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Vol. 26:4 ISSN 0160-8460 December 1998
Keeping the Pathfinder on Track
In 1993, the University of Illinois Press published The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont, edited by Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence. The one-volume edition followed the editorial procedures and style established by Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence in The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, another University of Illinois Press publication.
Now professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Spence coedited this volume with Pamela Herr, a historian and writer living in Palo Alto, California. A former managing editor of American West, Ms. Herr had authored Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography (New York: Franklin Watts, 1987). The NHPRC provided both financial and staff support for the production of the Letters volume.
Photo by Earl McDonald, NARA.
As the daughter of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton and the wife of John Charles Frémont, Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902) both witnessed and endeavored to influence many of the major events of the mid-19th century. Despite the restrictions faced by all women of her time, she carved out an important role for herself as a writer, a dedicated abolitionist, and the "secretary and other self" to her mercurial husband. She collaborated on Frémont's best-selling exploration reports, served as his political adviser and chief Civil War aide, and even worked as a lobbyist for Arizona mining interests.
Herr and Spence selected 271 of Jessie's letters for publication from the 800 they discovered. Among the correspondents are Horace Greeley, Abraham Lincoln, Dorothea Dix, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Theodore Roosevelt, as well as Elizabeth Blair Lee, who was her close friend. Jessie's letters provide enlightenment on the westward movement, the Civil War, and the Gilded Age, and constitute a rich addition to the field of women's studies.
Jessie Ann Benton eloped with John Charles Frémont at the age of 17. Soon reconciled with her family, she collaborated with her husband on the accounts of his explorations, which made him famous and persuaded many to settle in the west. After gold was discovered in California, her husband's Mariposa estate yielded a fortune. The Frémonts worked together in the presidential campaign of 1856 and during his Civil War military career. Frémont was not cut out for either politics or high command; by the mid-1870s, he had also lost his fortune as the result of dubious business maneuvers.
As previously noted, Jessie's skill in literary endeavors was first manifested through helping her husband with the reports of his explorations. Her first book was The Story of the Guard: A Chronicle of the War (1863), an account of the capture of Springfield, Missouri, on October 25, 1861, by the Frémont Bodyguard. Jessie evidently intended the profits from the book's sales to go into a fund for the families of the 16 soldiers who died in the battle.
After the loss of their fortune, the Frémonts learned that the health of one of their sons dictated a change of climate, but they had no money for this purpose. To meet the family's need, Jessie offered Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger a series of articles at $100 each. These newspaper accounts were followed by regular contributions to a number of periodicals. Most were travel and historical sketches or children's stories. In 1878, Jessie published A Year of American Travel, which described the hardships of travel to and conditions in California in 1849. Selections from her writings appeared as Souvenirs of My Time (1887), Far West Sketches (1890), and The Will and the Way Stories (1891). She also helped her husband write the first and only volume of his Memoirs (1887). After his death, Jessie lived with her daughter in Los Angeles, in a house given to her by the ladies of southern California in recognition of her husband's contributions to the state's early history.
