A Year of American Travel

Writer, wife of famed explorer John C. Fremont, and political activist Jessie Benton Fremont was one of the most remarkable women of the 19th century. Closest aide and confidant to her ambitious husband, she penned this tale of her family’s western migration. “I saw back into the time when I had learned to know how painful is the process of founding a new country. What loneliness, what privations, what trials of every kind, went to the first steps of even that rich and lovely country of California.” It was not gold that drew Jessie Fremont to California in 1848. Gold had not yet been discovered when she left on her journey. The Fremonts were there to make a new life. When bad investments bankrupted the Fremonts, Jessie turned to writing to help support the family. Sharing her husband’s anti-slavery feelings, she personally went to Abraham Lincoln to plead to restore her husband’s position after he was dismissed for issuing an edict of emancipation in Missouri. She was helpful in getting protection for Yosemite Valley during the Lincoln administration.