The Age of Gold by H.W. Brands

made her father more protective. He tried to steer her affections toward young men of family and prospects. But Jessie had different ideas. One day a dashing lieutenant named Frémont visited the Benton home to see the senator about support for an exploratory expedition to the West. Jessie was smitten before Benton could warn her about the young man’s checkered past. Sensing trouble, Benton forbade Jessie to see Frémont and made sure the explorer got the money for his journey far away from Washington.
    Yet Jessie, all of sixteen years old, refused to accept the paternal veto. She smuggled letters to Frémont, and upon his return the two eloped. When Benton learned of the marriage, he ordered Frémont out of the house and told him never to return. Jessie, he said, would stay.
    But Jessie would
not
stay. If her husband was banished from the family house, she declared, so was she.
    Benton had never been so angry, and he held out for weeks. Yet, as he always did with Jessie, he finally gave in. Daughter and son-in-law were permitted back home. Benton once more, but now with no ulterior motives, sponsored Frémont’s exploratory career.
    Jessie did, too. She became her husband’s collaborator and ghostwriter. When he returned from the expedition that scouted the Oregon Trail, and sat down to write the report required by Congress, he discovered that all the courage and ambition that had carried him over the mountains and deserts couldn’t get him past his first paragraph. A severe case of writer’s block induced headaches and nosebleeds. Jessie suggested that the man of action wasn’t necessarily the one best-suited to putting action to paper. As she explained afterward, “The horseback life, the sleep in the open air, had unfitted Mr. Frémont for the indoor work of writing.” (Jessie’s recollections almost always make her sound more demure than she really was. As with many memoirists, so especially with her: one has to read between the lines.) The two agreed that he would tell the story to her, and she would round it into literary form. The resulting report was a popular and political triumph. Congress ordered a thousand extra copies; newspapers reprinted it and reprinted again. Emigrants to Oregon packed the authorized versions and bootlegged copies in the tops of their trunks for ready reference. With Benton’s encouragement, the legislature ordered a second Frémont expedition, better funded and manned than the first.
    This expedition also proved to be better armed than the first: Frémont included a twelve-pound howitzer in his kit. When news of his armament reached Washington, officials at the War Department objected. Frémont would be entering territory in dispute with Britain and Spain; any hint of an armed invasion might provoke a diplomatic crisis. Frémont’s superiors dispatched an urgent message ordering him to leave his artillery at home or return to Washington to explain himself.
    Jessie intercepted the message at St. Louis. Acting as her husband’s secretary, she opened his mail in his absence; reading this letter, she concluded that jealous bureaucrats intended to subvert the Frémont expedition.“I felt the whole situation in a flash,” she recalled. “I had been too much a part of the whole plan for the expeditions to put them in peril now—and I alone could act.” She added, with hindsight, “It was in the blessed day before telegraphs; and character counted for something then, and I was only eighteen, an age when one takes risks, willingly.” She hazarded the censure of the federal government by refusing to forward the letter to Frémont, instead dispatching a swift emissary with a message of her own: “
Only trust me and Go
.”
    Frémont went, leaving before a copy of the letter, sent straight from Washington to his camp on the Missouri River arrived. The ensuing expedition, made possible by Jessie’s brazenness, was the one that first took him to California, and when he returned east