The Age of Gold (10 page)

The scrape with Jackson didn’t cure Benton of his violent streak; he subsequently killed a man in a duel. In the East this might have disqualified him from public office, but in Missouri it simply made him more popular, and he was elected senator upon that state’s admission to the Union in 1820.

Midway through his first term (of six), Benton became the father of a feisty girl who inherited his uncompromising spirit. Jessie afterward commented on “that instinctive sympathy which made us one”; in her youth, friends and neighbors commented on how impossible both were, and how much the father spoiled the daughter. When her teachers would no longer have her, he tutored her at home. When the world, including Jessie’s mother, chastised the girl, he took her part. One Saturday evening Jessie stole off to the house of a French Catholic playmate, with pajamas and other spurious evidence of permission to spend the night. She returned home next day to a stern lecture from her mother, who concluded by inquiring why the young lady had missed Sunday school. “Because I planned to go to mass,” Jessie replied saucily, “to learn more about a church that doesn’t confine your Sunday reading to one good book. Besides, I hate the Presbyterian church—no flowers, no candle light, no pictures.” After Jessie had been sent to her room, her sister inquired what their father’s reaction had been. “He scolded me for disrespect to mother, but not to the Presbyterians,” she said.

Jessie blossomed into a dark-eyed, raven-haired beauty, which simply made her father more protective. He tried to steer her affections toward young men of family and prospects. But Jessie had different ideas. One day a dashing lieutenant named Frémont visited the Benton home to see the senator about support for an exploratory expedition to the West. Jessie was smitten before Benton could warn her about the young man’s checkered past. Sensing trouble, Benton forbade Jessie to see Frémont and made sure the explorer got the money for his journey far away from Washington.

Yet Jessie, all of sixteen years old, refused to accept the paternal veto. She smuggled letters to Frémont, and upon his return the two eloped. When Benton learned of the marriage, he ordered Frémont out of the house and told him never to return. Jessie, he said, would stay.

But Jessie would
not
stay. If her husband was banished from the family house, she declared, so was she.

Benton had never been so angry, and he held out for weeks. Yet, as he always did with Jessie, he finally gave in. Daughter and son-in-law were permitted back home. Benton once more, but now with no ulterior motives, sponsored Frémont’s exploratory career.

Jessie did, too. She became her husband’s collaborator and ghostwriter. When he returned from the expedition that scouted the Oregon Trail, and sat down to write the report required by Congress, he discovered that all the courage and ambition that had carried him over the mountains and deserts couldn’t get him past his first paragraph. A severe case of writer’s block induced headaches and nosebleeds. Jessie suggested that the man of action wasn’t necessarily the one best-suited to putting action to paper. As she explained afterward, “The horseback life, the sleep in the open air, had unfitted Mr. Frémont for the indoor work of writing.” (Jessie’s recollections almost always make her sound more demure than she really was. As with many memoirists, so especially with her: one has to read between the lines.) The two agreed that he would tell the story to her, and she would round it into literary form. The resulting report was a popular and political triumph. Congress ordered a thousand extra copies; newspapers reprinted it and reprinted again. Emigrants to Oregon packed the authorized versions and bootlegged copies in the tops of their trunks for ready reference. With Benton’s encouragement, the legislature ordered a second Frémont expedition, better funded and manned than the first.

This expedition also proved to be better armed than the first: Frémont included a twelve-pound howitzer in his kit. When news of his armament reached Washington, officials at the War Department objected. Frémont would be entering territory in dispute with Britain and Spain; any hint of an armed invasion might provoke a diplomatic crisis. Frémont’s superiors dispatched an urgent message ordering him to leave his artillery at home or return to Washington to explain himself.

Jessie intercepted the message at St. Louis. Acting as her husband’s secretary, she opened his mail in his absence; reading this letter, she concluded that jealous bureaucrats intended to subvert the Frémont expedition.
“I felt the whole situation in a flash,” she recalled. “I had been too much a part of the whole plan for the expeditions to put them in peril now—and I alone could act.” She added, with hindsight, “It was in the blessed day before telegraphs; and character counted for something then, and I was only eighteen, an age when one takes risks, willingly.” She hazarded the censure of the federal government by refusing to forward the letter to Frémont, instead dispatching a swift emissary with a message of her own: “
Only trust me and Go
.”

Frémont went, leaving before a copy of the letter, sent straight from Washington to his camp on the Missouri River arrived. The ensuing expedition, made possible by Jessie’s brazenness, was the one that first took him to California, and when he returned east and Jessie wrote up the report, he became more famous than ever. Congress ordered ten thousand copies, which magnified the Manifest Destinarianism that elected James Polk and triggered the Mexican War.

T
HE IGNOMINIOUS WAY
the war ended for Frémont—culminating in his court-martial and resignation—was what prompted his and Jessie’s move to California. Their thinking was that in California he might restore his sullied reputation and she create a family home, which, on account of his frequent absences, they had never really had. She was pregnant, for the second time. A daughter, Elizabeth, had been born in 1842; now a son, Benton, followed. The four would make a new life in the new territory.

Before leaving California as Kearny’s prisoner, John had entrusted $3,000 to Thomas Larkin, the American consul at Monterey, with the understanding that Larkin would purchase a ranch Frémont had identified in the hills behind San Francisco. The property had various charms, including an ocean view; Frémont supposed it would be both a pleasant place to live and a good investment. But through some combination of accident and shady dealing, Larkin instead purchased a property in the Sierra foothills. The Mariposa tract, as it was called, was much larger than the San Francisco ranch, but was far removed from civilization, was occupied by fiercely possessive Indians, and, for that reason, was inhabitable by out
siders such as the Frémont family only at great peril. Frémont learned of the misdealing and vowed to make it right. He demanded an explanation from Larkin, saying he wanted either his money back or the ranch he originally selected. And he was coming to California to ensure that his demands were met.

Jessie would follow, with the children. The plan she and John devised called for him to travel overland, at the head of another expedition, this one privately funded and designed to test the feasibility of a railroad route to California. Jessie, Elizabeth (whom the family called Lily), and baby Benton would travel by steamer from New York to the isthmus of Panama, cross the isthmus by riverboat and mule, and take a second ship up the coast to Monterey, where they would meet John.

Because the overland expedition would require longer than the Central American journey, and because Jessie had seen so little of John during the last several years, she accompanied him to his jumping-off point on the Missouri River. They traveled by train to St. Louis, then by steamboat up the Missouri to Westport. En route little Benton, who had never been strong during the several weeks of his young life, fell ill and died. Doctors attributed the death vaguely to a defective heart, and attempted to console the mother and father by explaining that the child couldn’t have lived long in any case.

John carried his grief into the wilderness, bidding Jessie and Lily farewell in late October 1848. Jessie sadly returned down the Missouri to St. Louis. There she received a message that General Kearny, in the city and sick with yellow fever, wished to see her—to ask forgiveness for his treatment of John, she inferred. She rejected the invitation. Not only did she blame Kearny for destroying her husband’s career, she convinced herself that the strain of the trial during her pregnancy had harmed her unborn, and now dead, son. Kearny shortly died himself, unforgiven by the angry, grieving mother.

S
HE THEREUPON TRAVELED
east to New York—and ran into a hurricane of popular emotion like nothing she or anyone else in America
had ever experienced. The letter William Sherman had drafted at Monterey and sent off with the gold-laden Lieutenant Loeser had finally arrived at Washington, and President Polk had translated it into a special message to the American people. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service, who have visited the mineral district, and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation,” the president said. The entire California region was in a fit of excitement. “Labor commands a most exorbitant price, and all other pursuits but that of searching for the precious metals are abandoned. Nearly the whole of the male population of the country have gone to the gold district. Ships arriving on the coast are deserted by their crews, and their voyages suspended for want of sailors…. This abundance of gold, and the all-engrossing pursuit of it, have already caused in California an unprecedented rise in the price of the necessaries of life.” Americans from every region of the country—eastern merchants and manufacturers, southern planters, western farmers—could expect to benefit from the gold discovery and the demand it created for those necessaries of life. Polk predicted that California and the other territories acquired from Mexico would “add more to the strength and wealth of the nation than any which have preceded them since the adoption of the Constitution.”

Rumors of the California gold had been circulating for weeks, but skeptics could easily dismiss such rumors as self-interested efforts to drum up business. Polk’s statement, backed by the can of gold, transformed the rumors into hard news. And it touched off a torrent of commentary and conjecture. “We are on the brink of the Age of Gold,” asserted Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune
. The
New York Herald
declared, “The Eldorado of the old Spaniards is discovered at last. We now have the highest official authority for believing in the discovery of vast gold mines in California, and that the discovery is the greatest and most startling, not to say miraculous, that the history of the last five centuries can produce.”

New York’s merchants eagerly calculated what part of the profits they might hope to claim. One merchant, Franklin Buck, watched his commercial
colleagues lay in goods and passengers for the Far West. “Look out on the docks,” he wrote his sister, appealing to her mind’s eye, “and you will see from twenty to thirty ships loading with all kinds of merchandise and filling up with passengers.” Buck, a Massachusetts man by birth and an heir to the sober Puritan tradition of ancestor Samuel Sewall (of the Salem witch trials), wasn’t one to be swept away by every avaricious enthusiasm that came along. But this was more than he could resist.

Not all were so sanguine. The
Boston Courier
—reflecting that dour Puritanism—wondered whether reality was so golden as portrayed. The Spanish, after all, had owned California for two centuries without discovering gold, despite their adeptness at locating it elsewhere. Imagination strained to think that Americans, with no history in precious metals, should find gold within weeks of acquiring the territory. But Boston’s doubts ran deeper than this. Even assuming that the reports were true in their entirety, they didn’t augur well for California, or for America. “The last thing that we should desire for the prosperity and permanent welfare of a country would be the discovery of a gold mine in it. Hardly any thing can be more certain to repress industry, productive labor, thrifty habits, and social improvement in general.” Were the mining regions of South America prosperous? Hardly—they were characterized by “ragged people, ruinous dwellings, neglected agriculture, sloth, ignorance, squalor, dirt, and dissipation.” Americans would do well to heed the lesson of Spain’s experience. “The romance of
El Dorado
cost the Spaniards more blood, treasure, fatigue, and suffering than all their real conquests and acquisitions in the Western
world. It is to be hoped that our own times will not witness a copy of that delusion.”

J
ESSIE FRéMONT HAD
expected a leisurely start to a genteel journey; what she encountered were mobs of argonauts (as they styled themselves, after Jason and his fleece-seeking shipmates) clamoring for space on the vessels heading down the Atlantic coast. For gold-seekers with money, the isthmus was the route of choice. The price of ocean passage, on the New York to Panama and Panama to San Francisco legs together, ran from $200 to $500 depending on the class of one’s shipboard accommodations. And this was just the start. Under the crush of the gold-hunters, traversing the isthmus became a major operation and a major expense.

Fortunately for Jessie Frémont, money was no problem. Her father was happy to pay her way west. He was rather less happy for her to go unaccompanied by anyone older than Lily. Other Benton relatives were shocked that he even considered allowing her to travel so far, accompanied or otherwise. But he knew Jessie better than they, and knew it was futile to forbid what she had set her mind on—in this case, starting a new life with her husband in California. So her sister’s husband, Richard Taylor Jacob, was pressed into service to escort her to San Francisco.