john charles frémont
united states senator
biography
John Charles Fremont was born on January 31 in Savannah Georgia. He was the son of Jean Clarles Frémon, a French immigrant and Mrs. Anne Whiting Pryor of Richmont. His parents latermoved to Nashville Tennessee and then to Norfolk, where his father died. Frémont attended school at Dinwiddie Courthouse and later at Charleston where for his time his mother took in boarders.
At the age of fourteen he enrolled in a preparatory school and two years later he qualified as junior at Charleston College, and although he showed promise his attendance became irregular and was expelled in 1831. He had attained sufficient training to qualify as an instructor in mathematics on the sloop of war.
He spent the summer of 1836 as a surveyor for a projected railroad through Carolina and Tennessee mountains and that winter surveyed the Cherokee lands. In 2838, under the influence of Poinsett, he went to Washington D. C. And became assistant to Joseph Nicollet, a scientist on a reconnaissance of Minnesota and the Dakotas.
It was during his second expedition in 1843-44 that Fremont made the contributions to knowledge that were to secure his fame. On this expedition he made a massive circle of the least known parts of the West: from the Colorado Rockies north to the South Pass, northwest to the Columbia, south along the Cascade and Sierra Nevada ranges into California, and southward before turning east across the desert to the vicinity of Salt Lake and thence east across the Colorado Rockies. He returned to St. Louis in August 1844, after proving the existence of Salt Lake and a vast region of interior drainage (the Great Basin), dispelling the myth of the San Buenaventura River (supposed to flow from the Rockies to California), and demonstrating that the South Pass was the best route across the mountains.
In 1845, Fremont returned to California, where he encouraged the American settlers to revolt against Mexican rule and establish (June 1845) the Bear Flag Republic. In the ensuing dispute over command between Commodore Robert Stockton and Gen. Stephen Kearney, Fremont supported the former and was consequently court-martialed for insubordination. Fremont resigned from the army in 1847, but he continued his explorations with private backing.
In 1850-51 he served as U.S. senator from the new state of California, and in 1856 he was defeated in the presidential election as the first candidate of the Republican party. At the start of the Civil War he was made commander of the Western Department, but he was removed after ordering emancipation of the slaves in Missouri on his own authority. He was then given command of the Mountain Division (1862) but resigned when subordinated to John Pope. Business failures, including a disastrous transcontinental railroad project, made Fremont a near-pauper. Congress finally granted him a pension for his explorations only three months before his death.
