Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (42 page)

Five years had passed since he left Adaline. She was ten years old now and could hardly remember her father when he showed up at his niece’s farm not far from the town of Fayette, Missouri. The visit must have been as awkward as it was brief. Carson couldn’t linger, but he wanted to make sure Adaline was happy, that her education was progressing, that it wasn’t too much of a burden for her to grow up as a half-breed so far away from her father.

She was becoming a young woman. He could see a lot of her mother in Adaline. He was satisfied that she felt at home there, and that she was well loved by the Carson clan. It must have tickled him to learn that she could read. Already she had more schooling than he’d ever had. Still, he decided it was time she moved on from the little country school in which he had placed her; he now made arrangements for her to enroll as a boarder in a nearby Catholic school. Education was an understandable sticking point with him; his clumsiness with letters and figures—and the nuanced experiences he’d been denied because of it—remained his greatest humiliation. He wanted to spare his firstborn the lifelong embarrassment he’d felt.

Because his niece refused to take money, he showered the household with gifts and presented the family with a mahogany rocking chair, a sturdy piece of frontier furniture that would last generations. For Adaline, the rocking chair would be part of the architecture of her girlhood, a physical reminder of her kind but emphatically absent father. The family thought his gift was especially apt, for like Kit, the chair was never fully itself unless it was moving.

Jessie Benton Fremont met Carson at the Washington train station late one night near the end of May 1847. Although she had never seen a photograph of his likeness, she recognized him immediately when he stepped off the train. Her husband’s descriptions of Carson had been accurate: The dry smile and leathered face, the bandy-legged gait, the twinkle in his gray-blue eyes. How many men in the nation’s capital fit that description? She greeted Carson warmly and led him to her carriage.

Jessie Fremont, then twenty-three years old, was not a beautiful woman in the traditional sense. She had her father’s overlong nose, her face was round as a moon, her neck stalklike, her shoulders slumpishly sloped. Yet something about Jessie Fremont was immensely attractive to men and women alike. She was exuberant, defiant, opinionated, original. She approached people with a bearing of confidence so complete it was disarming. A friend once parsed her personality as “so much fresh breeze and so much sunlight,” but like her father, Jessie also had the musty erudition of a life spent among great books.

She and Carson rode back to her father’s house on C Street, and there he stayed for most of his three-week sojourn in Washington. She took him around to the sights, introduced him to her circle of friends, and carted him to dinner parties in which he sat awkwardly in the hotseat of attention and ate unfamiliar continental dishes. He was bewildered and flattered and, at least at first, mildly intrigued.

But in truth, there wasn’t much to do in Washington. The nation’s capital was then a tiny Southern city that closed up shop in the sultry summer months. L’Enfant’s grand plan of broad avenues and circles was very slowly taking shape, but the rutted streets were mires of mud and horse manure. The National Mall was little more than a cow pasture by the swampy margins of the Potomac. The great monuments of today were conspicuously absent—construction on the Washington Monument would not begin until the following year. Only a month before Carson’s arrival, crews had broken ground for a new museum to be called the Smithsonian Institution.

Carson liked Jessie Fremont and was grateful to have her escorting him around the town. He found that, temperamentally, she was very similar to her father. Of the four Benton children, Jessie was Tom Benton’s favorite, his pet, and the devotion was mutual. Growing up, she never wanted to be away from her father’s side. When he enrolled her in a prestigious girl’s boarding school in Georgetown, she protested by cutting off her hair so that she would look like the son she thought her father wished her to be. The senator relented, and so Jessie Benton quit “society school” and pursued her education under his tutelage. He set a regimen of books for her to read by lamplight in his formidable study; other times he would “pasture” her, as she liked to say, in the Library of Congress.

She eloped with John C. Fremont at the age of seventeen. Her father fiercely opposed the marriage at first but soon became Fremont’s staunchest advocate and sponsor. In an odd way Fremont was the real-life avatar of Benton’s designs for the West—a bold young explorer with the training and drive to make the senator’s ideas a reality. By marrying Fremont, Jessie had pledged herself to someone whose ambitions were in peculiar alignment with those of her father.

Jessie utterly hitched herself to her husband’s career. She furthered Fremont’s glory and ran interference for him in Washington while he was off in the wilderness, where, as she once put it, “not even the voice of Fame can reach him.” She wrote his letters. She tirelessly pressed and pleaded on his behalf. To a remarkable extent, she grafted her own interests and desires onto her husband’s to the point where the couple’s ambitions were indistinguishable. She told her husband that she was his “most confirmed worshiper.” She kept a daguerreotype of him hanging over her bed. “It is my guardian angel,” she once wrote him, “for I could not waste time with that beloved face looking so earnestly at me.” Many acquaintances thought her devotion to Fremont unhealthy. Said her closest friend Lizzie Lee: “She belongs to him body & soul & he does with her as he pleases as much as he does with his own right hand.”

Though it was not then widely known, Jessie Fremont had actively collaborated on all his expedition reports. Some said she had actually written them—or at least the best parts. (Carson didn’t realize it, but she had, through her skillful pen, done as much as Fremont to make the scout famous.) She was an accomplished phrasemaker, someone who knew how to make an image stick, and she had the desk discipline that her peripatetic husband lacked.

Certainly Jessie was John’s intellectual equal—and in some sense his superior. By way of an ambiguous compliment, it was sometimes said around Washington that Jessie was “the better man of the two.”

Within a few days, Carson had taken care of his business in Washington: He had met with Secretary of State James Buchanan and Secretary of War William Marcy and placed Fremont’s dispatches in their safe hands. Carson was not particularly impressed by either man and scarcely mentioned them in his autobiography.

Wanting to get home to Josefa, Carson packed his things. He had no intention of lingering in Washington. But then he got a message: President Polk wanted Carson to call on him at the White House. The president was quite busy, however, and would not be able to receive Carson until June 14, several weeks away.

So Carson found himself in a miserable holding pattern—more introductions, more newspaper interviews, more society functions. One of the dinners was at Secretary Marcy’s home. Many prominent officials, including two generals, were in attendance. It was reported that Carson only “picked at his fish and fowl drenched in rich sauces” but that he “ate all of the vegetables placed before him and appeared to enjoy his ice cream and cake.” Carson passed on the fine French wine, though he later accepted one of Marcy’s cigars after the ladies had repaired to the drawing room. It was only then, as the men smoked away and drank their brandy, that Carson began to loosen up, relating some of his adventures in California.

Carson’s sentence in Washington dragged on. While waiting for President Polk’s schedule to open up, he left Jessie’s place for a while and spent some time with Ned Beale, whose mother lived in Washington. Beale had grown up in Washington, in fact, and attended Georgetown College. A bon vivant who jerked with odd nervous tics, he dabbled in Islam, wrote verse in the romantic style of Keats and Shelley, and drank to such frequent excess that he created his own recipe for a hangover cure. Beale hailed from a well-established navy family, and he kept Carson busy meeting the leading people of the city. Jessie fondly described Beale as a “witty and eccentric man.” (Attesting to both his wit and eccentricity, Beale would in the 1850s preside over a somewhat quixotic U.S. Army experiment that tested—and advocated—the use of camels in the deserts of the American West. When working with the army dromedaries, he studied Arabic so that he could speak to them, he said, “in their native language.”)

One day, before some particularly fancy engagement, Beale noticed that Carson became anxious and moody. When he asked his friend what was wrong, Carson confessed that he was worried that the ladies of Washington would find out about Singing Grass. He reminisced about his deceased Arapaho wife and told Beale how much he loved her. He seemed to fear that his former marriage would invite ridicule, that people would cast aspersions not only on him, but on the memory of his dead wife. It seemed an odd thing for him to worry about; but such was the public disapproval of Indians, and the perceived taint of “miscegenation” among certain Eastern circles, that Carson assumed his earlier life would cause a scandal. Once the papers got hold of the story, he feared it might reflect badly on the Bentons and the Fremonts, as well as on Beale’s family.

Beale told Carson not to worry, he was getting worked up over nothing. People in Washington would not judge him for this. Society’s rules didn’t apply on the frontier, and his having lived such a wildly different life only made him more fascinating and impressive to people.

Beale was right, of course. Carson had nothing to fret about: His being a “squaw man” never came up. On the contrary, he was the toast of the city. Foreign ambassadors called on him. Generals and politicians wanted to be seen with him—and so did the ladies. He was an exotic curiosity all the more endearing for his social awkwardness, like some Tarzan figure removed from the jungle and paraded before all the town. The
Washington Union
ran a long, doting profile of him, calling Carson “one of those noble characters that have from time to time sprung up on our frontier.” Carson, the
Union
went on, “is modest as he is brave, with the bearing of an Indian, walking even with his toes turned in.” (The
Union
profile was the first full-length treatment Carson had ever received in the press; it was widely suspected that Jessie Fremont wrote the article, or at least substantially contributed to it.)

Carson appreciated the welcome reception, but in truth he had come to hate Washington. He disliked and distrusted most of the politicians he met. “They are the princes here in their big houses,” he told Jessie, “but out on the Plains,
we’re
the princes.” He found the city in every way confining. At the Beale house, Carson’s bedroom was so stuffy and his mattress so soft that he begged to sleep on the veranda in the open air. He was shocked at the high cost of everything in Washington, and thought it outrageous that carriage operators around the city
charged a fee
for something so basic as transportation. He fussed about this so much that eventually Jessie secured him a horse so he could trot around the city on his own.

Jessie grew close to Carson. She judged him a “perfect Saxon, clear and fair,” with “a nature as sweet as a clear winter morning.” He was “cool, sagacious, as gentle as he was strong.” She thought he had a “merry heart” and “that most lovable combination of a happy and reasoning patience…so like the simplicity of the Bible.” She discovered to her delight that he liked to be read to. In the Benton library, Carson stumbled upon an illustrated copy of Lord Byron’s poems and turned to an engraving depicting “Mazeppa’s Ride.” The long Romantic poem is based on a supposedly true story taken from Voltaire about a Polish nobleman named Mazeppa who pursued an affair with another man’s wife; when the cuckolded husband discovered their dalliances, he stripped Mazeppa naked and bound him helpless to a horse, turning the animal loose on the steppes. Mazeppa ended up hundreds of miles away in the Ukraine, half-dead from hunger and exhaustion—and nursing a righteous revenge.