Word: montes
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Thus almost lost to fame is the most exciting and excitable figure that ever trod the soil of North America. Frémont was, characteristically enough, born unconventionally in 1813. His mother was the wife of gouty Major John Pryor, but his father was a dashing French emigré (Charles Frémon) who ran off with his mother. Reared in the best Charleston, S. C., society, Frémont was a quick Latin and Greek scholar. People thought he might make a teacher or a preacher, until Joel R. Poinsett (manifest destiny man, Secretary of War, giver...
...mont went West with famed Kit Carson, observed buffalo, ate dog meat, charted the Continental Divide. Returning to Washington where Jessie lay in childbirth, he spread over her bed a ragged flag, said: "This flag was raised over the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains. I have brought it to you." Then, with Jessie's aid, he wrote a report of his trip which exploded the myth that the "Great American Desert" lay between Missouri and the Rockies. The public read the document avidly; the movement westward was stimulated...
...another expedition Frémont saw the Oregon Trail as busy as a barnyard in mating season, crossed the snow-deep Sierras in midwinter, visited Captain Suiter's fort in the fertile Sacramento valley. Ideas of manifest destiny were firmly planted in Frémont's head. So, on his next trip to California, he began to write history instead of geography. Mexican General Castro ordered him out of California. He went up to Oregon and waited for an excuse to raise the U. S. flag over California. An Indian attack gave it to him. Quickly he assembled...
...result of the quarrel was that Frémont was court-martialed in Washington and found guilty of mutiny, disobedience of orders, causing undue disturbance. President Polk canceled the punishment, allowed Frémont to remain in the Army. But Frémont resigned, insisting on his complete innocence. Despite its verdict, the court-martial made Frémont the hero of the North and the prophet of expansion...
Then, as a private citizen, Frémont set out for California by the southern route, almost died of starvation while some of his guides nibbled a human body. That was in 1849 when "time was worth fifty dollars a minute," but Frémont did not know it. He arrived in California to find gold-mad whitemen, redmen, yellowmen, blackmen, and himself the owner of the golden Mariposa veins. His wife came by boat and soon their home was filled with "hundred-pound buckskin sacks, worth not far from $25,000 each." California's richest man and most...