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III Solomon Carvalho’s Excellent Adventure - With Frémont over the Rockies; Great Salt Lake City Idyll
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30 It was a solemn and impressive sight to see a body of white men, Indians and Mexicans, on a snowy mountain, at night, some with bare heads and clasped hands entering into this solemn compact. I never until that moment realized the awful situation in which I, one of the actors in this scene, was placed. —Solomon Nunes Carvalho, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West with Colonel Frémont’s Last Expedition Egloffstein’s connection with Engelmann and the (Missouri) Pacific Railroad probably played a large role in getting him a position on what would become John Charles Frémont’s (illustration 11) last expedition across the Rocky Mountains. Charles Preuss, Frémont’s longtime topographer, was otherwise engaged for another Pacific Railroad project—Lieutenant Robert S. Williamson ’s expedition to map likely railroad passes of the Sierra Nevada in southern California. Preuss (and his wife) appear by then to have had enough of “adventure” with Frémont. Preuss, already suffering from chronic depression and the aftereffects of sunstroke, would return from the West in even worse shape. He committed suicide at the start of September 1854, precipitating a crisis in the production of Williamson’s Report that created editorial problems for Egloffstein as well.1 The great cause of St. Louis and Missouri in the decades leading up to the Civil War had become the plan to make the city the hub of the future American transcontinental railroad. This seemed the only strategy for survival in the aftermath of the death of the fur industry and the senescence of riverboat transportation . The principal booster of St. Louis as the jumping-off point for the Pacific Railroad was Thomas Hart Benton, US Senator from Missouri from 1821 to 1851, and afterward a member of the US House of Representatives for a single term from 1853 to 1855.2 Benton’s brilliant daughter, Jessie, suddenly eloped with John Charles Frémont in 1841.3 Once the senator recovered from the shock of the misalliance, Benton and Frémont became III Solomon Carvalho’s Excellent Adventure With Frémont over the Rockies; Great Salt Lake City Idyll With Frémont over the Rockies 31 natural allies in promoting this particular way West. Unfortunately , as was soon seen, nature itself connived against building the great rail link across the nation at the thirty-eighth parallel north. Even today, Interstate 70 halts its course short of the Sierra Nevada, where it encounters Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Repeatedly, Benton intoned the glories of his “way to India,” chanting the name of the Cochetopa Pass as if it were the inevitable route to San Francisco. Some wrote of “Fremont’s Undiscovered Pass” as the sole hope for the St. Louis route, Frémont’s ambitions intimately entwined with the nepotism of his ties with “Old Bullion” Benton.4 Benton was inevitably pitted against the leading politicians of the South, who promoted a route from Natchez or another jumping-off point on the lower Mississippi. This ignored the proposition that the rail link could come further north, say from St. Paul, or even the new lake port of Chicago. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis made no secret of his support for the southernmost route, which would run along the thirtysecond parallel north, but he agreed tactically to a formal study of all the alternative routes. The result was a series of official expeditions beginning in 1853 to provide tentative routes along each of several different paths to the Pacific. These reports were to provide maps of routes, cost estimates, and data on climate, all entrusted primarily to members of the Corps of Topographical Engineers under their commander, Colonel John J. Abert (1788–1863). The expeditions were also instructed to provide 11. John Charles Frémont, circa 1862. Daguerreotype Collection, Library of Congress. [44.221.43.88] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:54 GMT) 32 The Baron in the Grand Canyon studies of mineralogy, zoology, botany, and the ethnology of Native Americans, whether relevant to the railroad or not. Preliminary publication of the first narratives occurred in early 1854, and in 1856 an octavo edition in three volumes was issued.5 The final product was a massive collection of reports running to over twelve stout quarto volumes, the Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, normally known as the Pacific Railroad...