godey would become
one of Fremont's most faithful companions during this and the next
two expeditions. From Fort St. Vrain the group headed northwest along
the Cache Le Poudre river and its tributaries and finally reached the
Oregon Trail just east of South Pass. Except for a three-week
exploration of the Great Salt Lake, he stayed on the main trail for
the rest of the way, following the emigrant's wagons to Fort Hall,
then along the Snake River through Idaho to Fort Boise, and finally
across the Blue Mountains to the Columbia River, arriving at Fort
Walla Walla on October 1st. He left the major portion of his party
here with Fitzpatrick in charge and proceeded down the Columbia,
sometimes by boat and sometimes by land, meeting many of Oregon's
stalwart missionaries and emigrants on the way - including Marcus
Whitman, Peter Burnett, H.W.K. Perkins, Jason Lee, and the Applegate
brothers, Jesse and Lindsay. At Fort Vancouver he was received by
John McLoughlin, the executive director of the Hudson's Bay Company
operations west of the Rocky Mountains. Retracing his steps to the
Dalles where he had left a small contingent under the charge of Kit
Carson, Fremont prepared for his trip back. After waiting a few days
for Fitzpatrick to rejoin them, the group headed off on November
25th, traveling down central Oregon following the Deschutes River
(which Fremont called the Fall River). Fremont left two of his men,
John K. Campbell and Manuel Chapman, who wished to stay with the
emigrants. He also as a favor to Perkins picked up a Chinook teenager
to bring east so that he could learn more of the Anglo American
civilization. There was an understanding that Fremont would return
the youth on his next expedition. Two Indians from the Dalles also
agreed to guide the group as far as Klamath Lake. 
Why did Fremont decide to visit Klamath County? No one is quite sure. He seems to have made the decision on the spur of the moment. He had already accomplished his mission by tying in with the Wilkes expedition at Fort Vancouver. So all he had to do was turn around and head for home. A couple of weeks earlier he mentioned to Marcus Whitman that he was planning to board a brig near Fort Vancouver and sail all the way to Panama. Now it seems that he wants to explore more of the area of land he had christened The Great Basin. And in his meandering return journey of eight months he practically circumnavigates the area. In his report Fremont justifies his actions by citing the need to prove once and for all whether the fabled Buenaventura River which supposedly starts in the Rocky Mountains and flows all the way to San Francisco Bay really existed. But most of the experts on the West by this time had already discounted the Buenaventura myth. In 1839 Zenas Leonard published his journal of the Joseph R. Walker 1833 expedition to California. Walker's explorations demonstrated conclusive evidence that there was no such river. Fremont must have read Leonard's journal. In any event, Fremont was in no hurry to get home.
For 15 days Fremont travelled south following the Deschutes and some of its major tributaries, all the time noting the various flora, rocks and soil compositions along the way. He also made sure to note that he was well aware that he was entering the land of hostile Indians and that he had heard of Jedediah Smith's adventures along the Umpqua River west of Klamath County where 15 of his men were killed by local Indians in 1828.
On December 10th Fremont's group reached Klamath Marsh, about 30 miles north of Upper Klamath Lake. In his report Fremont says that his Indian guides told him that he was on an arm of the "Tlamath" Lake. But Fremont was mistaken and never got as far south as the real Klamath Lake. That day he gazed at the Williamson River thinking it was the Klamath.
We use the word "Klamath" today to describe the lake, the river and the tribe of Native Americans who inhabited the area. But Fremont preferred the term "Tlamath" because he thought it was closer to the way the natives pronounced the word.
At the point where he was about to camp Fremont noticed smoke rising from the middle of the marsh and from the opposite shore of what he thought was a lake. He then ordered the howitzer to be fired to announce his presence. Seeing the cannon discharge and then the shell burst quite a distance away brought great delight to the two Indian guides. "It inspires them with triumphant feelings" says Fremont in his report. "But on the camps at a distance the effect was different, for the smokes in the lake and on the shores immediately disappeared."
The next day Fremont decided to pay a visit to the nearest Indian village. "When we had arrived within half a mile of the village, two persons were seen advancing to meet us; and, to please the fancy of our guides, we arranged ourselves into a long line, riding abreast, while they galloped ahead to meet the strangers."
Fremont was surprised to discover that one of the two people who rode out to meet them was a woman. He soon found out that they were husband and wife and the husband was the village chief. Fremont described the man as being prepossessing with handsome features and a soft, agreeable voice. Unlike any other Indians Fremont had ever seen, these people all wore shells in their noses. They also wore shoes made of grass and the women wore woven baskets on their heads. The people lived in rounded huts, about 20 feet in diameter, with doors on the tops. Suspended on strings all about the huts were great quantities of fish that had been smoked and dried. On top of each of the huts sat a number of wolf-like dogs. Fremont bought a young pup and named it Tlamath.
Fremont thought he was near the heads of three great rivers - the Deschutes which flows northward to the Columbia, the Klamath which flows west to the sea north of the 42nd parallel (boundary between Oregon and Mexican California), and the Sacramento, which flows all the way to the bay of San Francisco. But he was wrong about both the Klamath and the Sacramento. Most of the Klamath River is in California below the 42nd Parallel. And the headwaters of the Sacramento are also in California, more than a hundred miles south of the Klamath region.
Fremont noted the latitude of his camp at 42.56.51 and estimated the lake being 20 miles across. "It is a picturesque and beautiful spot; and, under the influence of cultivation, might become a little paradise. Game is found in the forest; timbered and snowy mountains skirt it, and fertility characterizes it. Situated near the heads of three rivers, and on a line of inland communication with California, and near to Indians noted for treachery, it will naturally, in the progress of the settlement of Oregon, become a point for military occupation and settlement."
Fremont's Indian guides were about to return to the Columbia and Fremont asked the Klamath chief for assistance in guiding them eastward. The chief refused, however, claiming that he had not enough horses, that there was too much snow, and that his family was too sick. On December 12th Fremont crossed the marsh and headed east under dark skies and falling snow. The next day he was surprised by the visit of the Klamath chief and a number of his men. "He seemed to have found his conduct inhospitable in letting the strangers depart without a guide through the snow, and had come, with a few others, to pilot us a day or two on the way." That night they camped "by a considerable stream with a border of good grass." His guides told him he was on the headwaters of the Klamath but he was most likely on Long Creek, a tributary of the Williamson. The Indians returned home on the morning of December 15th after pointing out the route to a big water where no snow was to be found. Fremont then crossed what he thought was a tributary of the Sacramento but in actuality was probably Beaver Creek which flows into the Sycan River which in turn eventually flows into the Klamath (via the Sprague and Williamson rivers and Upper Klamath Lake).
Fremont spent the next few days traversing what is now Lake County and then turned south-east, entering present-day Nevada about ten miles east of the present California border. The names he gave to several of the places he visited are still on modern maps: Winter Ridge, Summer Lake (the big water with no snow), and Lake Abert, named after Fremont's boss. He discovered Pyramid Lake in Nevada and spent several days in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada looking for a pass to take him over the mountains to Sutter's Fort. He abandoned the howitzer in some canyon north of present-day Bridgeport in California's Mono County (people are still looking for it) and one night allowed Godey to sacrifice the dog Tlamath to the starving men. He eventually made his way to Sutter's Fort where he stayed until Spring. He then returned to Kansas City via the Old Spanish Trail through southern Nevada and southern Utah, the Yampa and Arkansas rivers in Colorado, and finally the Republican and Kansas rivers in Kansas. On August 6, 1844 Fremont arrived in St. Louis where he disbanded his group. His reports on his two expeditions became a national best-seller, promoting further migration to both Oregon and California and influencing the 1847 Mormon exodus to Utah.
Fremont's 1843 trip to Klamath and Lake Counties is commemorated by the Fremont National Forest and the Fremont Highway (state highway 31) which connects federal highways 97 and 395, cutting through northeast Klamath County and then passing Summer Lake and terminating at Lake Abert, both in Lake County.
Jesse Applegate, Levi Scott and others blazed the Southern Road to Oregon in 1846. Much of this route -- through the Black Rock Desert and High Rock Canyon in northwest Nevada -- follows in reverse Fremont's eastward trek three years earlier.
Fremont returned to Klamath County in 1846 with much less peaceful results. But that is a topic for our second story.
Jerry Dwyer is an historian and genealogist who maintains his own website on Fremont at http://home.comcast.net/~jcfremont/index.html
Sources
The
Expeditions of John Charles Fremont, Volume I: Travels from 1828 to
1844, edited by Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence. University of
Illinois Press. Urbana, Illinois. 1970
Trailblazer: The Autobiography of Kit Carson, edited by Milo Milton Quaife. Chelsea House Publishers, New York. 1983.
Kit Carson: A Portrait in Courage by M. Morgan Estergreen. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK. 1982.
"Winter in Oregon." The Journal of the Shaw Historical Library, Volume 4, Number 1. Fall 1989. Oregon Institute of Technology, Klamath Falls.
Fremont's Greatest Western Exploration, Volume 1: The Dalles to Pyramid Lake, by John L. Stewart. Set, Inc. Vancouver, WA.1999.
"Re: Klamath River," private correspondence between Bob Graham and Jerry Dwyer. April, 2000.
