How Frémont Framed the West

Abstract

How Frémont Framed the West John Bicknell Andrew Menard, Sight Unseen: How Frémont's First Expedition Changed the American Landscape. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 288 pp. $24.95 (paper). Sophie Greenspan, Westward with Fremont: The Story of Solomon Carvalho. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 176 pp. $17.95 (paper). An 1836 report from the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs justified the policy of Indian Removal by impugning both Native Americans and the land to which they were being sent. "They are on the outside of us," the committee wrote, "and in a place which will forever remain on the outside" (5). Thomas Hart Benton, the legendary U.S. senator from Missouri and leading proponent of westward expansion, saw something different. To Benton, the West was not "outside." It was simply next. He considered himself "the self-appointed son of Jefferson," as Andrew Menard terms him in Sight Unseen (xxii). And it was Benton's real-life son-in-law, John C. Frémont, who would become the instrument of Benton's passion to subdue and settle the American West. Sight Unseen tells the story of how Frémont changed how Americans see the West. Before Frémont came Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long, both of whom got the West wrong in ways that made Frémont's task more difficult and that made the success of his revisionism all the more remarkable. Menard writes that Pike's report of his 1806–1807 expedition through Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado is dominated by "a feeling of alienation and despair that seemed to grow stronger the farther west he moved" (8). Katherine Lee Bates may have been inspired to write "America the Beautiful" after climbing the peak that bears Pike's name, but Pike saw only that "'these vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time as celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa'" (9). Long, who explored the Platte River region into Colorado a dozen years later, doubled down on Pike's slanderous misinformation with his [End Page 107] description of a region of "'hopeless and irreclaimable sterility'" and with his famous map that labeled the Great Plains a "Great Desert" (10). Making matters worse, bestselling author James Fenimore Cooper—who had never traveled west of Lake Erie at the time he wrote The Prairie—used Long's report as the basis for his 1827 novel. Thus, the image of the Great Plains as a desert became cemented in the American imagination. What Pike and Long reported, given the context in which they worked, is forgivable in hindsight. At least they roamed over the land. When Menard writes about seeing "firsthand a country that was often conquered or claimed only on maps," he is talking about a long tradition that extends back to the first European settlers and continued into the nineteenth century (xi). When secretary of state John Quincy Adams dickered with his Spanish counterpart over where to draw lines on the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, they were arguing intensely over the inclusion or exclusion of features that neither of them—and hardly any other White man—had ever seen. Usually following in the footsteps of others, Frémont would change all that—after an apprenticeship on the prairies of the Upper Midwest. Before he gained fame as the "Pathfinder", Frémont honed his skills on the Coteau des Prairies, the 20,000 square-mile prairie plateau of northwestern Iowa, southwestern Minnesota, and eastern South Dakota. He had been given a commission in the Corps of Topographical Engineers by fellow South Carolinian Joel Poinsett, the secretary of war, to serve under the command of Joseph Nicollet, the head of the Corps. "If Benton and Poinsett gave him the opportunity to see the 'unknowne,'" writes Menard, "it was Nicollet who taught him how to see it" (31). They were "pilgrims of the senses as well as of science," and what they saw from close and systematic observation was nothing like what Pike and Long had reported before them. "Where Pike and Long saw a desert," Menard writes, "Nicollet and Frémont saw a 'vast interminable low prairie, that extends itself in front—be it for...