D-F: Dodge through Fremont

Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography

DODGE, GRENVILLE MELLEN (April 12, 1831-January 3, 1916), civil engineer, politician, son of Sylvanus and Julia Theresa (Phillips) Dodge, was born in a farmhouse in Danvers, Massachusetts. He was of English descent-eight generations removed from Richard Dodge who came to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1638, and four generations removed from James Phillips who emigrated to America in 1700. As a boy Grenville M. Dodge was active, robust, and healthy. He drove a butcher's cart, clerked in a store, and worked on Mrs. Edward Lander's celebrated fruit and vegetable farm-where he gained valuable training in business methods-but he was also interested in books, went to school, and prepared for college. During the winter of 1845-46 he attended Durham Academy (New Hampshire). In 1848 he entered Norwich University (Vermont). He graduated from the scientific department of this institution, and finished at Partridge's private school in July 1851, receiving a diploma as a military and civil engineer. His college days fell in the period of "railroad excitement." Men were dreaming of a transportation system that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and even college students were discussing the subject. Dodge became fired with enthusiasm for civil engineering and railroad building, and after graduating he made a beginning in this field at Peru, Illinois, where two of his classmates had preceded him. His first job was surveying town lot s. Parties, barn dances, horseback riding, and "girls in flaming calico dresses" interested him. Here he met Anne Brown, and later (May 29, 1854), married her. Together with his classmates, the Ransom boys, he organized an artillery squad, which later saw service in quelling some labor trouble at Vermilionville. In January 1852 he was given a position with an engineering party on the Illinois Central Railroad, and in the autumn of that year he met Peter A. Dey, and was taken into one of his surveying parties. When Dey was selected to make the surveys across Iowa for the Mississippi & Missouri Railroad, he took Dodge with him as his chief assistant and put him in charge of the survey from Davenport to Iowa City (1853). From Iowa City, Dodge pushed on westward with his party and reached the Missouri River near the village of Council Bluffs on November 22, 1853. Here he was to make his permanent home. From 1855 to 1861 he was engaged in railroad construction work in Iowa, and in mercantile business in Council Bluffs, helped to organize a bank, made some reconnaissances and surveys west of the Missouri River under the patronage of Henry Farnham and Thomas C. Durant, traded with the Indians, and did some freighting on the plains between the Missouri River and Denver.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, he tendered his services and the services of the Council Bluffs Guards, a company which he had organized in 1856, to Governor Kirkwood. Appointed first to a position on the governor's staff, then to the colonelcy of the 4th Iowa Regiment, he saw active service in the field in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and in the end was promoted to the rank of major-general of volunteers. Early in the war he was wounded at the battle of Pea Ridge. On August 19, 1864, in front of Atlanta he was severely wounded in the head and compelled to retire temporarily from active service. He visited Grant's headquarters at City Point upon invitation; and interviewed Lincoln in Washington. Upon his return to the field (November 1, 1864) he saw service in Missouri, and later against the Indians in the country west of the Missouri River. During the war his services both as a soldier and as an engineer were distinguished. In three days he built a bridge 14 feet high and 710 feet long across the Chattahoochee River. For his skill and efficiency in building bridges and reconstructing and equipping railroads for the use of the army, he was highly commended by General Grant.

Relieved of his military command at his own request (May 1866), he immediately entered upon his duties as chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad, to which position he had been appointed in January 1866. The fir st grading on this road had been done in the autumn of 1864; the fir st rail was laid in July 1865; and the last spike was nailed on May 10, 1869. In one year 568 miles of road were located, built, and equipped. The completion of this stupendous project was the fulfilment of the great ambition of Dodge's life. In January 1870 he resigned as chief engineer. He became chief engineer of the Texas & Pacific Railway in 1871, and upon the failure of that road in the panic of 1873 joined Jay Gould [q.v.] in railroad development in the Southwest. During the ten years of this association he assisted in the building and consolidation of nearly nine thousand miles of road (Perkins, post, p. 262). Among the roads in the construction of which he was interested in the later eighties were the Denver, Texas & Fort Worth; and the Denver, Texas & Gulf. He was president of the Union Pacific, Denver & Gulf in 1892, but the road went into the hands of receivers in the following year and he resigned his office. After the war with Spain, in association with Sir William Horne, he organized the Cuba Railroad Company and by 1903 had completed the line from Santa Clara to Santiago. This was his last piece of railroad construction.

Dodge's surveys alone totaled approximately 60,000 miles. For half a century he was active as projector, builder, financier and director of railroads in the West and Southwest and was called by some the ablest railroad lobbyist of his time. His record places him high among the railroad builders of the world. In politics he was a Republican; he attended the national party conventions; took an active part in presidential elections; and always, of course, kept a watchful eye on railroad legislation. In 1866 he was elected to Congress from the 5th Congressional District in Iowa. He declined a renomination in 1868 in order to devote all of his energies to th e construction of the Union Pacific. In his later years he was much interested in patriotic organizations such as the Society of the Army of the Tennessee and the Military Order of the Loyal Legion.

[Letters (1856-1916) and an incomplete autobiographical MS. are deposited in the rooms of the Historical, Memorial, and Art Building, Des Moines, Iowa. The best published sources of information are: J. R. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War-The Life of General G. M. Dodge (1929); A Brief Biographical Sketch of the Life of Major General Grenville M. Dodge (1893), compiled from official records by his private secretary, J. T. Granger; and "In Memoriam: Grenville Mellen Dodge," in the Norwich Univ. Record, January 29, 1916. See also H. H. Field and J. R. Reed, History of Pottawattamie County, Iowa (1907), volume I; Who' s Who in America, 1914-15; J. T. Dodge, Genealogy of the Dodge Family of Essex County, Massachusetts (1894).]

B. F. S.



FRANKLIN, WILLIAM BUEL (February 27, 1823-March 8, 1903), soldier and business executive, was born at York, Pennsylvania. His father, Walter S. Franklin, was clerk of the House of Representatives from 1833 to 1838. His mother, Sarah, was a daughter of Dr. William Buel of Litchfield, Connecticut. Entering West Point along with U. S. Grant in 1839, he graduated in 1843 at the head of the class, and was commissioned in the Topographical Engineers, then a separate corps of the army. His first employment was on the survey of the Great Lakes, and later he was with Kearny's expedition to the South Pass. In the Mexican War he accompanied General Wool's command, and was present at the battle of Buena Vista. On July 7, 1852, he married Annie L. Clark of Washington. He was promoted first lieutenant in charge of building the new state capitol, 1872- 73, consulting engineer, 1873-77, and superintendent, 1877-80. He was a presidential elector, voting for Tilden, in 1876; adjutant-general of the state for two years; chairman of the board of judges of engineering and architecture at the Philadelphia exposition of 1876; and commissioner- general of the United States for the Paris Exposition in 1888. He died at Hartford. Franklin was one of those generals who, rising to conspicuous positions early in the war, thereafter passed into comparative obscurity because of adverse circumstances for which they were in no way to blame. Grant declared, late in the war, that he "would feel strengthened" with Franklin commanding the right wing of his army before Richmond (Official Records, Army, I series, volume XL, part 2, p. 559); and suggested putting him in the actual military command of Butler's Army of the James (Ibid., part 3, 123), relegating Butler to administrative duties.

[G. W. Cullum, Biographical Register (3rd ed., 1891), II, 152- 54; Who's Who in America, 1901-03; Thirty-fourth Annual Reunion Association Graduates, U.S. Military Academy (1903), pp. 203-20; J. L. Greene, General William B. Franklin, and the Operations of the Left Wing at the Battle of Fredericksburg (1900), and In Memoriam: William Buel Franklin (1903), by the same author; Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the U.S., Commandery of the State of N. Y., Circular No. 19 (1903); Official Records (Army), 1 series, volumes II, XI (parts 1, 2), XIX (part 1), XXI, XXVI (part 1), XXXIV (parts 1, 2, 3), LI (part,).]

T.M. S.



FREMONT, JOHN CHARLES (January 21, 1813-July 13, 1890), explorer, politician, soldier, was the son of a French emigre school-teacher of Richmond, Virginia, Jean Charles Fremon, who eloped with Mrs. Anne Whiting Pryor of that city in 1811. They fled from Mrs. Pryor's aged husband to Savannah, Georgia, where Fremont was born. While the father taught French and dancing in various parts of the South, the mother sometimes took boarders. The family spent some years in Norfolk, Virginia, and after the death of Fremon in 1818 his widow (if we may so call her in the absence of any marriage) removed to Charleston, South Carolina, where she supported several children on a meager inherited income. Fremont was precocious, handsome, and daring, and quickly showed an aptitude for obtaining protectors. A lawyer, John W. Mitchell, saw that he was givein sufficient schooling to enter Charleston College in May 1829, and he remained there, with intervals of teaching in the country, till expelled for irregular attendance in 1831. Fortunately the college had grounded him in mathematics and the natural sciences. Fortunately also he had attracted the attention of Joel R. Poinsett, Jacksonian leader in the state, and shortly obtained through him an appointment as teacher of mathematics on the sloop of war Natchez. On this ship he cruised in South American waters in 1833.

Fremont's real career began when he resigned from the navy to become a second lieutenant in the United States Topographical Corps and to assist in surveying the route of a projected railway between Charleston and Cincinnati. In his work in the Carolina mountains he formed a strong taste for wilderness exploration. This was deepened when in 1837-38 he acted with another detachment of the Topographical Corps in a reconnaissance of the Cherokee country in Georgia, instituted by the government preparatory to the removal of the Indians. Ordered thence to Washington, Fremont obtained from Poinsett a place with the expedition of J. N. Nicollet [q.v.] for exploring the plateau between the upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Nicollet; a scientist of high reputation in Paris and Washington, gave him an expert training in astronomical, topographical, and geological observation, for which Fremont's quick mind had a natural taste. He also received a thorough initiation into western frontier life, becoming intimate with such men as Henry Sibley of the American Fur Company, Joseph Renville, J. B. Faribault, and Etienne Provot, meeting large bodies of Sioux, and traversing much of the country between Fort Pierre on the Missouri and Fort Snelling on the Mississippi. Returning to Washington, he took bachelor quarters with Nicollet and collaborated with him upon a map and an elaborate scientific report.

The second turning-point in Fremont's life was his meeting with Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who was greatly interested in Nicollet's work, brought Fremont to his house, and gave him a new vision of the possibilities of western exploration and expansion to the Pacific. Fremont later wrote that his interviews with Benton were "pregnant with results and decisive of my life" (Memoirs of My Life, 1887, I, 65). He fell in love with the sixteen-year-old Jessie Benton. Alarmed by their obvious attachment, her father persuaded Poinsett, now secretary of war, to send the penniless lieutenant to explore the Des Moines River. Fremont, elated by his first independent commission, equipped an expedition in St. Louis, hired the botanist Charles Geyer, and during the spring and summer of 1841 creditably mapped much of Iowa Territory. Neither he nor the strong-willed Jessie Benton had swerved, however, from what was to prove a lifelong devotion, and when the Benton family remained obdurate, they were secretly married in Washington, on October 19, 1841, by a Catholic priest. When Benton learned the fact in November he angrily ordered Fremont from his door, but relented when Jessie quoted the words of Ruth, "Whither thou goest, I will go." Thereafter Fremont found an invaluable adviser, patron, and protector in his father-in-law.

Fremont's first important exploration, a summer expedition in 1842 to the Wind River chain of the Rockies, was planned by Benton, Senator Lewis Linn, and other Westerners interested in the acquisition of Oregon, and marked him definitely as the successor of the now dying Nicollet. Its main object was to give a scientific examination to the Oregon Trail through South Pass and to report on the rivers, the fertility of the country, the best positions for forts; and the nature of the mountains beyond in Wyoming. Equipping a party of twenty-five in St. Louis with the aid of Cyprian Chouteau and obtaining by a lucky chance the services of Kit Carson as guide; Fremont left the Kansas River on June 15, 1842; followed the Platte toward the Rockies, crossed South Pass, and from the headwaters of the Green River explored the Wind River range, where he climbed what he mistakenly thought to be the highest peak of the Rockies, Fremont's Peak (13,730 feet). On his return he recklessly shot the rapids of the swollen Platte in a rubber boat and lost much of his equipment (F. S. Dellenbaugh, Fremont and '49, 1914, p. 65 ff.). He was back in Washington in October, and with Jessie Fremont's expert help, for she possessed high literary gifts, he composed a report which gave him a wide popular reputation (Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1843). Modeled on Irving's Adventures of Captain Bonneville, it showed a zest for adventure and a descriptive sparkle which appealed to the fast-growing interest in Oregon settlement. It furnished a scientific map of much of the Oregon Trail prepared by the topographer Charles Preuss, emphasized the fertility of the plains, and offered much practical advice to emigrants. Government publication was followed by numerous reprints. Congress, prompted by Benton, at once authorized a second expedition under Fremont which was to reach the South Pass by a different route, push to the Columbia, and examine the Oregon country, connecting on the Pacific with the coastal surveys by Commander Wilkes.

Fremont's second expedition of almost forty well-equipped men left the Missouri River in May 1843, with Thomas Fitzpatrick as guide, Preuss as topographer, and a twelve-pound howitzer cannon which he rashly obtained from Colonel S. W. Kearny in St. Louis. Its departure was hastened by an urgent message from Jessie Fremont, who suppressed a War Department order requiring Fremont to return to Washington to explain his howitzer; the government objected to giving the expedition the appearance of a military reconnaissance. Benton later successfully defended his daughter's action. On the Arkansas River Fremont was joined by Kit Carson. After an unavailing effort to blaze a new trail through northern Colorado, he struck the regular Oregon Trail, on which he passed the main body of the great emigration of 1843; stopped to explore the Great Salt Lake; and pushed on by way of Fort Hall and Fort Boise to Marcus Whitman's mission on the Columbia. His endurance, energy, and resourcefulness were remarkable. Reaching the Dalles on November 5, Fremont left the main body of his expedition while he went down stream to Fort Vancouver for supplies. He might then have retraced his steps to St. Louis. But under the spell of Benton's dream of acquiring the whole West, he resolved to turn south and explore the Great Basin between the Rockies and Sierras. Moving through Oregon to Pyramid Lake, which he named, and into Nevada, he reached the Carson River on January 18, 1844. From a point near the site of Virginia City he resolved to cross the Sierra into California, a feat daring to the point of foolhardiness, yet despite the perils of cold and snow he accomplished it. Early in March he reached the Sacramento Valley and was hospitably received by Captain August Sutter at his fort, where he refitted his party. While here he talked with the American settlers, now growing numerous, and formed a clear impress ion of the feeble Mexican hold upon California. Moving south till he struck the "Spanish Trail" from Los Angeles to Santa Fe, he followed this for some distance, crossed parts of the present states of Nevada and Utah, explored Utah Lake, and by way of Pueblo reached Bent's Fort on the Arkansas. Not until August 1844 did he arrive in St. Louis. His return was one of the sensations of the day. Accompanied by Jessie, he traveled to Washington and devoted the winter with her aid to his second report. It appeared at a fortunate moment, when Polk's victory had given impetus to policies of expansion. As detailed, vivid, and readable as the first report, with much careful scientific observation, it showed that the Oregon Trail was not difficult and that the Northwest was fertile and desirable. Senator Buchanan moved the printing of 10,000 copies.

With war with Mexico now clearly imminent and all eyes fixed on the West, it was easy for Benton to carry an appropriation for a third expedition under Fremont. Under the War Department, it was to execute a survey of the central Rockies, the Great Salt Lake region, and part of the Sierra Nevada. In St. Louis Fremont equipped sixty men, fully armed; Kit Carson was again called to be his guide, and two other distinguished frontiersmen, Joseph Walker and Alexander Godey, were enlisted. Fremont in his Memoirs (I, 422 ff.) states that it was secretly intended by Benton and George Bancroft, secretary of the navy, that if he reached California and found war had begun, he should transform his scientific force into a military body. Unquestionably he desired to play a role in conquering California, which had captivated him by its beauty and wealth, and this desire furnishes the key to his very controversial conduct there. Moving west by way of Bent's Fort, the Great Salt Lake, and the "Hastings Cut-Off," he reached the Ogden River, which he renamed the Humboldt, and divided his party in order to double his geographical information. On December 9, 1845, after blazing a useful new trail across Nevada, he was again at Sutter's Fort. Under the pretext of obtaining fuller supplies, he took his men to Monterey and established contact there with the American con~ sul, Thomas Larkin. In February 1846 he united with the other branch of his expedition near San Jose, thus giving the United States a formidable little force in the heart of California. The suspicious Mexican officials ordered him from the country but with headstrong audacity he promptly hoisted the American flag, defying them. Then, obviously playing for time, he moved north to Klamath Lake, where on May 8 he was overtaken by Lieutenant A. H. Gillespie from Washington. Gillespie had brought dispatches to Larkin, of which he carried copies to Fremont, and according to the latter he also brought verbal instructions from Benton and Buchanan which justified aggressive action. There can be no question that he brought news that both Larkin and the commander of the American warship Portsmouth in San Francisco Bay expected war to begin in a few days (Larkin Manuscripts, State Department, letters of April 17, 23, 1846). Fremont felt that his course was clear and turned back.

The result was that he played a prominent if at first hesitating role in the conquest of California. Hastening to Sutter's Fort, he made a display of force there which inspired the discontented American settlers in the Sacramento Valley to begin the Bear Flag revolt, and then (June 23) took up arms in their support. When news of actual war reached him on July 10 he actively cooperated with Sloat and Stockton in the conquest of California. His "California Battalion" of expedition- members and settlers marched to Monterey, took ship to San Diego, and with Stockton's force captured Los Angeles on August 13. Fremont then went north to muster a larger force, was busy recruiting when a revolt wrested Los Angeles from the Americans, and returned only in time to assist Stockton and General S. W. Kearny in the final capture of that town in January 1847. He accepted the Mexican surrender in the Capitulation of Couenga. Almost immediately he was involved in the bitter quarrel of Stockton and Kearny [qq.v.] over their respective authorities, caused by conflicting instructions from Washington. Taking Stockton's side, he was appointed by him civil governor of California, and exercised that authority for two months, until final orders from Washington established Kearny's supremacy. Kearny humiliated Fremont, detained him in defiance of Polk's orders that he was allowed to proceed to Mexico, and, taking him to Fort Leavenworth as a virtual prisoner, there arrested him upon charges of mutiny and insubordination. The quarrel was taken up with indiscreet energy by Benton. It resulted in a famous court martial in Washington (November 1847-January 1848) in which a panel of regular officers found Fremont guilty of mutiny, disobedience, and conduct prejudicial to order. Though President Polk remitted the penalty, Fremont, who found public sentiment on his side, indignantly resigned from the service.

This resignation was followed by a midwinter expedition (1848-49), at the expense of Benton and certain wealthy St. Louisans interested in a Pacific railroad, to find passes for such a line westward from the upper waters of the Rio Grande. It proved a disastrous venture. Eager to show that passage of the mountains was practicable in midwinter, Fremont ignored frontiersmen who warned him that the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan ranges were impassable. He was led astray by his guide "Old Bill" Williams, but he unwisely failed to turn back from the San Juan Mountains in time, and after intense suffering from cold, storms, and starvation, lost eleven men. Succored by Kit Carson and others in Taos, he proceeded to California, meeting on the Gila a troop of Sonora Mexicans who told him that gold had been discovered. Consul Larkin had recently purchased for him a tract of seventy square miles in the Sierra foothills, the Mariposa estate, and he hired the Mexicans to work there on shares. Within a few weeks his income from the diggings reached enormous sums-Jessie Fremont speaks of hundred-pound bags of gold dust-and he was able to acquire large realty interests in San Francisco, live on a generous scale in Monterey, and develop his Mariposa property. His election as United States senator in December 1850 gave him only the short term from September 9, 1850, to March 4, 1851.

Fremont remained essentially a Californian till the Civil War, but with restless energy spent much time outside the state. He served six weeks as senator in Washington, made a prolonged stay with his family in London and Paris (1852-53), gathering capital to work the quartz deposits at Mariposa, and conducted another winter exploration in search of a southern railway route to the Pacific (1853-54). In this expedition he reached central Utah with a small body of men after a journey of great hardship, demonstrating that practicable passes through the mountains existed between north latitude 37° and 38°. But the most important event of these years was his nomination for the presidency. His explorations and court martial had made him a national hero, while his aloofness from the slavery contest rendered him available. First approached by Democratic leaders, including Ex-Governor John B. Floyd of Virginia and members of the influential Preston family, he pronounce d himself vigorously for a free-soil Kansas and against enforcement of the Fugitive-Slave Law (Jessie Benton Fremont Manuscripts). Organizers of the new national Republican party, led by N. P. Banks, Henry Wilson, and John Bigelow, then took him up, and he was nominated at Philadelphia in June 1856. He had hoped that Simon Cameron would be named for vice-president, and always regarded the nomination of W. L. Dayton as one of the causes of his defeat. Possessing no taste or aptitude for politics, he played as passive a role as his opponent, Buchanan. In a campaign notable for abusiveness, much being made of his illegitimate birth and a mendacious report that he was a Catholic, he remained quietly at his Ninth St. home in New York. His defeat by Buchanan by an electoral vote of 174 to 114, and a popular vote of 1,838, 169 to 1,341,264, was clue partly to fear of Southern secession and partly to lack of campaign funds. Fremont shortly returned to California and devoted himself to his mining business, his title to Mariposa, then valued by some at ten million dollars, being confirmed by the federal Supreme Court in 1855.

The outbreak of the Civil War found Fremont in Europe raising more capital for Mariposa, and he attempted a bold service by hastening to England and on his own responsibility purchasing arms for the Federal cause (J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, During Lincoln's Administration, 1927, p. 190). Lincoln wished to appoint him minister to France, but when Secretary Seward protested, appointed him major-general in charge of the department of the West, with headquarters at St. Louis, where he arrived July 25, 1861. The task before him was of tremendous difficulty; he had to organize an army in a slave state, largely disloyal, with few arms, few supplies, and limited numbers of raw volunteers for material, and with political and military enemies ready to make the most of every misstep. When he took charge guerrilla warfare was breaking out in Missouri, while his forces at Cairo, Illinois, and Spring field, Missouri, were menaced by superior armies. He accomplished much, reinforcing Cairo, fortifying St. Louis, organizing a squadron of river gunboats, arousing the enthusiasm of the German population, and training large bodies of men; but the defeats at Wilson's Creek, and Lexington were unfairly blamed upon him, he was justly accused of ostentation and reckless expenditures, and the attacks of Frank Blair cost him Lincoln's confidence. He blundered when on August 30, 1861, he issued a rash proclamation declaring the property of Missourians in rebellion confiscated and their slaves emancipated; this act aroused the applause of radical Northerners, but Lincoln rightly regarded it as premature and when Fremont refused to retract issued an order modifying it. In response to growing complaints Lincoln sent first Montgomery Blair, and later Secretary Cameron and Lorenzo Thomas, to Missouri to investigate, and on the basis of their reports removed Fremont as he was leading an army in futile pursuit of Price's Confederate force (November 2, 1861). The antagonisms aroused in the West by Fremont would alone have justified such action, but the removal was bitterly resented by radical anti-slavery men, and was indirectly censured by the congressional committee on the conduct of the war. Out of regard for this radical opinion, Lincoln in March 1862 appointed Fremont to command the mountain department in western Virginia. But he was given inadequate forces, his command was improperly divided by the government, Lincoln plainly distrusted him, and in May and June 1862 he was completely out generalled by "Stonewall" Jackson in the latter's brilliant Valley campaign. Lincoln then placed Fremont and his corps under the command of Pope, whom Fremont detested for. his alleged insubordination in Missouri, and Fremont asked to be relieved.

Thereafter Fremont's history was one of adversity. Still popular with the radical Republicans who disliked Lincoln, he was nominated for the presidency on May 31, 1864, in Cleveland, but a convention of radicals, western Germans, and war Democrats. His candidacy disturbed the administration, and by a bargain between it and Fremont's radical supporters, Fremont ungracefully withdrew on September 22, 1864, and Lincoln the next day dismissed the ultra-conservative Montgomery Blair from his cabinet. Fremont played no further part in public life. Turning to business, he proved unable to rescue his Mariposa estate from the embarrassments into which it had fallen during his preoccupation with the war, and by the end of 1864 had lost control of that property. For finance, as for war, he lacked essential qualities of judgment. He became interested in western railroads, and after purchasing the Kansas Pacific franchise and a part-interest in the Memphis & Little Rock, he became president and promoter of the Memphis & El Paso, which he dreamed of extending from Norfolk, Virginia, to San Diego, Cal. Though hi, methods were merely those characteristic of promoters in the flush years preceding 1873, the bankruptcy of the line in 1870 not only cost him the remnants of his fortune, but left his reputation under a cloud. Misleading advertisements in French papers, for which he was indirectly responsible, caused his indictment in that country. He never reestablished himself, and was saved from poverty only by Jessie Benton Fremont's activities as an author, his appointment as territorial governor of Arizona (1878-83), and his restoration to the army as major-general, with pay on the retired list, early in 1890. In 1887 he made his home in California, but death came while he was temporarily staying in New York. He and his wife, who survived until 1902, are buried at Piermont on the Hudson. His whole later career had been a tragic anti-climax; but his fame as an explorer, in which his achievements were of very high rank, is commemorated by numerous place-names throughout the United States, and represents services which cannot be forgotten.

[The fullest Work on Fremont's life is Allan Nevins, Fremont, the West's Greatest Adventurer (2 volumes, 1928); it is based in part on family documents, and contains an extensive bibliography. It is supplemented by Fremont's Memoirs of My Life (1887), of which but one volume was ever published;

by Mrs. Fremont's Souvenirs of My Time (1887), Far West Sketches (1890), and A Year of American Travel (1878), valuable in the order mentioned; and by F. S. Dellenbaugh's Fremont and '49 (1914).

Of less importance are S. N. Carvalho, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West with Fremont's Last Expedition (1857);

John R. Howard, Remembrance of Things Past (1925), by a member of Fremont's staff in Missouri;

the manuscript "Narrative of John C. Fremont's Expedition in Cal. 1845-46," by Thos. S. Martin, in the Bancroft Library Cal.;

and John Fowler's manuscript paper on "The Bear Flag Revolt in Cal." (1846), in the same collection.

The Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Fremont (1912), compiled by I. T. Martin, contains materials by his daughter. There is an obituary in the New York Tribune, July 14, 1890.

Cardinal Goodwin, John Chas. Fremont: An Explanation of His Career (1930), is an able but excessively hostile treatment which centers attention upon the Bear Flag Revolt, the events of 1861, and the subsequent railroad transactions.

All of Fremont's papers which survive, many having been destroyed in a fire, are in the Bancroft Library.]

A. N.



FREMONT, JESSIE BENTON (May 31, 1824-December27, 1902), writer, daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton [q. v.] and wife of John Charles Fremont, was the second of five children. Her mother was Elizabeth McDowell, and Jessie was born at her grandfather McDowell's estate near Lexington, Virginia. Here, in Washington, and in St. Louis, she passed her girlhood. She was tutored at home, much of the time by her father himself, in St. Loui s went to an informal French school where she helped the master's wife with her pre serving and acquired an easy familiarity with spoken French; studied Spanish" the neighbor language," as her father called it -and in her earl y teens was sent to the fashionable boarding school kept by Miss English in Georgetown, D. C. At this time, as she later admitted, she was still something of a tomboy, given to climbing trees. At sixteen, a blooming, vigorous girl, full of fun, with a n intellectual capacity beyond her years-the result in part of companionship with h er father-she met young John Charles Fremont [q. v.], a lieutenant in the Topographical Corps, and in spite of the effort of her parents to postpone what seemed inevitable, she married him on October 19, 1841. For the fir st years after h er marriage, during her explorer-husband's long absences, she lived in her father's house-continuing her studies under his supervision, translating confidential State Department papers from the Spanish, serving as his hostess, and becoming increasingly his companion during her mother's long invalidism. Fremont returned from his first important expedition in October 1842; their baby, Elizabeth, was born in November; and during the happy winter that followed, Jessie worked daily with her husband on the first of his vivid reports. When his second expedition (1843) was endangered by a letter recalling him to Washington, she suppressed the order, wrote to him to start at once without waiting for a 1·eason, and when she had received word that he had acted immediately upon her message, wrote to the Department at Washington explaining what she had done. The expedition-a long one-was successful, and in the winter of 1844-45 Fremont and Jessie collaborated on the second report. Anxiety incident to Fremont's court martial in 1848 following his third expedition, told upon Jessie 's health, and in the fall of that year her second baby died. In 1849, with her little girl, she went, by the Panama route, to meet Fremont in San Francisco, suffering a critical illness on the way. The hardships of the voyage and conditions in California on the eve of its admission as a state are described in her little volume, A Year of American Travel (1878). The example of young Mrs. Fremont, reared in a very comfortable home, gallantly doing her own work in the frontier community and refusing to employ slaves, is said to have had an influence on the members of the convention which drafted California's Free-Soil constitution. During the next five years she returned for a short time to Washington society as wife of the first senator from California; bore a son, and when he was but two months old saw her house burn to the ground in the San Francisco fire of 185; visited Europe, 1852-53, being received cordially everywhere as the daughter of Senator Benton and the wife of the brilliant explorer and making lasting friendships in her own right; had another baby, who died; went back to her father's house to wait for Fremont's return from his fifth and most dangerous expedition (1853-54); and in May 1854 gave birth to another son. In her husband's unsuccessful campaign for the presidency (1856) her charm was exploited until "'Fremont and Jessie' seemed to constitute the Republican ticket rather than Fremont and Dayton" (Nevins, post, II, 496-97). After another brief visit to Europe and three years on the California ranch and in San Francisco, where she encouraged and befriended the obscure young reporter, Bret Harte, there came the Civil War. Throughout Fremont's stormy military service she shared his intense anxiety, giving expression to the bitterness which he would not admit and even, on one occasion, attempting to argue with the President in his behalf. Her feeling is partially revealed in The Story of the Guard: A Chronicle of the War (1863). After the war their home in New York City and their country place on the Hudson were centers of hospitality, but in the seventies they lost their entire fortune and for a time · were in actual need. Faced by the problem of a young son whose health required a change of climate, and with no money to send him away, Mrs. Fremont offered Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger a series· of articles at $100 each. He accepted her offer, and she began to contribute regularly to a number of periodicals, writing travel sketches, historical sketches, and stories for boys and girls. Selections from these papers were republished in book form: Souvenirs of My Time (1887); Far West Sketches (1890); The Will and the Way Stories (1891). She helped Fremont with the writing of the first and only published volume of his Memoirs (1887), and wrote for it a sketch of Senator Benton. (Another sketch of her father, which she wrote in 1879, was not published for many years; see New York Independent, January 29, 1903.) In 1887 the Fremonts returned to California, and after her husband's death in 1890 Mrs. Fremont remained in Los Angeles with her daughter, living in a house given her by the ladies of Southern California. At her death in 1902 she was buried beside Fremont at Piermont on the Hudson.

[Mrs. Fremont's writings; Allan Nevins, Fremont: the West's Greatest Adventurer (2 volumes, 1928); Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Fremont (1912), comp. by I. T. Martin; M. C. Kendall, "A Woman who has Lived History," Overland Monthly, January 1, 1901; C. A. Moody, "Here was a Woman," Out West (Los Angeles), February 1903, a good character sketch; Rebecca Harding Davis, "In Remembrance," Independent (New York), January 29, 1903; articles in Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1902, and following issues.]

E. R. D.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes III-IV, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.