By Alexandra Piacenza
The Fremont House on the Sharlot Hall Museum campus stands as testimony to John C. Fremont’s service as territorial governor of Arizona, from 1878 to 1881, and the year he resided here with his wife, Jesse Benton Fremont, and their daughter Elizabeth. The genteel interior belies the dramatic lives of its occupants, who plumbed the depths of personal drama and scaled the heights of national prominence preceding their time in Prescott. The powerful balance struck between the adventurer and his articulate, fiercely loyal wife still reaches out from the names, dates and places of history to touch the mind and heart.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said of him, “Frémont has particularly touched my imagination. What a wild life, and what a fresh kind of existence! But, ah, the discomforts!” His partner in exploration of the American West, Brigadier General Christopher “Kit” Carson, testified, “I find it impossible to describe the hardships through which we passed, nor am I capable in doing justice to the credit to which he deserves.” Fremont met his match in Jesse Benton whom the Wheeling Register of April 14, 1880, described as “this brave, fair woman, whose crown of roses has ever been plentifully strewn with thorns . . . the same witty, buoyant, fascinating Jesse Benton who made perpetual sunshine in her father’s home, and who from earliest girlhood successfully measured swords and talked with ripe scholars and dignified statesmen.”
Fremont, known by the sobriquet “The Pathfinder”, is best remembered for leading the first national surveys of the Oregon Trail (1842), the Oregon Territory (1844), the Great Basin, and Sierra Mountains to California (1845). His military career included leading an expedition of 300 men in the Mexican-American War to capture Santa Barbara, California, and a few days later, bringing armed resistance in California to an end by accepting the surrender of Andres Pico and signing the Treaty of Cahuenga on January 13, 1847. As a civilian, he made a multimillion dollar fortune in the California gold bonanza of 1848 and waged a memorable if unsuccessful campaign for U.S. President in 1856, the first Presidential candidate of the newly-formed Radical Republican Party.
Not all his exploits were glorious ones, however. Caught in the cross-fire of a struggle for control of California between rivals Brigadier General Stephen W. Kearny and Commodore Robert F. Stockton, Fremont was dishonorably discharged from the military. Although the sentence was commuted after review by President Polk, Fremont resigned his commission in indignation. Rejoining the military as a major general in the American Civil War, he proceeded to lock horns with President Abraham Lincoln. In command of Union forces in Missouri, Frémont lost his first battle, announced he would hang all partisans caught behind Union lines, then declared all slaves emancipated in Union-held Missouri territory. When asked by Lincoln for sensitive political reasons to rescind these orders; he refused unless Lincoln ordered him publicly to do so. Lincoln removed Fremont from his command shortly thereafter.
Neither were Fremont’s roots especially admirable, at least from the point of view of the society of his time. His mother, from a respected family fallen on hard times, ran away from an arranged marriage to a prominent but much older man into the arms of a charming French language tutor purported to have spent time imprisoned in Haiti. John was born January 21, 1813, in Savannah, Ga., the birth possibly out of wedlock. The family moved from town to town, often camping for extended periods with Native Americans, which is said to have fostered an early attachment to the subject in John. As low as the birthright of John C. Fremont was, so dignified was Jesse Benton’s. An 1895 article by the Daughters of the American Revolution notes that her mother Elizabeth Preston McDowell was the granddaughter of William McDowell, a regimental leader killed in battle during the Revolutionary War. Her father, Thomas Hart Benton, the first U.S. Senator from Missouri, served in the Senate from 1821 to 1851 and was the acknowledged architect and champion of Manifest Destiny. It was this passion for westward expansion that would draw the Senator and Fremont together—as well as John and Jessie.
Look for Part 2 in a May 2014 Days Past.
(Days Past is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International (www.prescottcorral.org). The public is encouraged to submit articles for consideration. Please contact SHM Library & Archives reference desk at 928-445-3122 Ext. 14, or via email at dayspastprescott@gmail.com for information).