A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Fremont, And The Claiming Of The American West

Chapter 1: A Disorder of Enormous Masses They set out, fifteen men on fifteen mules, shortly after dawn on August 12, 1842, carrying two days' worth of food -- dried buffalo meat, macaroni, and coffee. In the lead, as usual, rode Kit Carson, threading a trail through tangles of downed limber pine, across tilted slabs of granite where the mules' hoofs skated and slipped, beneath waterfalls and around cobalt lakes. And as usual, calling the shots from the middle of the pack, John C. Fremont straddled his mule as the alien landscape enfolded him, his quicksilver spirit veering between exultation and despair. Directly ahead of the party loomed its goal, the peak Fremont had judged loftiest in all the Rocky Mountains, snowfields gleaming in the sun, rock towers spiking the sky.As yet, these two were nobodies, Kit Carson and John Fremont, their deeds discussed, if at all, only within the arcane circles of their peers and cronies. But this summer's jaunt would make them famous, launching a joint passage into the realms of myth that would place them, before the century's end, among America's eternal heroes. From the 1842 expedition onward, their destinies and renown would be intertwined; yet in all the West, no pair of adventurers more different in character than Carson and Fremont could be found.Ten weeks before, the two men had first met, aboard a steamboat crawling the Missouri River upstream from St. Louis. Twenty-nine years old, a southerner born in Savannah and raised in Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina, Fremont had escaped a life of incipient dandyism to become an ambitious lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, a branch of the U.S. Army. He had served adequately on several surveying trips in the South and Midwest, but the present journey was Fremont's first thrust into the Great West, as well as his break in life. For the first time, he was in charge of an expedition. The explicit mandate given Fremont was to survey the first half of the Oregon Trail; his implicit charge was to keep an eye out for the best places to build forts along the way to safeguard emigrants from the "redskins" who (in the phrase of the day) "infested" the territory.Fremont needed a guide who knew the West. Three years his elder, out of Kentucky via a hardscrabble homestead on the Missouri frontier, Carson had run away from home at the age of sixteen. For thirteen years he had trapped beaver and fought Indians from California down to Chihuahua, from New Mexico up to Idaho, without amassing the most modest fortune or dulling one whit his wanderlust. Now, with the collapse of the beaver trade, he was simply another down-on-his-luck mountain man looking for work. Aboard the steamboat, in response to Fremont's earnest questions, Carson (as he recalled many years later) "told him that I had been some time in the mountains and thought I could guide him to any point he wished to go."By mid-August, the expedition had traversed a thousand miles of prairie, ascending a series of rivers: the Missouri, both the North and South Platte, and the Sweetwater. On August 7, the team had traversed South Pass -- the ill-defined saddle, some 7,500 feet above sea level, that affords the easiest crossing of the Continental Divide between Mexico and Canada -- and turned the south end of the majestic Wind River Range. Now, for the ascent of what would come to be known as Fremont Peak, the lieutenant divided his party, leaving twelve men beside a lake on the western fringe of the range to stand guard against the Blackfeet Indians, who Fremont feared would seize the first opportunity to ambush his team.For all his western experience, Carson had never before penetrated the Wind Rivers. Both he and Fremont seriously underestimated the range's defenses. What from a distance looked like a straightforward slope leading to tRoberts, David is the author of 'A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Fremont, And The Claiming Of The American West' with ISBN 9780684870212 and ISBN 0684870215.