John C. Frémont

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John Charles Frémont (born January 21, 1813 in Savannah , Georgia , †  July 13, 1890 in New York City , New York ) was an American explorer , major general and politician . Between 1841 and 1853 he carried out a total of five surveying expeditions, which were among the most important expeditions of the 19th century to explore the American West and which earned him the name The Pathfinder ; its official botanical author abbreviation is “ Frém. “Frémont's merits as an explorer lie primarily in exploring the mountainous part of the United States as well as inexpensive overland routes that were and are later used by the railroad or as trails .

During this period he was active in the army for the first time and between 1846 and 1847 during the Mexican-American War as a lieutenant colonel or major under the command of Commodore Stockton was largely responsible for the conquest of California. In 1850 Frémont was elected as a member of the Democratic Party alongside William M. Gwin as the first senator of the new state and represented this in Congress until 1851 . In 1856 he joined the Republican Party, founded in 1854, because of his clear opposition to slavery and ran unsuccessfully as the first Republican against James Buchanan in the following presidential elections .

In 1861, Frémont was appointed major general in the American Civil War by Abraham Lincoln , but dismissed in the same year due to an unsettled emancipation edict for Confederate slaves and received no more command before retiring from the army in 1864. In 1878 he was in financial difficulties and dependent on the income from the publications of his well-known wife Jessie Frémont , was made honorary governor of the Arizona Territory , from which he had to resign in 1881, since he was hardly there.

Life

John C. Frémont was born out of wedlock under the name John Charles Fremon.

From 1838 he worked in the US Army as a topographic engineer, and from 1838 to 1839, accompanied by the French geographer Joseph Nicollet , he surveyed the area between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers . In 1841 Frémont secretly married Jessie Benton, the daughter of the US Senator from Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton . Then he was commissioned by the US War Department to explore the Rocky Mountains .

With his team with the prominent trappers Kit Carson and Thomas Fitzpatrick as guides, he managed to reach the South Pass of the mountains from May to October 1842 , to determine its location and the other points and thus the most important traffic route of the Rocky Mountains in the Found in the middle of the 19th century, on which all trade and settlement routes ( Oregon Trail , California Trail and Mormon Trail ) were bundled.

On a second expedition to Oregon he crossed the Rocky Mountains further north and reported on the great salt lake of Utah . He found that the Green River did not arise from the Great Salt Lake, as previously assumed. Between 1843 and 1844 he and 25 men, poorly equipped, explored Upper California , the Sierra Nevada and the plains of the Sacramento Valley for nine months through snow and ice . Only his expedition recognized the geography of the country west of the Rocky Mountains in context and cleared up errors. So he found that there is no great river from the central Rockies to the Pacific, as it had been shown on maps as the Buenaventura River since the late 18th century.

John C. Frémont sets the US flag in the Rocky Mountains

After the conquest of California in the Mexican-American War , in which he participated as an officer in a volunteer army, he got into a conflict with General Stephen W. Kearny and the Commodore Robert Field Stockton , who accused him of refusing to obey and tried to have to make yourself the governor of California.

Frémont was arrested and taken to Washington, DC , where he was court- martialed and dishonorably discharged from the army. Although he was pardoned by President James K. Polk , he took his leave and set out again in October 1848 to the west, crossed the area of ​​the Apaches and after a 300-day journey came to the riverside of the Sacramento River , where he found a piece of land bought in Mariposa . Shortly afterwards, large gold deposits were discovered there, which fueled the gold rush in California and made Frémont a rich man. The Californians elected Frémont, who was still a Democrat at the time , in December 1849 as one of their first two Senators in Congress . In 1850 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 1856 he was the first presidential candidate for the newly formed Republican Party , but was defeated by the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan . Frémont retained his residence in California and wrote other publications. In 1860 he was accepted as a foreign member for his scientific work in the Prussian order Pour le Mérite for science and the arts.

In the spring of 1861 he was in the American Civil War to Major General of the Northern States appointed, but proclaimed unilaterally in Missouri the martial law and gave the slaves armed insurgent-free, after which he was dismissed. In 1862 he received another command, but was defeated by Richard S. Ewell on June 8, 1862 in the Battle of Cross Keys and has not been used in active service since then. In the US presidential election in 1864 , he stood against Abraham Lincoln as a representative of the short-lived Radical Republicans, who thought Lincoln's course was too compromising towards the southern states. In September 1864 he left the election campaign. After examining the positions of Democratic candidate George B. McClellan , he declared that it was too important to win the Civil War to harm Lincoln.

Frémont was involved in various railway companies to the Pacific coast and was later sued by defrauded French shareholders and convicted - in absentia - of escroquerie by the Paris tribunal , which corresponds to German fraud . His financial situation deteriorated so much that he had to apply for office in Washington DC. From 1878 to 1881 he was named governor of the Arizona Territory by President Rutherford B. Hayes and later lived in New York City, where he died of peritonitis in a hotel on July 14, 1890 .

Honors

Works

literature

  • Tom Chaffin: Pathfinder: John Charles Fremont and the Course of American Empire ISBN 0-8090-7556-3 (English)
  • Ferol Egan: Fremont: Explorer for a Restless Nation. University of Nevada Press, Reno 1985, ISBN 978-0-87417-096-2 .
  • Harold Faber: John Charles Fremont: Pathfinder to the West (Great Explorations) ISBN 0-7614-1481-9 (English)
  • Ned Harris, Edward D. Harris, William H. Goetzmann: John Charles Fremont and the Great Western Reconnaissance (World Explorers) ISBN 0-7910-1312-X (English)
  • Natalie Nelson-Hernandez, Claudia Nolan: Mapmakers of the Western Trails, Adventures with John Charles Fremont ISBN 1-885852-31-2 (English)

Movie

  • Dream West - The Adventurous Life of John Charles Frémont (USA 1986) with Richard Chamberlain

Web links

Commons : John C. Frémont  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mariposa County History .
  2. ↑ The Order Pour le Merite for Science and the Arts, The Members Volume I (1842-1881) . Gebrüder Mann-Verlag, Berlin, 1975, page 214
  3. ^ JG Randall, Richard Current: Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure 1955, p. 307.
  4. ↑ The Orden pour le merite for science and the arts, The members of the order, Volume I (1841-1881), Gebr. Mann-Verlag, Berlin, 1975
  5. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names . Extended Edition. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Free University Berlin Berlin 2018. [1]
personal data
SURNAME Frémont, John C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frémont, John Charles (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American explorer and politician
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1813
PLACE OF BIRTH Savannah , Georgia
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 1890
Place of death New York City