Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (11 page)

Missouri had long been the portal of American expansion, the pad where great expeditions were outfitted and adventures launched, the place where the westering fever burned at its highest pitch. It was the flash point, the port of embarkation. The state’s own senator, the famed Thomas Hart Benton, was perhaps the greatest exponent of westward expansion, and his unapologetic vision of a continental United States animated the Missourians as they pressed toward New Mexico.

The great-uncle of the famous American painter of the same name, Tom Benton was an enormous man with an even more enormous influence. The sixty-five-year-old senator had a long nose and an imposing head nimbused with white hair. In the Senate, as in every other sphere of his life, he was a tenacious fighter. He’d been involved in several duels over the years—one against Andrew Jackson that ended with the future president lying badly wounded, his shoulder shattered, in a pool of his own blood.

Benton was one of the lions of the Senate at a time when the Senate was full of lions—roaring egos like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. An ultrahawk, Benton served as chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. He had been in the Senate for more than twenty years, ever since Missouri became a state following passage of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. He was a thoroughly self-made, self-educated man who had cured his boyhood tuberculosis through a regimen of cold showers and vigorous outdoor activity. His daughter Jessie wrote that through his illness he had found an “ally within himself on which he could surely rely—his own will.”

He was deaf in one ear from his proximity to a national tragedy that had occurred three years earlier. In February 1844, Benton and a number of other Washington dignitaries had boarded the USS
Princeton
for a Sunday cruise down the Potomac. The ship was captained by Robert Stockton, a flamboyant commodore who would play a prominent role in the American conquest of California. At some point during the excursion, Stockton had ordered his naval gunners to fire a few exhibition rounds from a new cannon that had been placed on board. But something went wrong and the cannon fired directly into the assembled crowd of politicians and military officers. A number of dignitaries were killed by shrapnel, including Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Navy Secretary Thomas Gilmer. Benton survived only by sheer luck—moments before the blast, he had moved a few feet away in search of a better vantage point from which to study the gunner’s marksmanship. Still, the blast ruptured his eardrum and left him in such severe shock that it took him several months to recover.

He found his peace in books. An obsessed bibliophile, Senator Benton was said to have the best library west of the Mississippi, and quite possibly, in his third-floor Washington study, the best library
east
of the Mississippi as well. He was especially fond of his rare editions of Plutarch, Herodotus, and the ponderous
British State Trials,
from which he quoted freely and obnoxiously. He was known around Washington as a breathing encyclopedia. Daniel Webster said that Benton “knows more political facts than any other man I have met, even more than John Quincy Adams.”

Benton would deliver stem-winding filibusters that might last for twelve hours, full of abstruse facts dressed up in purple layers of grandiloquence. One biographer said Benton “literally smothered listeners with the columns of his research.” He would sprinkle not only his formal speeches but even ordinary conversations with lofty allusions from Greek and Roman literature. Another Benton biographer, Teddy Roosevelt, said that the senator, though he had “much erudition,” was “grievously afflicted with the rage for cheap pseudo-classicism.” Roosevelt went on to capture Benton in a series of pungent fragmentary descriptions: The senator had, he said, a “magnificent physique.” He “waxed hot and wrathful” and was “fond of windy orations” in which he “fairly foamed at the mouth.” He had an “aggressive patriotism” and an “immense capacity for work,” but was “unfortunately deficient in the sense of humor.”

Well before the war with Mexico, Benton had kept the long fingers of American settlement steadily curling toward the Pacific. During his first term as senator, in the 1820s, Benton proposed a public works bill that created a true national commerce road from Missouri to New Mexico—the road that became known as the Santa Fe Trail. It was Benton who had pushed for the opening of the Oregon Trail, along which thousands of emigrants were now traveling each year to settle the fertile Willamette Valley. Early on Benton had recognized the necessity of topographical expeditions to map and explore the West, and through his impeccable connections he’d seen to it that his son-in-law John C. Fremont got the choice assignments. More than anyone else in Washington—more than President Polk, even—Tom Benton was the face and voice of Manifest Destiny.

Yet he had arrived at his position by an oblique and unpredictable path, and it was this that made him one of the most interesting men in the Senate. A Southerner by birth, Benton represented a slave state and owned slaves himself. But he did not follow his Southern colleagues in Washington, most of whom favored western expansion primarily as a way to extend slavery into Texas, California, and elsewhere to tip the delicate national balance between slave and free states. Refreshingly, slavery had nothing to do with Benton’s designs on the frontier. He regarded the Peculiar Institution as an “incurable evil,” one that would cause infinite trouble if Western states attempted to adopt it. “I am Southern in my affections,” he once declared, “but I will not engage in schemes for slavery’s extension into regions where a slave’s face was never seen.”

Tom Benton favored westward expansion for altogether different reasons. He was a Unionist, first and foremost, a kind of superpatriot with no patience for men like John C. Calhoun who talked of nullification and secession. Benton believed in the ruddy rightness of American power and American ideals and, especially, American commerce. A staunch advocate of low tariffs and free trade, he was particularly interested in the Orient. He looked forward to the cornucopia of Asian goods that would one day flow through the American ports of San Francisco and Puget Sound. He spoke unabashedly of “the American Empire,” and from his wide reading he concocted a theory that all empires in world history had become great by achieving a direct access to Asian trade. He insisted that the nation do everything in its power to blaze a clear path to the Pacific in the interest of establishing what he called “the American road to India.” Throughout Benton’s long, blustering career, this was his main theme—his “hobby,” as Roosevelt put it, a leitmotif he hammered on constantly.

The most significant obstacle to a vigorous Oriental trade, Benton thought, was Great Britain. Having fought in the War of 1812, the senator especially hated the British, who were always sniffing along the coast of California, pushing various intrigues and colonization schemes. With its mighty navy, Britain could thwart America’s geopolitical aims in myriad ways. Benton thought President Polk should be more confrontational with London. Although the Polk administration had amicably resolved the Oregon boundary dispute at the 49th parallel, the British still seemed suspiciously interested in California’s magnificent ports. Americans, Benton had long thought, should boldly take what was rightly theirs before the British beat them to it.

As a practical matter, of course, Mexico stood in the way—but Stephen Kearny’s Army of the West was on the march to remove this annoying impediment.

To an unusual extent, Kit Carson was a person who lived not in words but in action, responding to situations with a preternatural swiftness. Nearly everyone who knew him mentioned this quality. An army doctor who had traveled with Carson remarked on his “shrewdness of perception” and his “promptitude in execution.” When telling stories about himself, Carson’s favorite phrase was “done so,” the words popped off with the clarity of a clean, neutral fact. One of his early biographers, Stanley Vestal, observed that Carson constantly used the construction “Concluded to charge them, done so,” noting that he often rendered it in a single sentence. “To Kit,” Vestal said, “decision and action were but two steps in the same process.”

For all his self-assurance in the heat of a tight moment, Carson had powerful doubts and vulnerabilities. He was deeply embarrassed by his illiteracy and tried to cover it up in various ways, but the fact remained that he could not write his own name. When signing documents he simply scrawled an
X
(he later learned to write “C. Carson”). At times he showed something of an inferiority complex that manifested itself in an instinctive deference to culturally refined men from back east who were more intellectually accomplished and socially better-connected than he. Falling under the spell of such figures, Carson seemed comfortable playing the role of a loyal lieutenant—or, some might say, a henchman. When people he perceived as his betters told him to do something, he did it, happily and without question.

For Carson, John Charles Fremont was one of those people. Fiercely intelligent but of questionable ethics, Fremont was a man of striking good looks, with a full black beard, hawkish features, and the manic expression of a prophet. Behind his mystic eyes burned the will of a glory hound who saw himself on the path to a fortune far brighter than his rank or talents would immediately suggest. Unlike other leading army topographers, Fremont was not a West Pointer—in fact, he was not even a college graduate, having been expelled from university in South Carolina for “incorrigible negligence.” The bastard son of a wandering French
artiste,
Fremont was born in Savannah and grew up in Charleston. Largely self-taught, he had a passion for botany, a reputation as a Lothario, and a penchant for melodrama that could be insufferable.

But Fremont had something else going for him: He was married to Jessie Benton Fremont, the estimable daughter of Sen. Tom Benton. With the senator’s constant lobbying behind the scenes, Fremont won an ambitious series of official assignments to explore the great wildernesses of the West.

For his first expedition, in the summer 1842, Fremont’s mission was to map and describe the general course of the Oregon Trail all the way to the South Pass in the mountains of present-day Wyoming. The Oregon Trail was a new wagon road that branched off from the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas and worked its way northwest over the Rockies to Oregon, which was then an ill-defined territory occupied jointly by the United States and Great Britain. American emigrant parties, enticed by reports of fertile land in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, had been taking to this braided, rutted road in increasing numbers.

But in truth the route was uncertain, its main thoroughfare forked with dangerous detours, its various stages and watering holes poorly understood, the whereabouts of hostile Indian tribes unknown. To all but the stoutest of hearts, the Oregon Trail was simply too forbidding.

And so the proponents of western expansion wanted to do something about this tenuous state of affairs. Hoping to encourage a full-scale wave of emigration, Senator Benton and others realized that what settlers most sorely needed was a foolproof map and guidebook—a manual, almost—one that pioneers could closely follow, mile by mile, stage by stage.

Producing such a handbook would be the task of Fremont’s first expedition.

While outfitting his party in St. Louis, Fremont chanced to meet Kit Carson on a Missouri River steamboat. Carson was thirty-two years old then and had been visiting his family in Missouri after his many years working as a trapper in the Rockies.

Leaning against the steamship’s railing, Fremont immediately took a liking to this curious little man. “He was broad-shouldered and deep-chested,” Fremont wrote, “with a clear steady blue eye.” Fremont was particularly impressed with Carson’s “modesty and gentleness.” He told Carson that he was looking for a guide to lead him to South Pass.