Free The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War by Leonard L. Richards

path to the Pacific was straight west from St. Louis. With the financial backing of St. Louis businessmen who eagerly hoped to locate a central, all-weather railroad route through the Rockies, Frémont led a company of some thirty men into the rugged mountains of southern Colorado in the dead of winter. It was a disaster. Ten men, a third of the expedition, perished in the snow. Frémont blamed the guide, “Old Bill” Williams, a sixty-one-year-old mountain man, for leading the expedition astray. So did the Prussian cartographer, Charles Preuss, normally Frémont’s harshest critic. Others laid the blame at Frémont’s feet. 19
             
    Despite the failure of the 1848–49 expedition, the lively reports that Frémont and Jessie had produced a few years earlier had a life of their own. They quickly became classics in exploration literature.
    Although a scientist, Frémont had an artist’s eye for detail. His observations were thus often memorable, romantic. He also celebrated his men and their adventures with boyish enthusiasm. And Jessie clearly had a gift with words. The reports caught the public eye. They could be read for scientific data. They could also be read as adventure stories. Fathers and mothers read them to their children.
    The impact was immense. Joaquin Miller, growing up on an Ohio farm, later recalled listening to his father read by candlelight from Frémont’s report. Wrote Miller:

    I never was so fascinated. I never grew so fast in my life. Every scene and circumstance in the narrative was painted in my mind to last and to last forever…. I fancied I could see Frémont’s men, hauling the cannon up the savage battlements of the Rocky Mountains, flags in the air, Frémont at the head, waving his sword, his horse neighing wildly in the mountain wind…. It touched my heart when he told how a weary little brown bee tried to make its way from a valley of flowers far below across a spur of snow, where he sat resting for a moment with his men; how the bee rested on his knee till it was strong enough to go on to another field of flowers beyond the snow, and how he waited a bit for it to go at its will…. I was no longer a boy…now I began to be inflamed with a love for action, adventure, glory, and great deeds away out yonder under the path of the setting sun. 20

    The reports were also timely. Hundreds of thousands now had their eyes on the West. How were they to get there? What might they encounter? Never before had there been maps that provided detailed directions. Never before had there been so much practical information, such as where to find water and firewood, where to graze livestock, or how to avoid Indian attacks. Never before had there been such vivid descriptions of the West. 21 The account of the Great Salt Lake basin was so animated that Brigham Young, after reading it, became convinced that he had found the promised land for his long-suffering Mormon followers. And in 1847–48, he led them west to Utah. 22
    The reports also generated derivatives. The most important was probably a series of seven maps—created by Preuss—depicting the entire length of the Oregon Trail. Issued by the U.S. Senate in 1846, the maps became for thousands of emigrants their only guide. Others carried along Frémont’s detailed reports.
             
    Typical were Josiah and Sarah Royce. Along with their two-year-old daughter, Mary, the Royces left Iowa for California on the last day of April 1849. After loading up with provisions, they set off in a covered wagon pulled by three yokes of oxen and one yoke of cows. They were guided, as Mrs. Royce later put it, “only by the light of Frémont’s
Travels.
” 23
    The Royces were just three of some thirty thousand Americans who made the trek across the Oregon Trail that summer. They were unique in that two members of their party, Sarah and Mary, were females. No more than one thousand females made the trip that summer. Nearly all the emigrants