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The Fremonts and Utah
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 44, 1976, No. 3
The Fremonts and Utah
BY MARY LEE SPENCE
THERE IS A FREMONT legend. For some it gleams as brightly as burnished gold; for others it is incredibly tarnished and scruffy. Writers like Allen Nevins have defended and extolled the explorer; others, including Ogden-born Bernard DeVoto, have roasted him with all the sarcastic adjectives they could summon to their pens. But in all this one point is clear: nobody ignores the man.
John Charles Fremont was born in 1813 and died in 1890, the date Frederick Jackson Turner took to denote the end of the American frontier; thus Fremont's career paralleled the great nineteenth-century period of expansion. His was a multi-faceted calling: his most monumental success came as an explorer in the West—not in his role as senator from California, Civil War general, presidential aspirant, territorial governor of Arizona, or most certainly not as a businessman. Five times he led men across the Plains and Rockies under conditions of hardship and privation, and through his narratives publicized the West to a nation hungry to know. And aiding his long public career was his wife, the charming and spirited daughter of Missouri's dreadnought senator, influential Thomas Hart Benton. A beautiful and talented girl, Jessie Benton Fremont had inherited her father's concern for power and prestige and learned to write with remarkable ability. Together, she and John Charles made a truly dashing pair, a rarity in American history.
But to emphasize the fortunate marriage connection is in no way to underestimate Fremont's abilities. He had audacity, courage, and a quick mind that had absorbed a great deal of knowledge in the fields of natural history, geography, and surveying. His maps, which were constructed with the assistance of the skillful German topographer, Charles Preuss, were used by thousands of immigrants on their travels to Oregon and California. His reports contained original material on ethnology, and in some cases he was the first to notice particular Indian tribes and give careful descriptions of their characteristics and appearance. He was the first to describe and explain so succinctly the great climatic difference between the east and west sides of the Cascade Mountains. He recognized that the Oregon Country was geologically different from the other regions of the United States, partly because of the great lava flows and, partly because of the Columbia River, the mighty watercourse that tied the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. When he saw submerged trees at one place in the Columbia he recognized that this was not the result of rising waters, but of complicated landsliding, and he was able to find the actual shear surfaces on which the shifts had occurred.
For Utah, his greatest contribution was the discovery and naming of the Great Basin as a geologic and geographic entity. Because he explored the area's perimeters, he knew that no rivers ran from it to the sea, although large streams flowed in; his perceptive analysis of this phenomenon was the first recognition of the great power of evaporation in the region. He aptly compared the Great Basin with the interior of Asia. He also established the correct elevation of Great Salt Lake at 4,200 feet, and collected specimens of rocks, minerals, fossils, soils, and plants for eastern scientists to analyze and classify. One such botanical collection was made in the Uinta Basin, an area not again botanized until the twentieth century.
Too often one lets Fremont's later failures cloud his earlier achievements. In admitting that his character was flawed by vanity and by hunger for recognition and financial gain, one tends to forget the dedication and discipline of his work of the 1840s. The wonder is that he was able to accomplish as much as he did. An exploring expedition required organization: as leader, Fremont provided this—and he handled logistics, oversaw the mapping, conducted the geodetic surveying, arranged the defense, and maintained the records. Late at night he shot readings on the stars, sometimes standing waist-deep in snow, work he regarded as routine.
The purpose of this article is to touch on the expeditions that penetrated Utah and note how Jessie, the waiting wife, viewed them from afar. Fremont was absent five of their first six and a half years of wedded life. Not until 1860 could Jessie write: "I feel now as if we were a complete & compact family & really Mr. Fremont used to be only a guest— dearly loved & honored but not counted on for worse as well as better." She had finally "magnetised" into home life this man to whom she once thought the gift of parental instinct had been denied.
The first major expedition—the 1842 expedition—was of but five months duration and Fremont returned to Washington in time to be with his eighteen-year-old wife when she gave birth to their first child. In fact, he assuaged her disappointment at not having produced a son by presenting her with the flag he had raised atop the peak in the Wind River chain that ultimately bore Woodrow Wilson's name. It was a special emblem: in addition to the usual thirteen stripes and twenty-six stars, it displayed an American eagle clasping arrows and an Indian peace pipe in its claws.
In 1843 after Fremont was ordered to connect up his survey with that of the naval expedition of Charles Wilkes on the Oregon coast, Jessie accompanied him as far as Saint Louis, there to await his return for fourteen long months. While she waited, she also handled his affairs, including, she said, the suppression of an order from his superior canceling the expedition because it took a mountain howitzer. Jessie's version is contradicted by the official correspondence, but this was not the only occasion on which she would use her writing skills to dramatize an event, create a myth, or try to shape the historical record for posterity.
On his way to Oregon, Fremont made a side trip to Great Salt Lake. He entered Utah by way of the Bear River, but at Standing Rock Pass he veered away and descended to the valley of the Malad, following that stream until the Bear River reentered through a canyon gap in the mountains. Traveling between the two rivers, he continued down the valley until the two joined. He then launched his rubber boat on the Bear near the present site of Corinne, but the marshes thwarted his attempt to reach the lake using this watercourse. The whole morass, which is now the Bear River National Wildlife Refuge, he noted, "was animated with multitudes of water fowl, which appeared to be very wild—rising for the space of a mile around about at the sound of a gun, with a noise like distant thunder." He returned up the Bear River again on foot for about five miles, and then, crossing to the left bank, proceeded south through present Brigham City around Bear River Bay to the Weber River, examining Utah Hot Springs on the way. From a peninsular butte, Little Mountain (where a marker commemorates his passage), he viewed the inland sea and described it as "one of the great points of the exploration." "I am doubtful if the followers of Balboa felt more enthusiasm when, from the heights of the Andes, they saw for the first time the great Western ocean," he wrote. "It was certainly a magnificent object, and a noble terminus to this point of our expedition; and to travellers so long shut up among mountain ranges, a sudden view over the expanse of silent waters had in it something sublime."
Fremont noted several large islands that "raised their high rocky heads out of the waves" and invited further exploration. Just west of present Ogden, preparations were made. The party quickly constructed a strong corral for the animals and a fort for the men who would remain behind. They set out to repair with cloth and gum the eighteen-foot Indiarubber boat, inflated it with air, and filled three five-gallon bags with drinking water. In the evening, having feasted on yampah ("the most agreeably flavored of the roots") seasoned with a small fat duck shot by Fremont's Black servant, they discussed the "whirlpool and other mysterious dangers" that Indian and hunter's stories attributed to this "unexplored" lake, as Fremont called it, even though William H. Ashley's men had sailed around it in 1826 in skin canoes.
On the next morning, September 8, 1843, Fremont and four companions, including the later famous Kit Carson, paddled down the Weber River, and on the following day steered across the lake itself to a desolate, arid island that now bears the explorer's name, but which Fremont, his dream of fertile spots evaporated, then named Disappointment Island. Here the party spent the night. They climbed Castle Peak, and while Carson, Basil Lajeunesse, and Baptiste Bernier carved a seven-inch cross under the shelving rock, Fremont and Charles Preuss studied and charted the surrounding lake. The finished map, which was published in his Report, was the first to show the seven islands in their proper locations and the correct elevation of Great Salt Lake (4,200 feet) which he had determined at the mouth of Bear River. Next morning the six men returned to shore over waters roughened by wind and boiled down five gallons of lake water to produce fourteen pints of very white and finegrained salt. Then using the Malad again, the entire expedition turned northward to Fort Hall and the route to Oregon.
On his return to the States the next year, Fremont again entered Utah, this time from the Southwest over a portion of the Old Spanish Trail. He came past Mountain Meadow, picked up as a guide the famous hunter and trapper, Joseph Reddeford Walker, in the vicinity of later Newcastle on Pinto Creek. Passing north of the Antelope Range and east to Iron Springs, he reached present Enoch at the divide between Cedar and Parowan valleys near the southern end of Little Salt Lake. He left the Spanish Trail at the site of Paragonah and continued northward, camping on May 19 north of the Beaver River. The next day he met a band of Utah Indians headed by their chief, Walker (Wakara), who, with their rifles, "were journeying slowly towards the Spanish trail to levy their usual tribute upon the great Californian caravan." Fremont exchanged a fine blanket he had obtained at Vancouver for a Mexican one and continued north to camp either on Pine Creek or at Cove Fort. On May 21 he was on Chalk Creek at present Fillmore and the next night found him in Round or Scipio Valley. On May 23 at the site of Yuba Dam on the "fine" Sevier River, he buried Francois Badeau who had accidentally shot himself. Within two more days the party was at Utah Lake which Fremont erroneously thought was a southern spur of the Great Salt Lake and where he noted that in their eight-month circuit "of twelve degrees diameter north and south, and ten degrees east and west," they were "never out of sight of snow." From Utah Lake he passed out of Utah by way of Spanish Fork Canyon, Fort Robidoux, and Fort Davy Crockett.
Meanwhile, as army wives have done from time immemorial, Jessie waited impatiently for her husband's return. In the early days of the expedition, occasional news and letters reached her at Saint Louis. September was not far along when two Indians brought a letter; on December 2 eleven of the expedition returned from Fort Hall bringing a few more letters and word of the Great Salt Lake exploration. As time wore on and communications ceased completely, Jessie sought consolation from old traders and trappers who knew Oregon or the Southwest firsthand. Even though her mother thought she was "too young & too perfectly healthy to know all the miseries that attend a separation," and though she would speak of her own "elastic" spirits and even counsel "patience" to the families of men on the expedition, time grew long and each day brought a fresh disappointment. The headaches that prostrated her she attributed to the "sickness of the heart." To the mother of one of the members of the exploring party she spoke longingly of her own husband:
"... From the moment I open my eyes in the morning until I am asleep again I look for him: I hurry home from a visit and from church & the first question is 'Has he come?' " In March her little daughter of sixteen months came down with whooping cough and her mother had a recurrence of illness—all of which added to the strain. When her mother had recuperated, Jessie made plans to accompany her to Washington; but when departure time drew near she found she could not leave Saint Louis, and she confided to the mother of Theodore Talbot that she might have "to resort to some desperate remedy such as plain sewing to relieve the nervous state" into which she had fallen.
Perhaps it was just as well that she knew little of the ordeals and vicissitudes of Fremont's travels. How might her "nervous state" have fared had she been aware that two divisions of the India-rubber boat had collapsed under the impact of waves on Great Salt Lake and that only constant use of the bellows had maintained enough air to keep the craft afloat; or that all the plants collected between Fort Hall and the San Francisco Bay had been lost by the fall of a mule from a precipice into a torrent; or that deep snow and rugged mountains had forced the abandonment of the controversial howitzer in the Sierra Nevada; or that two of the men became so deranged by extreme suffering that one wandered away from camp and the other went to swim in an icy mountain stream foaming among the rocks, as if it were summer and the water placid; or that another, who went in search of a lame mule, was killed by Indians.
Jessie's anxiety ended in August 1844 with the return of Fremont and his party on the steamer Iatan, and soon the little family was back in Washington where the explorer spent long hours dictating his report to his wife. This report with its description of the Great Basin—submitted to the Chief of the Bureau of Topographical Engineers on March 1, 1845, and ordered by Congress to be printed, along with his first, in an edition of 10,000 copies—secured Fremont's reputation. Its popularity astonished even Jessie, and she wrote that her author-husband was ranked with Daniel Defoe. Domestic and foreign trade editions quickly followed. The public read them avidly, especially Mormon leaders in Nauvoo, whose attention was caught by an entry of September 14 describing the valleys along Bear River and some of the creeks Fremont had seen as forming
Undoubtedly Fremont's report and maps were influential in the Saints' decision to settle in Salt Lake Valley.
A few months after submitting the report, Fremont embarked on his third western expedition and came once more to Utah, entering this time by way of the White River and again picking up Joseph R. Walker. Traveling to Utah Lake by way of Provo Canyon, the party followed the Jordan River to the Salt Lake Valley where several days were spent exploring, making astronomical observations, and sketching the geographical features of the country. Fremont rode horseback out to Antelope Island, "the water nowhere reaching above the saddle girths." "The floor of the lake," he wrote, "was a sheet of salt resembling softening ice, into which the horses' feet sunk to the fetlocks." It was there he met a weathered Ute chief who demanded and received pay for the game the whites had taken.
Fremont explored Skull Valley, crossed the Cedar Mountains, and blazed a trail across the Salt Lake Desert to Pilot Peak which he named. Although he made little of it, this crossing of the desert was not always easy: in this case it was done late in the coolness of October and his party was mounted; emigrants, crossing in late summer, making fifteen miles a day with heavy-laden wagons and oxen, would suffer incredibly. After he reached California, Fremont wrote Jessie in Washington that by the route he had explored one could ride in thirty-five days from the junction of Fountain Creek and the Arkansas River (modern Pueblo, Colorado) to Sutter's Fort on the Sacramento, and that wagons could follow the road easier than any other.
Rumors that Fremont had found a more direct road to California than the established one by way of Fort Hall and the Humboldt especially interested Lansford W. Hastings who arrived at Sutter's Fort shortly after the prestigious explorer. In his already published Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California, he had theorized that a shorter route to California might bear "west southwest" to the Salt Lake. At Sutter's he undoubtedly talked with Fremont and his men, including those of the Talbot-Walker detachment which at Mound Springs had been sent through Secret Pass in the Ruby Mountains to intersect the emigrant road at the Humboldt River, south of present-day Halleck, Nevada. Apparently convinced that the Walker-Talbot-Fremont route was feasible, Hastings recrossed the Sierras in the spring of 1846 and worked his way east along their path until he reached Fort Bridger on Blacks Fork where he was successful in persuading a number of emigrant groups, including the Donner-Reed party, to take the desert shortcut to California. In a real sense the infamous Hastings Cutoff was blazed by Fremont.
Of Fremont's checkered role in the Bear Flag Revolt, the conquest of California, and his involvement in Robert F. Stockton's controversy with Stephen Watts Kearny, little needs saying except that Fremont was as often right as wrong and that Jessie stood by him loyally and attempted to use her influence at the highest level—i.e., with President Polk. When her husband returned from the third expedition which had started so gloriously, he was under arrest. His subsequent trial at the Washington Arsenal for mutiny, disobedience, and conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline was a humiliating experience. He and Benton, who acted as his legal counsel, sought on more than one occasion to use the fear and public distrust of Mormonism against Kearny and the prosecution. They insinuated that the unrest among native southern Californians after the conquest was due to the arrival of the Mormon Battalion and not to any lack of faith in the legitimacy of Fremont's government. They implanted the idea that had the commander of the Mormon Battalion, Philip St. George Cooke, found Fremont instead of a subordinate in command of the California Battalion at San Gabriel on a particular occasion, he would have used the Mormon soldiers to "crush" the national hero and that "crush" meant to "kill." They also attempted to show that Kearny had marched Fremont home from California under the surveillance of a Mormon guard—a great indignity— as much because it was Mormon as because he was in custody!
Rather than tarnishing Fremont's national reputation, the courtmartial actually added to it, and the trial wrote indelibly into the public mind the fact—or fiction, as some historians would have it—that he had played a daring role in the acquisition of California. But the courtmartial did have an effect upon his character. While he was not a man to look back, lose courage, or indulge in posttrial recriminations, the wound festered and made him more determined than ever to win laurels as an explorer.
He launched a new expedition late in October 1848 to establish the feasibility of a railroad to the Pacific along the line of the thirtyeighth parallel. It terminated in disaster in the snows of the San Juans in Colorado with ten men dead from starvation and cold. There followed a lull in exploring activity as Fremont occupied himself in developing his Mariposa estate and with a brief fling at politics, when he drew the short term as one of California's first United States senators.
In 1853, when Congress appropriated money for five Pacific railroad surveys, Benton immediately wrote to Fremont, who was in Europe, suggesting that he return, and to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, urging that Edward F. Beale and Fremont be given one of the surveys, and that Beale be permitted to begin work immediately. As soon as Fremont was able to get out of the hands of his "bail," he came home ahead of Jessie and the children with fine scientific instruments he had selected in Paris with the help of the astronomer Arago. Failing to land a spot at the head of one of the government surveys—John W. Gunnison was appointed to direct the one he coveted along the thirty-eighth parallel— Fremont decided upon another winter expedition at his own expense (and perhaps Benton's). He would show that winter snow was not a deterrent to such a railroad route and in the process cover himself with glory.
To this end, he recruited a party of twenty-two, including the American-born Jewish-Portuguese artist and daguerreotypist, Solomon Nunes Carvalho, whose narrative is the only source of detail about this adventure and who became one of Fremont's staunchest boosters. "I know of no other man to whom I would have trusted my life, under similar circumstances," Carvalho subsequently wrote. Other members included the thirty-year-old Prussian topographer, F. W. Egloffstein; assistant engineer Oliver Fuller of Saint Louis, and W. H. Palmer as a "passenger." Although Theodore Bacon, son of a New Haven minister, was rejected because the expedition was being financed by such "slight means," Fremont later softened and accepted a volunteer assistant topographer, Max Strobel, who had left Isaac Stevens's northern railroad survey and who would become a paid topographer when Egloffstein quit at Parowan. Among the twenty-two, were ten Delawares. "... A more noble set of Indians I never saw," wrote Carvalho, "the most of them six feet high, all mounted and armed cap-a-pie...."
Except for the Indians, who joined them at the Potawattomie village, the men outfitted near Westport, Kansas. Animals purchased at exorbitant prices were branded with the Fremont "F"; at Independence Carvalho bought two dozen India-rubber blankets, dubbed by him the most useful articles on the trip. He wrote:
Supplies included luxuries as well as necessities—cocoa, Java coffee, and Alden's preserved eggs, milk and cream, the latter commodities supplied by the manufacturer who wished them tested on the expedition. But excess baggage, even luxuries, was unwelcome and before many days out the men had destroyed some of Alden's patented products. The thoughtful Carvalho, however, tucked away a tin of the eggs and one of the milk and on New Year's Day, in the bitter cold of the high mountains, mixed these with water and arrowroot (provided by his wife in case of illness) to produce a tasty dessert to accompany the usual "horse soup," augmented on this special day with horse steak fried in the remnants of buffalo tallow candles.
], and literally got FreThe expedition got underway on September 22 but Fremont became ill and turned back to Westport for medical advice; soon he returned to Saint Louis for treatment, ordering the party to wait for him on the Saline fork of the Kansas River where buffalo were plentiful. From Washington, Jessie dashed by train to Saint Louis where the consulting homeopathic physician, Dr. Ebers, in time "soothed the pain, uprooted the inflammation" [inflammatory rheumatism, and literally got Fremont "on his legs." The good doctor, a veteran of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828, even agreed to accompany the explorer west, although Jessie was reluctant to see her husband go. She wrote Elizabeth Blair Lee, her good friend,
It was the end of October before Fremont rejoined his party, late in the season for exploring. Already Captain Gunnison and seven of his men, two of them veterans of Fremont's fourth expedition, had been murdered by Utes near Sevier Lake. By the time the Fremont party reached Bent's House thirty miles below the old fort, which had been destroyed, Fremont's health was so completely restored that the physician returned to Saint Louis. Then the expedition laid in new supplies of sugar, coffee, dried buffalo meat, robes, overshoes, and gloves and added a small buffalo-skin lodge for Fremont and a large one capable of sheltering twenty-five men. From Bent's they traveled up the Arkansas, worked their way over the Rockies and down the western slope into Utah. Part of the time they were following Gunnison's trail; but before reaching the Green, Fremont diverged from it, swung south, crossed the river near the mouth of the San Rafael, wandered through unexplored country—at least as far as Circle Valley on the Sevier—and ultimately reached Parowan in the southwest corner of the present state.
Carvalho chronicles vividly the sufferings of the little party as they doggedly pushed through the wintry wilderness, sometimes encountering raging snowstorms, sometimes temperatures thirty degrees below zero. On one occasion, the lead mule slipped on a snowy mountain slope and tumbled head over heels, carrying fifty other mules with him several hundred feet to the bottom. Fortunately only one mule was killed, but it took a full day to recover the baggage. The crossing of the eastern fork of the Colorado River was attended with much difficulty and more danger. Along both banks the ice was about eighteen inches thick, but the middle channel, about two hundred yards wide and six feet deep, ran too swiftly to freeze. The men spread sand on the surface of the ice to prevent slipping, drove the pack animals in, and rode their own horses across, their clothes freezing stiff in the process. Carvalho wrote of "the awful plunge from the ice into the water, I never shall have the ambition to try again." The Delawares had been among the first across and built huge fires by which all dried their clothes on their persons.
On several occasions they encountered Indians, one group of which undoubtedly would have run off their horses had it not been for the party's vigilance; another band of about fifty was most threatening in their demands for red cloth, blankets, gunpowder, and knives; on the other hand, another furnished cereal in the form of grass seed.
Steadily their food supplies disappeared and could not be replenished with game on a regular basis. Once they had beaver for breakfast and porcupine for supper; a coyote furnished another meal, but Carvalho could not bring himself to partake; sometimes they collected cactus leaves, burned off the spines in the fire and ate them. Soon it became necessary to kill their horses for food. Carvalho's poor old pony, too weak to bear even a bundle of blankets, was the first sacrificed. At that point, Carvalho records, Fremont called the men together and exacted a solemn pledge that regardless of the extremity, they would not resort to cannibalism as some may have done on the fourth expedition. "He then threatened to shoot the first man that made or hinted at such a proposition."
As suffering became more acute, men began to lag behind. Fremont ordered all extra baggage wrapped in the large buffalo-skin covering of the great lodge (the pole had already broken), buried in the snow, and covered with brush. During that night in Circle Valley, standing almost to their waists in snow, Fremont and Carvalho made astronomical observations for hours, and the veteran explorer concluded that Parowan, the small Mormon settlement, forty rods square, in the Little Salt Lake Valley was but three days travel. But reaching it was a feat in itself, and almost at the very hour of triumph—near Mule Point—Oliver Fuller died in the saddle. Not having tools to dig a grave in the frozen ground, Fremont postponed burial until after his arrival at Parowan, whence he sent out several men to perform the duty. The Mormons opened their homes and took in the men of the expedition. Fremont stayed with the stake president, John Calvin Lazelle Smith, and his family; Carvalho with the English shoemaker, William Heap, and his family. The secretary of the territory, Almon W. Babbitt, had stopped in this walled village of a hundred families en route to Washington, by way of California, and Fremont was able not only to borrow money from him but also to send letters home.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, the long winter ground on for Jessie, who was again pregnant. There was a distinct coolness in the air when Fremont's name was mentioned to her father, even though it had been Benton who summoned his son-in-law home from Europe in the hope of getting him a survey post. Later, Jessie attributed some of this coolness to her husband's having revoked the $1,000,000 sale of the Mariposa, that Benton, under a power of attorney, had made to Denny Sargeant in 1851. Family friend Montgomery Blair thought more was involved and perhaps he was right. Whatever it was, Jessie, too, felt the alienation of her adored father and was slow to forget the loneliness of that winter of 1853-54. To Elizabeth Blair Lee she wrote a few years later:
She brooded, her nights became sleepless, her appetite vanished, and she became convinced that Fremont and his party were starving. Then suddenly her spirits revived, a fact she ascribed to a strange psychic revelation experienced on the precise day and hour that her husband emerged from the jaws of death. Her sister and a young cousin had come to her house to spend the night and were telling her all about a wedding they had just attended. The fire in the hearth burned low and Jessie went to an adjoining room for a log. As she stooped, she felt a touch on her shoulder and heard her husband whisper her name. At once her heart grew light. Hurrying to the next room she found her sister half-fainting from the sense of a mysterious presence, and when she revived she began to scream. According to Jessie, upon Fremont's return his notebook revealed that at 11:30 P.M. Parowan time (1:53 A.M. Washington time), having just settled his men in warm quarters, he had permitted his thoughts to wander home before setting about writing notes. Jessie reiterated this story on several occasions: in the pages of Wide Awake, in the Journal of Physical Research, in her own book, Far West Sketches, and in her manuscript memoirs, now in the Bancroft Library. Sometimes she dates the arrival in Parowan as February 6, sometimes as February 9; Smith dates it February 7; and Fremont, February 8.
When the Mormon, Babbitt, arrived in Washington on April 11 Jessie arranged a dinner party. In her invitation to Lizzie's husband and Mr. Blair, she requested that they forget "he has lots of wives and look upon him only as I do in his last character as friend & banker to Mr. Fremont."
By February 21, Fremont was in shape to continue his expedition but this time without the services of Egloffstein and Carvalho, who withdrew to Salt Lake City. He was guided west for three days by Bishop Tarlton Lewis's son. John Steele, the mayor and county recorder, lamented that the explorer carried away with him twenty dollars worth of survey maps of Iron County that had been lent to him for copying. Fremont's route was "a little south of West," which must have taken him by Iron Springs, across the Escalante Desert, and near present-day Panaca, Nevada.
By mid-April 1854 he was in San Francisco and, Montgomery Blair wrote his wife, "as fat as a buck. So much so, that his clothes seem too tight for him," and that he made "no account of his hardships." Fremont did not linger long in California. Declining a public dinner tendered by the Society of California Pioneers, he took passage in the Nicaragua steamer Cortes on May 1. At Aspinwall, he caught the Northern Light, arriving in New York on May 25, 1854, about a week after Jessie had given birth to a son in Washington.
Territorial Delegate John M. Bernhisel wrote Brigham Young that Fremont had called to thank him "for the kindness he had received from our people." Although the Republican platform of 1856 asserted that "it is both the right and imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery," Fremont, the standard bearer, remained personally silent on the issue of polygamy. Given the political climate, perhaps it was as much as could be expected. Brigham Young noted that "even our friend [Stephen A.] Douglas dare not venture to enlist his influence in our cause. . . ."
As time wore on, Fremont's attitude mellowed even more. When Jesse N. Smith, who had gathered supplies for the bedraggled company in Parowan, came to Arizona in 1879, Fremont, as territorial governor, at once sent congratulations to Smith and appointed him notary public. At a San Jose Floral Affair in early May 1888, he met and reminisced with one of his old Parowanian rescuers. And a bit later when Kate Field, journalist, actress, and the recipient of a gold badge set with diamonds from the Loyal League in Salt Lake City, travelled to Los Angeles in 1888 to lecture on the vices and evils of Mormonism, Fremont refused to introduce her at a public meeting. "I cannot do it," he said, "The Mormons saved me and mine from death by starvation in '54."
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