Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863 - W. Dirk Raat - Страница 18

On January 21, 1813, John Charles Fremon was born out of wedlock in Savannah, Georgia, the child of Ann Pryor, the daughter of a socially prominent Virginia planter, and Charles Fremon, a French-Canadian refugee from Quebec who taught foreign languages, fencing, and dancing, painted frescoes, and attracted the fancy of Mrs. Pryor. A household slave called Black Hannah aided in raising young John. His father died when John was a youngster of five years of age. A truant in the private schools, he went on to college to study mathematics and the natural sciences. At age 25 he changed his surname to Frémont, adding the accent and the “t.” This was to take his father’s name. His father originally had been called Louis-René Frémont and had changed his name in order to avoid pursuit by British authorities in Canada. Thus John C. Frémont had now reclaimed his father’s true name. Between 1838 and 1841 he served in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, assisting in mapping the country between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.³⁸

Frémont had acquired the nickname “the great pathfinder” because of his explorations in Western America during the 1840s. His career as federal surveyor and “pathfinder” was promoted by his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri, and his travels were popularized by his wife and Benton’s daughter, Jessie, who rewrote his journals into literary masterpieces that made him a national hero. Benton pushed appropriations through Congress that provided the financial backing for his survey expeditions of the Oregon Trail (1842), Oregon Territory (1844), the Great Basin, and the Sierra Nevada in California (1845).³⁹ Most of these missions fulfilled Benton’s “Manifest Destiny” views of America’s expansionist future, and all of them were designed to develop the national economy, from transcontinental railroads to resource development (land and precious minerals). Pushing the American Indian and his or her land to one “side” was truly the “downside” of this nationalistic worldview.

Frémont certainly earned his “pathfinder” label, even if he was often guided by more experienced mountain men like Christopher “Kit” Carson, “Uncle Dick” Wootton of Bent’s Fort fame, or the eccentric “Old Bill” Williams, or a group of Delaware Indians, Sierra Natives, and Oregon Chinooks. To enlist the services of a “Kit” Carson meant Frémont improved his chances of surviving Indian attacks, thirst, hunger, and angry mules. In 1861, during the Civil War, he showed similar wisdom as Commander of the Department of the West when he recognized the military skills of Ulysses S. Grant and assisted the latter in separating the Confederacy from its terrain west of the Mississippi. His early expeditions led to the Anglo-American discovery of Lake Tahoe, proved that the Great Basin had no outlet to the sea, and described western lands and Indians along the Oregon Trail and the Sierra Mountains. His expeditionary maps were published by the US Congress and became the “Report and Map” that guided hundreds of overland immigrants to California and Oregon, and led the Mormons to the Salt Lake Valley. He was truly the “pathfinder” of the West.⁴⁰

His good name made it possible for Frémont to purchase in 1847 the Rancho Las Mariposas land grant in the Sierra Nevada foothills outside of Yosemite, where gold discoveries enriched the young and energetic 33-year-old adventurer. He acquired large landholdings in San Francisco, including a Golden Gate mansion, and had a luxurious lifestyle in Monterey. By 1850 he was a wealthy and successful man.

Of course, what generated popularity for Frémont among the Anglo-American settlers in California from 1846 to 1850 in no way aided his legacy. Many of his actions were intemperate and ill-conceived, and reflected a mean streak not always complimentary to his character. After meeting with President James K. Polk in Washington, DC in the early months of 1845, Frémont went to St. Louis and organized a group of military volunteers who traveled with him to Sutter’s Fort in California, arriving in December of that year. In May 1846 he and his volunteers, including Kit Carson, attacked and destroyed a Modoc fishing village at Lake Klamath in south-central Oregon. Although the action was supposedly in retaliation for an earlier Indian assault, the evidence suggests that the villagers were not involved in the first action. Later the bloodlust continued when Frémont and his followers without provocation wiped out a series of Maidu villages on the Sacramento River, slaughtering men, women, and children.⁴¹

The killing did not stop here, for in June 1846 he ordered Kit Carson to murder three Hispanics. It turned out that these men were established and respected members of California’s Mexican elite, all being mayors or Alcaldes and governing authorities in Sonoma and Yerba Buena (later known as San Francisco).⁴² Frémont then assumed leadership of the Bear Flaggers and falsely took credit for the independence of California. The revolt lasted 26 days, ending once the US Army arrived with the Bear Flag being replaced with the Stars and Stripes. Unbeknown to Frémont and his Bear Flag supporters, the US had already declared war on Mexico on May 13, 1846. Most of Alta California did not even know about the revolt, even though the rebels declared the independence of California from Mexico.⁴³

In January 1847, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, commander of the Pacific Fleet headquartered in Monterey, appointed Frémont military governor of California. But when General Stephen Kearny of the US Army arrived later that year in an overland march from Santa Fé, Stockton dismissed Frémont and declared Kearny the governor. Frémont stubbornly refused to accept Stockton’s decision and was extremely slow to relent. He was later convicted of mutiny and disobedience of a superior officer. While approving of the court’s action, President Polk quickly commuted his dishonorable discharge sentence because of his prior service to the country.⁴⁴

Back in St. Louis, Frémont and his father-in-law privately financed a fourth expedition in the later months of 1848 that would survey a railway line along the 38th parallel between St. Louis and San Francisco. This was the ill-fated mission that was lost in the winter snow and cold in the passes through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. When the expedition finally made its way to Taos they were missing ten men, some, it was rumored by his political opponents, to cannibalism.⁴⁵ Still, with his triumphs and failures behind him he was sufficiently well known and close enough to power (in 1850–1851 Frémont was one of the first two senators from California to the US Senate) to receive the nomination for president of the United States by the Republican Party in 1856. This was when the nation learned of his “free soil” policies.

The Free Soil Party was founded in Buffalo, New York, and was active in the presidential elections of 1848 and 1852. It was a single-issue third-party movement that consisted of anti-slavery members of the Democratic and Whig Parties. Its banner was “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men,” and its main cause was opposing the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Free soilers believed that if slavery were contained it would die out. It was not an abolitionist movement, and many abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, believed the free soil movement to be “white manism,” a philosophy that would free white labor and northern businessmen from the economic competition of slavery.⁴⁶ Merging of the Free Soilers and Whigs in 1854 divided the Whig Party. In general, southern Whigs went over to the Democrats while discontented northern Whigs created the new Republican Party. The Whig and Free Soils parties disappeared from the American landscape.

As a popular military man, both Democrats and Republicans sought out Frémont as a candidate in 1856. He turned the Democrats down because he opposed their doctrine of “popular sovereignty” (that would allow the settlers to decide the issue of slavery or not in their territories), and he favored a Free Soil Kansas. He also opposed the Democratic-supported Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. So the Free Soil Democrat became a Republican and accepted their nomination. Their slogan, echoing their Free Soil Party roots, was “Free Soil, Free Men, and Frémont.”⁴⁷

A new third party joined the fray, the nativist American Party (called the “Know- Nothing Party” by its opponents, since, as a secret party, when asked about its purpose, their members would reply, “I know nothing”), which ran ex-president Millard Fillmore and gathered over 20% of the popular vote. They were basically an America-first group that opposed Catholic immigrants. While the Republicans pushed their Free Soil campaign, the Democrats warned the public that victory for the Republicans would mean civil war for the country. While the Democrats attacked Frémont’s illegitimate birth, the Know-Nothings accused Frémont of being a Catholic, an absurd charge that the Republicans could not counter since they did not want to offend their German Catholic voters. When the votes were counted Frémont received 114 electoral votes while the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan from Pennsylvania, got 174. Surprisingly, Frémont lost his home state of California, with Buchanan receiving over 48% of the vote, while the Know-Nothings got 32%. Poor John could only gather in a little over 18% of the California tally.⁴⁸ Perhaps this was an omen that the future might not be as bright as the past.

The question first posed in this chapter must now be answered. If Frémont were a free soiler who opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories, and California had been a territory since 1846 and a state since 1850, how could this man, who was a friend to many anti-slavery proponents, own so many de facto Indian slaves and peons on his gold ranch in California?⁴⁹ What was his actual situation, and did his wealth come from exploiting Indian workers? Did he think Indian peonage and involuntary servitude in California was the norm, while African chattel slavery in the American West was not? And what about his wife Jessie and what was her situation? To answer these questions it is first necessary to look briefly at the traditions and customs of Indian slavery in both Spanish-Mexican California before 1850 and Anglo-American California after 1850.⁵⁰

The system of law that the Anglo-Americans of California created after 1846 perpetuated the labor exploitation of the Spanish colonial era and the Mexican period. In the first years of military rule in California a series of martial codes restricted the freedom of the Indian, including labor contracts that bound the Indian workers to their employer, limitations on the freedom of movement of all Indians, and the development of an Indian apprenticeship that allowed whites to obtain and control Indian labor. All of these restrictions were very reminiscent of the Spanish system of encomienda and repartimiento of the early period, as well as the hacienda peonage of the later era—Indians were free, but not free to not work.⁵¹

By 1849, California had established a constitutional government. As a condition for California’s entry into the Union the delegates agreed that slavery would be prohibited in that state. However, they were speaking of black slavery, not Indian slavery. As for the Indian, they were to remain what they had always been—a subservient class of workers. Accordingly, when dealing with suffrage they voted to limit it along racial and sexual lines and only allowed “white male citizens” to vote. In the final analysis, however, it was the 1850 law entitled “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” that defined the status and place of Indians in California society.⁵²

The 1850 law stated that any able-bodied Indian who refused to work would be liable to arrest, and “vagrants” could be hired out for up to four months. Indian convicts could be bailed out by “any white person,” and they would be forced to work for the person doing the bailing. Under the apprenticeship clause of the law, whites could legally obtain the services of Indian males under 18 and females under 15. A revised statute in 1860 allowed third parties to obtain Indian children without parental consent. In effect, the peonage system of the Mexican period was being extended and legalized for the post-1850 Americanized state of California.⁵³

Whatever the intent of these laws, the apprenticeship clauses had the effect of encouraging kidnapping and selling of Indian children. Desperados and reckless criminals plied their trade in the frontier areas of northern counties like Humboldt, selling and ransoming their human prey to eager participants in southern California. Young Indian women and child “apprentices” were forcibly wrested from their families and communities and sold to miners, ranchers, and farmers. While most worked in mining, ranching, and agriculture, many of the female slaves became domestic servants. The state was approving a form of Indian servitude not found in the earlier Spanish and Mexican period, crossing the boundary from peonage to slavery. It has been estimated that over 4,000 children were stolen between 1852 and 1867, with the prices for Indian women and children dependent upon sex, age, physical attributes, and usefulness.⁵⁴

A typical feature of this trade was that Indian girls as young as eight or nine were sold by their captors to other whites expressly as sexual partners. Sometimes they became concubines. Otherwise they would be used until they became useless. In December 1861, according to historian James Rawls, the Maryland Appeal “commented that, while kidnapped Indian children were seized as servants, the young women were made to serve both the ‘purposes of labor and of lust.’” In 1862 a correspondent to the Sacramento Union wrote about the “baby killers” of Humboldt County who “talk of the operation of cutting to pieces an Indian squaw in their indiscriminate raids for babies as ‘like slicing old cheese.’ …The baby hunters sneak up to a rancheria, kill the bucks, pick out the best looking squaws, ravish them, and make off with their young ones.”⁵⁵ Boys as young as 12 were also enslaved, and given the disparity in power between master and slave, the conjecture is that pedophilia may have been a likely result.

In spite of the protestations of the Anglo-Americans of California, relations between Indians and whites in the Southwest paralleled those between blacks and whites in the Confederate South. Although California did not create slave codes like those in New Mexico, their laws and rules restricting Indian freedoms were similar to the infamous Black Codes of the South. Indian passes and the practice of limiting Indian mobility were similar to restrictions on blacks in the post-war South. Vagrancy and bail-out provisions were similar, as were instances where Indians and blacks could not testify against their white masters.⁵⁶ While the Spanish and Mexican heritage of peonage and involuntary servitude was important for slavery in California, the racism, sexism, and violence that accompanied Indian slavery after 1850 became commonplace throughout much of the Indian Southwest.

In the early period prior to 1850, California Indians provided a variety of tasks for their white overlords, from laboring as mechanics and domestics to deckhands and lumbermen. The gold-rush of the late 1840s meant that most laborers were headed for the gold fields, and therefore the scarcity of labor for the remaining jobs required the use of Indian workers. And the Argonauts needed food for them and fodder for their livestock. Beef was in great demand. The California cattle boom extended the Mexican tradition of utilizing Indian labor on the ranchos and haciendas. In the 1850s most of the cattle ranches in Bernardino and Los Angeles counties used Indian laborers who were permanently attached to the soil, who were, as one contemporary observed, “no better than slaves.” Eventually, the “great drought” of 1862–1864 brought an end to the cattle industry, with many “useless” Indians becoming homeless vagabonds.⁵⁷

Of course, the dominant activity in the early years after the 1848 discovery of gold was not ranching but mining. The Hispanic tradition of the repartimiento or allocation was transferred from the farms to the mines, with the white miner and his Indian worker having a relationship not unlike the traditional ranchero and his Indian peon. One Argonaut estimated that within months after the initial discovery of gold, four thousand Indians worked alongside two thousand whites. Just as the Indians on the ranchos were considered as stock, so too were those who worked in the mines. And those whites, like Johann Sutter in Sacramento, who already controlled a body of Indian laborers before the 1848 strike, had an advantage over the newcomers in working the placer mines. The outsiders were naturally jealous of the old-timers.⁵⁸

After the initial discoveries Indian laborers began to disappear from the mines. This disappearance coincided with the arrival of the newcomers who had no prior experience with the Hispanic history of Indian exploitation. For them the Indian was useless since most Indians in their experience had been hostile and a threat to their security. In March 1849, three years after Frémont’s volunteers had decimated the Klamath Indian village in south-central Oregon, and one and a half years after the Whitman massacre left 13 dead missionaries in Walla Walla, Washington, 7 Oregon prospectors raped several Maidu women on a ranchería near the American River. This led to retaliation by Indian men and an escalation of violence in which Indians from the village of Colima were killed, arrested, and executed. It was no accident that the Colima site had been the place where Sutter had positioned his mill, and Sutter, of course, had generated much of the outsider’s anger and jealousy. After news of this incident spread, Indians in the mines fled from the whites fearing for the safety of themselves and their families. The jealousy of the newcomers had ignited an era of mutual fear and outrage, and a decade of Indian wars.⁵⁹

This is the California context in which John C. Frémont’s activities and ideas can be judged. First, it must be noted that in the late 1840s, prior to the discovery of gold, Frémont was essentially a tourist and newcomer. His behavior toward the Indian was not any more sophisticated than that of his fellow Oregonians who fought, killed, and raped Indians. Had he stayed only an explorer, his reputation as “the great pathfinder” would have been secure, but his decision to purchase the Mariposa estate transformed the surveyor into an unsuccessful entrepreneur.

The 43,000-acre estate, in the Sierra foothills only 40 miles southwest of Yosemite, had been the favorite hunting ground of the Cauchile Indians. Similar to other white rancheros, his land had been carved out of previous indigenous properties. Like his neighbors, he surrounded himself with de facto Indians slaves that worked his fields, and after the discovery of gold and silver on the Mariposas River, his Sonoran managers administered the Indian mineworkers. One of the prospectors was a black servant named Saunders, whose family was still in slavery, who was working the Mariposa mines for the purpose of working off his purchase price of $1,700.⁶⁰ Generally speaking, while Frémont was generally consistent in his “free soil” views and his opposition to African chattel slavery in the South, he, like many of his contemporaries in the West, had a blind eye when it came to the issue of Indian slavery.

Jessie (Benton) Frémont was equally involved with the institution of Indian slavery. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s the most constant demand for Indian labor was that of Indian servants—male or female, young and old. In her Monterey house a Mexican chef oversaw Indian men who did most of the cooking, aided by Indian boys who hunted for food and assisted in the preparation of meals. Jessie noticed a remarkable similarity between the average California household and the “life of our Southern people.” In California it was typical for ladies of the house to be “surrounded by domesticated Indian girls at their sewing.” At Mariposa, Mission Indians were obtained by the Frémonts and required to work at laundering and other domestic chores. Jessie bragged about “playing Missionary” to a group of local Indians, plaiting their hair, and dressing them in starched calico and clean white undergarments. She was able to civilize these dirty people and transform them into “picturesque peasants.”⁶¹

For Jessie to play missionary was in character, as she had always wanted to experience the man’s world, from her teenage days as a tomboy, through her vicarious experiences of her husband’s explorations and adventures (as described in her writings of her husband’s exploits), to her playing the role of Spanish missionaries domesticating and Christianizing their Indian subjects. Her maternalism was the counterpart to the paternalism that fostered Indian servitude, and she was as consistent in her “free soil” views as she was inconsistent on the subject of slavery. In this way she was her husband’s wife.

It must be remembered that “abolitionism” and the “free soil” movement were not identical, and that, as aforementioned, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Free Soil Party as a white man’s party that was only concerned with ending slave labor’s competition with free white labor. Garrison, by the way, had written an editorial as early as 1829 criticizing the forced removal of Indians from the Southeast. In the 1850s many abolitionists and crusaders, like John Beeson and Wendell Phillips, spoke against Indian slavery and in favor of reform of the Indian service of the United States government.⁶² Frémont, while consistently favoring the anti-slavery point of view when talking about African chattel slavery, was ultimately a white man who ignored the rights of Indians as human beings and saw them as useful sources of labor to be exploited. His views on these matters were shared by many northerners, including the Abraham Lincoln of 1863 and after.