The Age of Gold (5 page)

That didn’t end the Texas story, however. Nor did it satisfy the aggressive appetite of Manifest Destiny. Although Texas had claimed independence from Mexico in 1836, the Mexican government rejected the claim and sent troops to suppress the rebellion. The Texans lost at the Alamo, but won at San Jacinto and forced the Mexicans to withdraw. Even so, Mexico refused to make peace or recognize the independence of the Texas republic. Consequently, when the United States annexed Texas in 1845, Mexico protested vehemently.

James Polk, inheriting the dispute, might have ignored the Mexican protests, except for one thing. Polk had read Richard Dana’s book, and he became convinced that California—that marvelous land so neglected by its feckless people—should be brought into the Union. He offered to buy California from Mexico. When the Mexican government refused, he insisted. When the Mexicans refused again, Polk determined to take California by force.

The dispute with Texas provided the pretext. The president ordered General Zachary Taylor to assume a provocative position on the border between Texas and Mexico, intending for Taylor to be attacked. The attack was slow in coming, and the frustrated Polk began drafting a war message without it. But at the last minute the welcome news arrived that hostilities had commenced. Eleven Americans had been killed—on American soil, Polk explained to Congress. War was necessary and justified. Congress agreed, and in June 1846, Manifest Destiny went to war.

T
HE DECLARATION OF WAR
came none too soon for John Frémont, who was in California anxiously awaiting the belligerent word. Frémont’s anxiety reflected both his personal ambition and his uneasy conscience. His ambition drove him to dream of conquering California for the United States; his conscience nagged him for having started the war already, without authorization from Washington.

Frémont was one of the great enigmas of his generation. For ten years during the 1840s and 1850s he was as famous as anyone in America, a celebrity-hero whose star rose like a rocket in the West and flashed brilliantly from coast to coast. Young men idolized his physical courage and political audacity; young women swooned over his sad eyes, his black curls, and olive complexion, and the catlike grace with which he walked. In an era entranced by exploration, Frémont was the explorer par excellence, the “Pathfinder of the West.” Thousands followed the trail he blazed toward Oregon; thousands more read the reports he published on the vast region that stretched from the Great Plains to the Pacific.

Yet though the whole country knew Frémont, almost no one knew
him well. His origins were shrouded in mystery and scandal. His father was an itinerant French adventurer, an émigré from the French Revolution with a trail of transatlantic amours who seduced Frémont’s mother and cuckolded the man to whom she was married. Consumed by her desire, she ran off with her lover and lived with him in common-law bigamy. From this illicit union sprang John Charles Frémont, who inherited his father’s handsome face and dangerous habits, and his mother’s passionate impulsiveness. But he inherited little else, certainly nothing on which a man could build a career.

Where he got his burning ambition was another mystery. Neither parent displayed anything comparable. Perhaps it had skipped a generation or two; perhaps it came from having to live down his illegitimate birth. In any event, it caused him to join the army, that historic institution of elevation for the ambitious but badly born. It provoked him to risk his own life and those of his men on daring crossings of the Rockies, the Great Basin, and the Sierras. And it drove him, in the spring of 1846, to dream of liberating California from Mexico and to grossly exceed his military orders.

Frémont had reached California some months earlier, on his second visit to the province. Amid the bellicose clamor of Manifest Destiny, his presence, with that of his wilderness-toughened band of cavalrymen, made John Sutter and other Mexican officials nervous. The commandant of California, José Castro, ordered Frémont to leave the province. He obliged, but slowly and with a studied insolence intended to elicit a violent response. He came close to getting it when Castro issued a proclamation calling on Californians to take arms against the “band of robbers commanded by a captain of the United States army, J. C. Frémont.” Frémont claimed injury and vowed, “If we are unjustly attacked we will fight to extremity and refuse quarter, trusting to our country to avenge our death….If we are hemmed in and assaulted here, we will die, every man of us, under the flag of our country.” But the tense moment passed, and Frémont reluctantly headed north toward Oregon. On the way he heard rumors that Castro was encouraging local Indians to attack American settlers; still hoping to start something, Frémont launched a raid on an Indian village. Scores of Indians—as many as 175 by one count—were killed.

Yet the tinder refused to light, and Frémont continued north to the vicinity of Oregon’s Klamath Lake, where he waited impatiently for an excuse to return. In May 1846 a secret messenger arrived from Washington. Precisely what this messenger said has been lost to history, for he destroyed his orders before crossing Mexican territory. But whatever he said prompted Frémont to move south at once.

Back in California, he resumed his campaign against the Indians. He led a mounted sweep of several Indian villages on the west bank of the Sacramento River; an indeterminable number of Indians were killed and hundreds were rendered homeless.

But
still
the war wouldn’t start. By now Frémont was beginning to wonder if it ever would—and, if it didn’t, whether he would be held accountable for the Indian war he had been waging, unauthorized, on Mexican soil.

Frémont’s predicament only deepened when some of the American settlers raised the flag of rebellion against the Mexican government. These rebels modeled their “Bear Flag revolt” on the American Revolution, and just as the patriots of 1776 had appealed to France for help, so the patriots of 1846 appealed to the French-descended Frémont. Frémont obliged, and in fact took effective control of the rebellion. He seized Sutter’s Fort— thereby confirming Sutter’s long-standing suspicions of his malign intentions—and arrested nearby officials of the Mexican government.

These actions elevated his liability to a new level. Thus far his aggressions had been directed against Indians, who though living under Mexican jurisdiction lived somewhat outside Mexican law. But now Frémont was taking on the Mexican government itself. If war didn’t break out, he would be at the center of a major international incident.

Frémont raised the stakes still further by ordering the killing of some Californians. Shortly after the start of the Bear Flag rebellion, Frémont’s soldiers spied a small boat of Californians crossing San Pablo Bay. Frémont sent Kit Carson, the famous scout and Indian fighter who was Frémont’s frequent partner in exploration, and some other men to intercept the boat. According to an eyewitness, Carson asked Frémont, “Captain, shall I take those men prisoner?” According to this same witness, Frémont answered, with a wave of the hand, “I have no room for prisoners.” Carson and the
others rode to where the boat had landed and shot three of the Californians dead. (A fourth escaped.) Frémont defended his action as punishment for the murder of two Americans, apparently by some Californians. But there was no evidence that the three men killed on Frémont’s order had any connection to the murder of the Americans, and the incident created the distinct probability that Frémont would be charged with murder if no war followed.

Finally, to Frémont’s relief, the news of Washington’s war declaration arrived. This effectively ended the Bear Flag revolt, which was swept up in the larger contest against Mexico, and it lifted the cloud that hung over Frémont. Technically, of course, he was still guilty of having illegally waged war in a foreign country. And there was the moral matter of the blood of the Indians and Californians on his hands. But in the age of Manifest Destiny, it didn’t seem likely that anyone in Washington would fault him for arriving at the same conclusion the United States government did, only sooner; and as for the deaths of the Indians and Mexican Californians, no one ever said the West was an easy or safe place to live. Americans applied different rules beyond the plains and mountains, especially to Indians and Mexicans. Frémont was confident that if the war made him a military hero—if he showed the same success in battle he had shown in the wilderness—all would be forgiven.

So he flung himself into the fighting. He raised a regiment of Americans (including James Marshall), whom he led to Monterey. By the time he got there, however, the provincial capital had already surrendered to an American naval squadron. Frustrated again, and more eager for action than ever, Frémont sailed to San Diego, where he joined the force of Commodore Robert Stockton. With Stockton he marched against Los Angeles and took part in the defeat of the Mexican garrison there. As this seemed to end the war in California, Frémont returned north to recruit a larger force for an invasion of Mexico proper. But in his absence, fighting resumed at Los Angeles. He raced back into the breach, and when the uprising was suppressed, he received the honor of accepting the Mexican capitulation. This really did terminate the fighting in California, and though Frémont couldn’t claim sole credit for liberating the province, he
could take satisfaction from having accomplished more toward that goal than anyone else.

His reward was appointment by Stockton as governor of California. For two months he exercised the authority of his office, which was by far the highest he had ever held. But then things began to go wrong. He fell afoul of a conflict between Stockton and Stephen Kearny, the senior army general in California, who had come overland after conquering New Mexico. Frémont assumed, with nearly everyone else in the vicinity, that Stockton outranked Kearny. Kearny differed, and after hot fighting in Washington between the War and Navy Departments, and attendant confusion and unrest in California, Kearny’s view prevailed. Kearny resented Frémont’s defection from army solidarity and ordered him arrested on charges of mutiny and insubordination. Frémont briefly considered resisting the arrest but thought better of it. He allowed himself to be taken ignominiously east, a prisoner, to stand trial before a court-martial.

At the trial, Frémont conducted his own defense. The charges were mutiny, disobedience to a lawful command of a superior officer, and conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline. Frémont indignantly denied all charges, contending that he had always conducted himself as an officer and a gentleman, that he had never disobeyed an order he knew to be lawful, and that mutiny was the farthest thing from his mind. In closing he pleaded the honorable work he had done during his governorship. “My acts in California have been all with motives and a desire for the public service,” he declared. “I offer California, during my administration, for comparison with the most tranquil portion of the United States; I offer it in contrast to the condition of New Mexico at the same time. I prevented civil war against Governor Stockton, by refusing to join General Kearny against him; I arrested civil war against myself by consenting to be deposed.”

To the surprise of no one familiar with military justice, the court returned a verdict of guilty on all counts. Frémont was sentenced to dismissal from military service. Yet several members of the court recommended clemency, citing the prisoner’s valor and the confused conditions in California.

President Polk accepted the recommendation, after a fashion. He said
he believed Frémont guilty of the two lesser charges but innocent of mutiny. Therefore he commuted the prisoner’s punishment. “Lieutenant- Colonel Frémont will accordingly be released from arrest, will resume his sword, and report for duty,” the commander in chief declared.

But Frémont would
not
report for duty. Outraged at being incompletely exonerated, he interpreted Polk’s offer as an insult and resigned his commission. The army had impugned his honor; he would find other outlets for his ambition.

W
ILLIAM SHERMAN SHED
no tears for Frémont. A graduate of West Point and an officer in the American contingent that occupied California after the fighting with Mexico ended, Sherman joined most of the regular army officers in condemning Frémont for insubordination. Kearny was Frémont’s army superior; that fact alone should have settled the matter. The army was better off without the turbulent lieutenant colonel.

Besides, Sherman couldn’t stand Frémont personally. As individuals they could hardly have been more different. Where Frémont was flamboyant, Sherman was steady. Where Frémont took chances, Sherman took care. Where Frémont broke rules, Sherman enforced them. Where Frémont’s charisma drew people to him, Sherman’s reserve put people off. Where Frémont was fire, Sherman was ice.

The ice in Sherman often took those who met him by surprise. His red hair and beard gave a first impression of a hotter temperament. Perhaps because of that, and to correct it, he kept the hair and beard clipped brusquely short. The eyes were the giveaway: blue, not like some warm southern ocean but like a glacier’s heart. Gazing out from beneath a high, broad brow, the eyes assessed the world, and the people in it, with cool deliberation.

That was how they assessed Frémont, whom Sherman encountered in California. Sherman arrived at Monterey in January 1847 after a long voyage around Cape Horn. The tedium of the voyage was relieved, imperfectly, by a copy of Richard Dana’s book and by the prospect of joining the fight against Mexico. With other West Pointers, Sherman saw the war as a career opportunity, one lately lacking for professional soldiers, and he an
ticipated bloodying his lance in battle. On the last leg of the voyage, up the California coast, he and his shipmates heard reports of the hostilities around Los Angeles. “Being unfamiliar with the great distances,” he wrote, “we imagined that we should have to debark and begin fighting at once. Swords were brought out, guns oiled and made ready, and every thing was in a bustle when the old
Lexington
dropped her anchor.”