Part 9

The year following his marriage, Frémont applied to the Secretary of War for permission to explore the far West and penetrate the Rockies. The plan was supported by Benton, who believed that by making surveys the government would be giving at least a semblance of protection to its Western possessions. Congress gave its sanction, and in May, 1842, with a handful of venturesome spirits gathered on the Missouri frontier, Frémont went forth to the exploration of the southern pass. It was the first of numerous similar expeditions, his scientific reports of which--going into astronomy, botany, mineralogy, geology, and geography--were translated into many tongues, and gave their author world-wide fame.

During his absences, which were always of uncertain duration, his wife sometimes remained in her parents' home. Her father sent for her one morning, when she had been married about a year, and, pointing out her old place at his library table, he said, "I want you to resume your place there; you are too young to fritter away your life without some useful pursuit." So she dropped back quite naturally into her old habits of study, as if her honeymoon days had been but another form of vacation.

She frequently accompanied Frémont, however, as far as St. Louis, waiting there for his return, or going out again to meet him after a fixed time. He was once eight months overdue, during which period of awful silence and suspense she had a supper-table set for him every night with all the comforts and luxuries of that civilization to which he had been so long a stranger. He came at length, in the dead of the night, and, rather than disturb a household, he went to a hotel, and for the first time in eighteen months slept in a bed.

With whatever misgivings she may have seen him set out for a field where he would encounter certainly many dangers, and possibly even death, she never, even when the opportunity came, of which many a weaker woman would have availed herself, endeavored to withhold him from his purpose. He would sometimes, after having covered many miles of his route, come back to her for another good-by, overtaking his party again by hard riding or pressing forward while they were resting.

In the summer of 1843, while he was still on the frontier gathering together men and animals for his second expedition, his recall to Washington was ordered, to explain there why, making a scientific expedition under the protection of the government, he had armed his men with the howitzer. The order, however, never reached him, for he had already left St. Louis, where it fell into the hands of his wife. Though she still labored under the depression of their recent parting, she yet, with all the spirit which the emergency demanded, sent him a swift messenger, bidding him hurry off and rest and fatten his animals at Bent's Ford, stating that there was sufficient reason for the haste which could not then be given.

When he was quite beyond the reach of recall, for it was before the days of telegraphy, she wrote to the colonel of the Topographical Bureau, and confessed what she had done, at the same time giving ample reason for her action. To have obeyed the order, she explained, would have meant the ruin of the expedition. Together with the time it would have required to settle the party before he could leave it, the length of the trip to Washington, and the inevitable delays there, the early grass would be past its best, and the animals thus would be thrown underfed into the mountains for the winter. She then replied to the charge made against Frémont in the order of his recall. The expedition must cross the country of the Blackfeet and other unfriendly tribes of Indians, with no reverence whatever for the cause of science, but with a very wholesome regard for any rights that were backed up with a howitzer. Her father, who was absent from St. Louis at the time, endorsed her action, and wrote to Washington, assuming the responsibility for it, saying he would call for a court-martial on the point charged against Frémont. Nothing further was heard of it, however, and the precious time, that meant so much more to the scientific mind of the explorer than to his government, to which all seasons are the same, was saved.

From an historical point of view this was the most important of all Frémont's expeditions. With the French territory which we had acquired by the Louisiana purchase we inherited also France's old feud with England, the underlying cause of which was the control of the markets in the East. When we took up the cudgels, their conflict, so far as the Western hemisphere was involved, had narrowed down to the ultimate possession of that portion of Mexico's territory which included the harbor of San Francisco. England had already made her survey of the ground, and her eye coveted that matchless port. She was the power we confronted in California when our war with Mexico ushered in the moment for decisive action. Two courageous, intensely American men, however, held the situation in their grasp,--in the Senate, at the climax of his powers, Benton, who had ever had a jealous eye upon England's encroachments on our boundary; in the field, Frémont, with all the gallantry and spirit that final coup demanded.

The British admiral, moving with more deliberation than the American colonel, with characteristic love of sport and appreciation of success, gracefully accepted his defeat, and tendered his felicitations to the intrepid rival, whose flag he found already floating above the coveted territory.

Frémont, after his gallant conquest, became the victim of a quarrel between two officers commanding the United States forces in that vicinity, and was brought back a prisoner over the territory he had acquired for his country. During the ninety days of his trial by court-martial, which stripped him of his commission as lieutenant-colonel of mounted riflemen, inspired by a lofty enthusiasm, his nights were devoted to writing the history of the expedition.

Though he was reinstated by the President, he returned his commission, and in 1848 took out a private expedition, opening the route from the Mississippi to San Francisco. His mountaineers flocked to him, ready to follow wherever he should lead. He had that faith in himself and in his purpose that evoked a corresponding confidence in them, and his presence was light and warmth and refreshment to their daring spirit. When it became necessary at times to divide the party, those who were not with him suffered sorely. The memorable winter of 1848, however, was one of hardships for all, travelling days and weeks within sight of eternal snows. Frémont wrote to his wife during a brief respite from that agonizing period, when his men were starving and freezing and wandering off in despair to lie down alone and die: "We shall yet enjoy quiet and happiness together; these are nearly one and the same to me now. I make frequent pleasant pictures of the happy home we are to have, and oftenest and among the pleasantest of all I see our library with its bright fire in the rainy, stormy days, and the large windows looking out upon the sea in the bright weather. I have it all planned in my mind."

Mrs. Frémont was, meanwhile, making ready for the long journey towards the land of this picture-home. It was the first break from the real home, her father's, where she had passed the greater part of the eight years of her married life, five of which her husband had spent in the field. She started in March, 1849, going by way of the Isthmus, where the man selected by Mr. Aspinwall for her guide had many misgivings about undertaking the charge. He had a wife, who had prophesied that, coming from Washington, Mrs. Frémont would be "a fine lady" and would make him no end of trouble, especially concerning the scant attire of the Indians.

In the sunshine of her presence, however, his misgivings melted away. She was not a "fine lady" at all, he said, that bugbear of his unconventional mind, but a slender woman with a head so level and a heart so stout as to render all the more forcible the appeal of her delicate body.

She was stricken with the fever, and ill for many weeks in Panama, where she was surrounded with that warmth of friendship and sympathy which she ever seemed to attract. In addition to many substantial evidences of genuine interest in her recovery, one resident of the city vowed in that event to supply the hospital with limes for a year.

Gold was discovered in California in 1848. When Mrs. Frémont arrived in San Francisco the people were in that first frenzy of excitement that disturbed temporarily the whole aspect of their daily existence. The population of the towns was flocking to the mines, and the comparatively few who remained at home had many novel problems to face. The art of cooking without eggs and butter had to be acquired, for there were neither chickens nor cows, though one woman had as many as thirty-seven satin dresses, "and no two off the same piece," she averred.

A little Eastern bride, whom San Francisco society, consisting of sixteen ladies, turned out in a body to welcome, set up her first household belongings in a modest frame structure two stories in height, that had been put up at a cost, out of all proportion to its intrinsic value, of ninety thousand dollars.

Yet nothing was so valuable as time, and though it was estimated to be worth fifty dollars a minute, there were busy men who paid Mrs. Frémont the compliment of frequent day-time visits.

With every personal inducement to favor slave labor in the new territory, both Frémont and his wife were among its most strenuous opposers. Not only did they pay their first house-maid two hundred and forty dollars a month with perquisites, which included the housing of her husband and children, yet even with a disposition to retain her at that neat figure, they found themselves obliged to do without her truly valuable assistance when Mrs. Frémont refused the loan of her gowns as patterns for the wardrobe she was having constructed at the hands of a Chinese modiste. There were, moreover, on the lands that Frémont owned, rich gold deposits, which could be most profitably operated by slave labor.

When the convention to draft the constitution under which California should come into the Union met at Monterey, where Frémont had established himself, his home became the head-quarters for the anti-slavery party. Its neatness, the smoothness of its internal workings, and the evident contentment of his wife formed a text for the friends of free soil, and many an incredulous opponent was brought to behold, and, seeing, went away believing in the possibility of domestic happiness without slaves. Mrs. Frémont had, to be sure, a preference for underclothing that had been ironed, and she might have wished also that the two Indian men who presided in her kitchen and pantry had not been gifted with such facilities for terminating both the ornamental and useful career of her china and glassware. Yet these small clouds in no way overshadowed her domestic horizon. Her prejudice to slavery she inherited from both parents, belonging, as she said, "to the aristocracy of emancipation," or to that class of people who, owning slaves, quietly gave them their freedom at infinite sacrifice to themselves, as opposed to the abolitionists of the North, who, with nothing to lose and much to gain, clamored noisily for that freedom.

Frémont was the hero of the hour, and could have been governor of the new State or one of its first Senators. He chose the latter, however, though it took him away from those material interests which California then held for him. Going into the Union as a free State, it would need in Congress a defence such as no man could give it with greater loyalty than Frémont.

There is an anecdote told and applied indiscriminately to various political heroes, most frequently, perhaps, to Lincoln, to whom, therefore, it may possibly appertain, demonstrating delicately his deference for the marital tie. On the night of his election to some office, and while he was being inundated with the congratulations of the friends who had assisted in the achievement of his triumph, he further captivated their fancy by remembering his wife. "Well, gentlemen," he said, quietly, "this is very nice, but there is a little woman around the corner who will be interested in hearing this news, and if you will just excuse me, I think I'll step around and tell her."

One woman interested in the balloting of the delegates at San José for California's first Senators was not so conveniently situated. She was at Monterey, and as a season of heavy rains was on, there was but little prospect that her keen desire to know the result would find immediate gratification. Before just such a merry blazing fire as his imagination had once conjured up as a central feature of their library sat Frémont's wife, her fingers for the first time fashioning a dress for herself on the trustworthy outlines of one that had been ripped up for the purpose. Her little daughter had been put to bed, and her companions for the evening were the Australian woman who had replaced her two Indian servitors, and whose accustomed fingers plied the needle with a more rapid stroke than her own, and the woman's baby, playing on the bear-skin rug near the fire. Besides the voice of the woman and an occasional chirrup from the baby, she heard nothing but the storm without, till the door opened and a man, dripping with rain, stood on the threshold and asked, in consideration of his sorry plight, if he might enter.

It was Frémont. He had torn himself away from his idolizing followers and ridden out into the darkness and storm to tell his wife, seventy miles away, that he had been elected to the United States Senate. Though it was late in the night when he reached Monterey, he was in the saddle again before dawn and on his way back to San José, making in all a ride of one hundred and forty miles.

The home-bound steamer, sailing from San Francisco on the 1st of January, 1850, carried, among others, the first two Senators from the new State, Frémont and Givin. At Mazatlan a British man-of-war fired a salute in honor of these two distinguished passengers.

They landed in New York the last of March, and from the long mirror into which she looked, in her hotel bedroom, there gazed back at Mrs. Frémont a comely young woman clad in a riding habit that had been abbreviated to a convenient walking length, a pair of black satin slippers, a leghorn hat tied down with a China crêpe scarf, and a Scotch plaid shawl that had borne the brunt of her year's outing,--in a word, the wife of a United States Senator from the golden West.

On another morning of the early spring two years later, such were the contrasts which the events of her life produced, she stood in the throne-room of Buckingham Palace, awaiting presentation to the Queen of England. To the British eyes that looked upon her she was a graceful, distinguished woman, sharing in the renown of her husband, the American explorer, and a recent medallist of the Royal Geographical Society, whose honors are only conferred upon those whose expeditions are taken out at personal cost and sacrifice. In the faultless details of her court dress she was a gratification to the most critical taste. Its exquisite design, shading in color from the faint pink that touches the outer edge of a rose petal to the deeper tone it assumes near the heart, with clusters of the fair flower itself giving it an almost fragrant emphasis and bringing out the delicate beauty of her fine face, seemed a part of herself, so gracefully did she wear it, carrying its sweep of train with a queenliness that was of her nature.

On the 17th of June, 1856, Frémont was unanimously nominated for the Presidency by the National Republican Convention at Philadelphia. He was the first choice of the Free Soil, which became, later, the Republican party, and he was also, probably, the only man of whom Lincoln, the first successful candidate of that party, was ever jealous. Fearing a military rival, and recognizing in Frémont the qualities that gave him a natural supremacy among men, he kept him in the background. He foresaw correctly. The military hero came, but he came in the person of the man to whom opportunity had been a fairy godmother.

Though he polled the vote of all the Northern States but five, the time was not ripe for a Republican President when Frémont was a candidate for that high honor. The men, like Benton, who still led the political thought of that day, and who knew every aspect of the country, realizing the peril that lay in countenancing sectionalism, could not give their support to a candidate who stood upon a sectional platform.

Whatever were his hopes or his disappointment, his wife shared them. His accepting the nomination from so radical a party had meant the breaking up of many friendships for her, which in itself was a genuine grief to a woman of her temperament. The anguish she endured during the first months of the war between the North and the South, which she spent in St. Louis among familiar faces, whom the circumstances of her position as the wife of a Northern general had estranged from her, left its record in her beautiful hair, which, from a warm brown, became quite white within a few weeks. No matter with what heroism we endure, we sometimes bear all the rest of our lives the scars which our courage has cost us.

She has never outgrown, however, her early attachment to the South, to which she is united by many ties of blood. During the famine there that followed the war she applied to Congress for relief, which was immediately granted, with a ship to carry all the supplies the Freedman's Bureau could furnish. With warm and tender sympathies she has always taken up any cause that appealed to her with an enthusiasm that communicated itself to others. Relating to Mrs. Dix one evening the case of one of Lieutenant Frémont's men, who had been disabled by being wounded in both legs, and to whom Congress had refused a pension on the ground that he had not been regularly enlisted at the time the wound was inflicted, she did not observe that a man who was calling upon Senator Dix was attentively listening to all the graphic details of her story. It was Preston King, of New York, and at that time chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. He took Senator Dix to the door with him when he left, and bade him tell her to write out the story as she had just told it and send it to him, and he would see that the man got his pension; and he did.

With what tender gratitude and reverence the man himself, Alexis Ayot, a Canadian by birth, came to thank her!

"I cannot kneel to thank you," he said, balancing himself upon his crutches, "Je n'ai plus de jambes; but you are my Sainte Madonne, et je vous fais ma prière."

During her early California days she extended her generous young hand to a youthful compositor who was working on the _Golden Era_. He dined with her every Sunday, and she gave him not only that recognition and encouragement that were in themselves a stimulus to his talent and ambition, but she used her influence to obtain for him salaried offices that lifted him above anxiety concerning his material condition, and gave him the leisure necessary to the best development of his genius. His name is Bret Harte, and so entirely did he recognize his indebtedness to her that he once wrote to her: "If I were to be cast away on a desert island, I should expect a savage to come forward with a three-cornered note from you to tell me that at your request I had been appointed governor of the island at a salary of two thousand four hundred dollars."

She has both the versatility and adaptiveness that are characteristic of the genuine American woman, and which have enabled her to make almost as many friends in foreign lands as she has throughout her own country. The Count de la Garde, a cousin of Eugene and Hortense Beauharnais, whom she knew in Paris, and who left her at his death a valuable collection of souvenirs of the Bonaparte family, said of her that she was the only American woman he had ever known. He had known others of her countrywomen, but they were but imitations of English or French women, while in her he felt the originality and individuality of another people.

As a scientist and explorer, Frémont's reputation had gone forth to the countries of Europe, from many of which he received enviable honors and decorations. He and his wife were presented at the courts of England, France, and Denmark, attending at Copenhagen the wedding-festivities of the Crown Prince and his Swedish bride. As one of her friends has cleverly said of Mrs. Frémont, "she has entertained and been entertained through not only the gamut but the chromatic scale of society."

After the war, while her younger children were still growing up, and during her husband's lifetime, she lived for some years in New York, on a picturesque old property on the Hudson that still bore its Indian name, Pocaho. Now, however, she lives again in the State that once gave her health, wealth, and honors, near the great sea, away from which she feels that she is never fully alive.

Her life has been full of changes and events, to all of which her alert intelligence and quick sympathies have made her keenly susceptible, and which wrung from her recently a plaintive, "We are tired, my heart and I." That was all, for one who knew every phase of her life has already borne testimony to that "sweet and happy and forbearing temper which has remained proof against the wearing of time."

SALLIE WARD

(MRS. GEORGE F. DOWNS)

One of those extraordinary women which the world from time to time produces, who rise to eminence solely through the force of their own personality, was born in America as the nineteenth century was rounding out its first quarter. Known all her life throughout the entire country, she was one of the most conspicuous figures in the life of the South and Southwest, and was the object of a sentiment that fell but little short of worship among the people of the state of Kentucky, to which she belonged.

James Lane Allen who has studied his people from every stand-point, draws the typical Kentucky woman for us as "a refinement of the English blonde, with greater delicacy of form, feature, and color."

"A beautiful Kentucky woman," he says, "is apt to be exceedingly beautiful. Her voice is almost uniformly low and soft, her hands and feet delicately formed, her skin quite pure and beautiful in tint and shading, her eyes blue or brown, her hair nut-brown or golden; to all which is added a certain unapproachable refinement."

Of such a class, Sallie Ward, with her blue eyes full of twinkling humor and rather far apart, lending to her round face an expression of candor, which was further borne out by her somewhat large though finely shaped mouth disclosing handsome teeth in her happy tendency to frequent smiling, her brown hair, and a skin faultless in tint and texture, has been the most noted representative. A radiant woman, instinct with sparkling life from the crown of her beautiful head to the tips of her slender feet, spoiled, wilful, lovely, and loving, it is probable that but few people will ever truly estimate her character.