We head Up the Road this week to Mariposa at the southern end of California’s famous Mother Lode, where John C. and Jesse Fremont once called home some 70 square miles of Sierra Nevada foothills
outside Yosemite—the former Las Mariposas Spanish land grant of Juan Bautista Alvarado. Las Mariposas happened to include a thick five-mile vein of gold-laced quartz that produced hundreds of pounds of placer gold every month. The Fremonts were loaded.
Yet controversy and drama dogged John C. Fremont throughout his life—his incursions on behalf of Manifest Destiny, the belief that Americans had a divine right to possess the entire continent; his attacks on Indians; his instigation of the Bear Flag Revolt and Mexican-American War; his strange court martial. (And that was before most of his military career.) More drama at Las Mariposas, soon overrun by squatters, mostly miners with contested mining claims. The US Supreme Court eventually backed Fremont.
The smartest thing John C. Fremont ever did was marry Jesse Benton. She was politically savvy where he was impetuous—and came by it naturally, as the daughter of expansionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Her very engaging writings launched Fremont as a popular public figure. She greatly expanded and improved his otherwise thin expedition reports, which were then published in the tabloids of the day, encouraging western settlement. And her work supported him at the end, when the wealth was gone.
Here is a taste of her storytelling, from “My Grizzly Bear,” in Mother Lode Narratives. We join this particular narrative as the Fremonts, their daughter, and companions, on a sight-seeing outing near home, hear a “rough, low bark—broader and rougher even than that of a bull-dog,” quite close.
I never question any acts of some few people but I was surprised, and not too pleased, to find myself hurried back down the steep, stony peak with only, “It is too late to finish the climb—we must hurry—do not speak—keep all your breath for walking.” And hurry we did. I was fairly lifted along. Mr. Burke had disappeared and was now with Lee bringing the horses to meet us. . . I had been seriously ill not long before and could not understand why I was so roughly hauled along.
There was reason enough. It was no dog, but a grizzly bear that made that warning bark, and we were very close to it. My ignorance spared me the shock of this knowledge, but the practiced mountain men knew it was not only a bear, but a she- bear with cubs. They knew she would not be likely to leave her cubs at that hour when they were settling for the night unless we came nearer or irritated her by talking and noises. . . .
Very quickly our bright drawing-room filled with eager men gun in hand. Armed men rode down the glen intent on that bear—first coming to get all information of the exact locality, then to ride and raise the countryside for a general turnout against it. For everyone had kept from “the Madam” the fact that a she-bear had been prowling about for some time seeking what she could devour; and that she had devoured some and mangled more of “Quigley’s hogs”— Quigley having very fine and profitable hogs at a small ranch three miles from us. . . .
Bear Wary
Lights frighten off wild beasts. I had no shame in illuminating the house that night. Men laughed kindly over it, but they all felt glad that I had come off so safely, and next day I was early informed that the cubs were all killed. The bear went as usual to Quigley’s for her raw pork supper, the digestion of a bear making this a pleasure without drawback, but the stir about the place was evident to the keen senses of the grizzly and the men watched that night in vain. Her tracks were plain all around about, and the poor thing was tracked to her return to her cubs. She had moved them—made sure they were all dead, and her instinct sent her off into close hiding. The watch was kept up, but she was wary and kept away.
At length one dark night the Quigley people heard sounds they were sure came from the bear though the hogs in the big pen were quiet. They were stifled sounds blown away by a high wind. There was but one man in the house, and he said his wife would not let him go after them; it was so desperately dark the odds would be all against him.
The woman said she was not sure it was a bear. She half thought it was men fighting, an equally great danger in that isolated way of living. So they shut their ears and their hearts although human groans and stifled blown-away cries made them sure it was no animal.
The Morning Reveals a Death
The sounds passed on. In the morning they went to the wagon-road which ran near their enclosure and found a trail of blood. Followed up, it led to a little creek close by with steep clay banks. Dead, his face downward in the water, lay a young man in a pool of blood—shockingly mangled across the lower part of the body. His sufferings must have been great, but his will and courage had proved greater.
He had not been torn by a bear as was first thought, but by a ball from his own pistol. This was found, a perfectly new pistol, in his trousers pocket; the scorched clothing showing it had gone off while in the pocket. The trail was followed back, leading to a brook where he must have stopped to drink when the pistol, carrying a heavy ball, went off. Yet such was his courage and determination that he crawled that long way in a state plainly told by the place where he had rolled in agony—the last was where he made his vain appeal for help at the Quigley house. Perhaps he fell face downward into the shallow streams and was mercifully drowned.
His good clothing, a geologist’s hammer, and some specimens of quartz wrapped in bits of a German newspaper, told of an educated, worthy sort of man. But there was nothing to identify him, and the poor fellow was never inquired after. One of the many who came from afar with high hopes, and whose life was summed up in that most pathetic of words, “Missing.”
The grizzly had disappeared and was, I am told, the last ever known in that valley, which still has as postmark for the town, “Bear Valley.”
