Among public men who urged most strongly such action was one of the most distinguished of our Western statesmen, Thomas H. Benton, first Senator from the new and growing State of Missouri. He persistently advocated the settlement of the lower Columbia by Americans, the enforcement of the title of the United States to the Pacific Coast region from California northward to the forty-ninth parallel, and in 1825 he presented in the Senate a bill authorizing the use of the army and navy to protect American interests in Oregon.
In season and out of season Benton opposed the joint occupation of Oregon by England and America, unfailingly supporting every measure which promised to fill its fertile valleys with American settlers. So dominant was this idea in Benton’s career that artistic skill has fittingly shaped his statue in St. Louis with its bronze hand pointing west, with his prophetic words carved on the pedestal, “There is the east. There is India.”
In his efforts to put his ideas into practical shape, Benton threw the great weight of his influence as a Senator toward the employment in such explorations of a member of his family by marriage, John Charles Frémont, whose ability and inclinations specially suited him for the scientific examination and exploration of the trans-Mississippi region.
| John Charles Frémont. |
Born January 21, 1813, at Savannah, Ga., Frémont entered Charleston College, where his disregard of discipline prevented his graduating, although the faculty later honored him with the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Arts. Well grounded in the classics and familiar with the ordinary astronomical methods of determining latitude and longitude, Frémont visited South America on the United States ship Natchez, as a teacher. Later, appointed a professor of mathematics in the navy, he declined the position to accept more congenial service as assistant engineer of the United States Topographic Corps, where he had experience in preliminary surveys of railroads and also in a military reconnoissance among the Cherokees in Georgia. Commissioned in the United States Army, in 1838, as second lieutenant in the Topographic Corps, his initial service was fortunately as principal assistant to I. N. Nicolet, in the survey of the country between the Mississippi and the Missouri. Nicolet, an able and distinguished engineer, was the first explorer in America who made general use of the barometer for determining elevations of the great interior country, and his map of this region was one of the greatest contributions ever made to American geography.
| Jessie Benton Frémont. |
In 1841 Frémont married Jessie Benton, a daughter of Senator Benton, through whose influence Frémont was assigned to the command of the expedition ordered to explore the country between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains on the line of the Kansas and Platte Rivers.
In May, 1842, while Frémont was on the frontier making preparations for the journey, there came, as Mrs. Frémont relates, an order recalling him to Washington. Mrs. Frémont sent a special messenger to her husband, advising him to move immediately for good and sufficient reasons, to be given later. Meanwhile, holding the letter, she wrote the colonel who had given the order for the recall that she had neither forwarded the order nor informed Frémont of it, as she knew that obedience thereto would ruin the expedition. On such a small thread of circumstances hung the fate of his first separate command, which brought Frémont into such great prominence in connection with the exploration and development of the Pacific Coast region.