Synopsis
Book by Roberts David
Extrait
Chapter 1: A Disorder of Enormous Masses
They set out, fifteen men on fifteen mules, shortly after dawn on August 12, 1842, carrying two days' worth of food -- dried buffalo meat, macaroni, and coffee. In the lead, as usual, rode Kit Carson, threading a trail through tangles of downed limber pine, across tilted slabs of granite where the mules' hoofs skated and slipped, beneath waterfalls and around cobalt lakes. And as usual, calling the shots from the middle of the pack, John C. Frémont straddled his mule as the alien landscape enfolded him, his quicksilver spirit veering between exultation and despair. Directly ahead of the party loomed its goal, the peak Frémont had judged loftiest in all the Rocky Mountains, snowfields gleaming in the sun, rock towers spiking the sky.
As yet, these two were nobodies, Kit Carson and John Frémont, their deeds discussed, if at all, only within the arcane circles of their peers and cronies. But this summer's jaunt would make them famous, launching a joint passage into the realms of myth that would place them, before the century's end, among America's eternal heroes. From the 1842 expedition onward, their destinies and renown would be intertwined; yet in all the West, no pair of adventurers more different in character than Carson and Frémont could be found.
Ten weeks before, the two men had first met, aboard a steamboat crawling the Missouri River upstream from St. Louis. Twenty-nine years old, a southerner born in Savannah and raised in Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina, Frémont had escaped a life of incipient dandyism to become an ambitious lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, a branch of the U.S. Army. He had served adequately on several surveying trips in the South and Midwest, but the present journey was Frémont's first thrust into the Great West, as well as his break in life. For the first time, he was in charge of an expedition. The explicit mandate given Frémont was to survey the first half of the Oregon Trail; his implicit charge was to keep an eye out for the best places to build forts along the way to safeguard emigrants from the "redskins" who (in the phrase of the day) "infested" the territory.
Frémont needed a guide who knew the West. Three years his elder, out of Kentucky via a hardscrabble homestead on the Missouri frontier, Carson had run away from home at the age of sixteen. For thirteen years he had trapped beaver and fought Indians from California down to Chihuahua, from New Mexico up to Idaho, without amassing the most modest fortune or dulling one whit his wanderlust. Now, with the collapse of the beaver trade, he was simply another down-on-his-luck mountain man looking for work. Aboard the steamboat, in response to Frémont's earnest questions, Carson (as he recalled many years later) "told him that I had been some time in the mountains and thought I could guide him to any point he wished to go."
By mid-August, the expedition had traversed a thousand miles of prairie, ascending a series of rivers: the Missouri, both the North and South Platte, and the Sweetwater. On August 7, the team had traversed South Pass -- the ill-defined saddle, some 7,500 feet above sea level, that affords the easiest crossing of the Continental Divide between Mexico and Canada -- and turned the south end of the majestic Wind River Range. Now, for the ascent of what would come to be known as Fremont Peak, the lieutenant divided his party, leaving twelve men beside a lake on the western fringe of the range to stand guard against the Blackfeet Indians, who Frémont feared would seize the first opportunity to ambush his team.
arFor all his western experience, Carson had never before penetrated the Wind Rivers. Both he and Frémont seriously underestimated the range's defenses. What from a distance looked like a straightforward slope leading to the mountain (which days before, from the plains, Frémont had singled out as clearly the apex of the chain) proved to hide a wildly convoluted terrain. Unguessed chasms thwarted their progress, the forest grew in places too dense to ride through, and chaoses of sharp-edged talus made for treacherous footing. By nightfall, the team had found a grassy bottom among the pines where the mules were turned out to graze and the men set up their bivouac.
For all the difficulties thrown across his path, Frémont pushed into the heart of the range in a state of rapture. "It seemed as if," he later wrote, "from the vast expanse of uninteresting prairie we had passed over, nature had collected all her beauties together in one chosen place." An avid if uncritical self-taught botanist, Frémont gathered samples wherever he went: here, he waxed ecstatic over "a rich undergrowth of plants, and numerous gay-colored flowers in brilliant bloom." (Looking over Frémont's pressed specimens four months later, anticipating the lieutenant's second western expedition, the great Harvard botanist Asa Gray wrote to his equally luminary Princeton colleague John Torrey, "I wish we had a collector to go with Fremont...If none are to be had, Lieut. F. must be indoctrinated, & taught to collect both dried spec. & seeds. Tell him he shall be immortalized by having the 999th Senecio called S. Fremontii...")
Yet Frémont's rapture was darkened with a sense of awe that bordered on dread. In the primeval wild into which he had trespassed, the young lieutenant discerned "a savage sublimity of naked rock." As crag and ridge and abyss forestalled his blithe plans, he felt all but trapped within "a gigantic disorder of enormous masses."
In the morning, still optimistic, Frémont moved three miles deeper into the range, through "a confusion of defiles," until his party came to a clearing with a magnificent view of their objective. Here the leader set up an advanced base, leaving the mules with several men and all their camping equipment. After an early dinner, the would-be alpinists set out on foot, carrying neither coats nor food: "The peak appeared so near, that there was no doubt of our returning before night..."
Once again, Frémont misjudged the Wind River Mountains. "We were soon involved in the most ragged precipices..., [which] constantly obstructed our path, forcing us to make long détours; frequently obliged to retrace our steps, and frequently falling among the rocks." One man averted death as he pitched toward a cliff's edge only by "throwing himself flat on the ground." By late afternoon, the men were close to exhaustion, and Frémont himself had succumbed to a violent headache and vomiting.
Stretching 110 miles across western Wyoming, with its countless lakes, its meadows fringed with evergreens, its cirques teeming with solid walls of granite and gneiss, the Wind River Range has become today a favorite playground for backpackers, fishermen, and mountaineers. From Elkhart Park, at 9,100 feet on a mountain shoulder above Fremont Lake, a well-traveled trail winds fifteen miles north and east toward Titcomb Lakes.
The path winds up a shallow vale, then angles across a plateau thick with limber pines and Engelmann spruce, making a gratuitous jog north to treat pilgrims to a splendid panorama at Photographers Point, where they gain their first view of distant Fremont Peak. Forest Service crews have chainsawed downed tree trunks out of the way, but in the trackless woods on either side, fallen, mossy logs form a maze of obstacles that would still make for tortuous going on muleback.
The best guess of modern historians as to where Frémont entered the Wind Rivers is at Boulder Lake, some dozen miles south of Elkhart Park. Approaching the mountains from South Pass, Frémont might easily have believed he was taking the shortest route to his objective; but the delusions of mountain foreshortening that bedeviled all early climbers in the West thus added those dozen miles to the party's ordeal. It is possible that the path Carson found through tangles and ravines during the party's first two days veers close to the Titcomb trail, but equally likely that the 1842 explorers wandered several miles farther east.
By mid-August, the summer's riot of wildflowers has peaked and waned, leaving only the hardier survivors: not only the profusions of purple asters over which Frémont raved, but swaths of Indian paintbrush, elephantela (with its tiny pink trunklike blossoms), buttercups, blue lupine, and magenta fireweed blooming down the stalk. Squirrels skitter among the pine needles, and Canada jays, emboldened by the crumbs a summer's troop of hikers have dropped along the trail, perch on nearby branches.
Ten miles in, the trail skirts Seneca Lake. The odds are good that Frémont's party passed by here, for it lies on the direct route to Titcomb Basin, southeast of Fremont Peak. For all the vexations of trail finding in the forest, for all the scrapes and scares of negotiating granite slabs and cliffs, in the Wind Rivers, Frémont's spirit soared with joy. As he emerged upon an unexpected lake (possibly Seneca), "a view of the utmost magnificence and grandeur burst upon our eyes. With nothing between us and their feet to lessen the effect of the whole height, a grand bed of snow-capped mountains rose before us, pile upon pile, glowing in the bright light of an August day."
The evening of August 13, on the north side of a sizable lake with a rocky island in the middle of it, the team prepared for a second bivouac. Island Lake, as Frémont named the site of their nocturnal vigil, is the first point on the party's mountain itinerary where the modern traveler can be sure of walking in their 1842 footprints. The lake lies close to timberline, at 10,346 feet -- 3,400 feet of altitude and three miles as the hawk soars beneath the summit of Fremont Peak.
On a broad flat rock, the men stretched their weary bones in hopes of sleep. They had nothing to eat, and not even their coats to cover themselves. Before dusk, the best hunters had set off hoping to shoot a bighorn sheep or two, but had come back empty-handed. The men built a bonfire of downed pine, but a gale out of the north robbed the bivouackers of its heat. Most of the worn-out party endured the ten hours of darkness without a wink of sleep.
Frémont, however, had already proved himself the most stubborn of explorers. Despite vomiting late into the night, he rose on August 14 still determined to conquer the mountain. As he later jauntily wrote, "[W]e were glad to see the face of the sun in the morning. Not being delayed by any preparation for breakfast, we set out immediately."
By the end of his voyaging, twelve years hence, Frémont could lay fair claim to having explored more terrain west of the Mississippi than any other American. The historian Allan Nevins would subtitle his 1928 biography of the man The West's Greatest Adventurer. Frémont would enter the pantheon of his country's heroes tagged with the resounding sobriquet the Pathfinder.
Yet compared to the monumental government expeditions to the West that had preceded his, Frémont's 1842 voyage does not easily lend itself to pioneering superlatives. Lewis and Clark's journey of 1804-6 fulfilled Thomas Jefferson's empyrean expectations: to explore the Louisiana Purchase and beyond, all the way to the Pacific; to search for a northwest passage by river across the continent (Lewis and Clark proved there was none); and to gauge the potential of that vast wilderness for American commerce and settlement. The next two western expeditions -- Zebulon Pike's in 1806-7, and Stephen Long's in 1819-20 -- furthered the reconnaissance of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, as well as probing the Spanish stronghold in the Southwest.
But Frémont's 1842 mission was a comparatively modest one -- essentially, to make an accurate map of the first half of what was already being called the Oregon Trail. The journey's covert purpose, Frémont comprehended well: for his push west might help serve the intrigues of politicians who dreamed of seeing the American flag wave not only over Oregon, but Texas and California as well. Only three years after Frémont set out from St. Louis, the editor of the New York Morning News, John L. O'Sullivan, would publish a manifesto whose key words became the catch phrase that rallied tide after tide of American expansionism. It was, O'Sullivan wrote, the "manifest destiny of this nation to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."
It required, however, a linked chain of fortuitous events to place Frémont in charge of the expedition that would launch his lasting fame. As the survey took shape in the minds of its government sponsors, it was assumed that Joseph Nicollet would lead the party, as he had the 1838-39 jaunt into the Midwest; once again, Frémont would serve as a useful but decidedly subordinate second-in-command. An astronomer, cartographer, and member of the French Legion of Honor, Nicollet had fled his native land in 1830 for political reasons; within a decade, he had landed a cherished job as explorer for the War Department. A brilliant innovator, Nicollet was the first to use the barometer to measure altitudes; one historian calls him "the first systematic modern cartographer." It was Nicollet, on the 1838-39 expedition, who taught Frémont everything the young lieutenant knew about mapping and surveying.
By 1842, however, Nicollet was gravely ill with cancer. It was almost more than he could do to write up the report of his previous journey, let alone lead another one.
The great American champion of westward expansion was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who had served in the Senate since 1821. A close confidant of Thomas Jefferson, Benton had tirelessly lobbied for expeditions to take up the challenge laid down by Lewis and Clark; in the last meeting he ever had with an ailing Jefferson, in 1824, their talk had been of the need for further exploration of the unknown West.
By 1840, as Nicollet's mapmaker, Frémont had won the attention and approval of the stormy senator from Missouri. But it was far from a foregone conclusion that, in default of Nicollet, a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant in the Topographical Corps would be entrusted to lead the survey up the Missouri and the Platte.
And Frémont came very close to ruining not only his chance at command, but his whole career -- by falling in love with Benton's daughter. Jessie was fifteen when she met the twenty-six-year-old Frémont. They courted discreetly, then were secretly married by a Catholic priest on October 19, 1841. When Jessie presented her father with this startling fait accompli, the senator flew into one of his legendary rages, then banished his son-in-law from the house. Still only seventeen, Jessie stood firm, declaring her fealty to the man she loved, and Benton was so moved that he performed an about-face. By early 1842, the rash lieutenant had become Benton's protégé.
To finance the expedition, Benton pushed a $30,000 appropriations bill through Congress. Within the senator's heart burned a clandestine passion to flood the West with Americans, and so drive out the British, who were gaining more than a foothold in Oregon. Clandestine, because relations with Great Britain would be seriously compromised by any overt avowal of such an American goal.
Thus the official orders for Frémont's expedition make no hint of paving the way for emigrants or of claiming land for the United States. The only document that has ever come to light, a laconic five-sentence directive from the chief of the Bureau of Topographical Engineers, demands only that Frémont "make a Survey of the Platte or Nebraska river, up to the head of the Sweetwater." The party's whole foray into ...
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