Of Mountains and Men: The Story of John Charles Frémont’s Ill-Fated Fourth Expedition

Written by Quentin Septer

Note: This is a modified excerpt from my book, Where Land Becomes Sky: Life and Death Along the Colorado Trail, available now.

In September 1848, a man by the name of Richard Kern penned a poem in his sister Mary’s journal:

When to the land where the citron flowers blooming,

the swan speeds his southwardly flight

When the red of the evening in the far west is sinking

And though the deep woods steal the shadows of night,

Then doth my heart with deep grief complain

That never, ah never shall I see thee again.

Parting, ah parting, parting gives pain.

In a matter of days, Kern — an artist and naturalist in Philadelphia — would leave his home and travel west, joining an expedition bound for the Rocky Mountains and beyond, to California’s Sierra Nevada. Exploration in the name of science, progress, and Manifest Destiny. It’s how young men in frontier-era America made names for themselves, and Richard must have felt like his time was due. Just three years earlier, in 1845, his younger brother, Edward (known affectionately as “Ned”), joined an expedition led by John Charles Frémont. The party surveyed portions of the Central Rockies, the Great Salt Lake region, and the Sierra Nevada. In his duties under Frémont as expedition topographer, Ned made maps and drew sketches of the people, places, and wildlife encountered on the Western frontier. For a time, he commanded Sutter’s Fort near Sacramento. He even helped to rescue surviving members of the Donner Party up in the Sierra Nevada, in February of 1847. “He was, besides an accomplished artist,” Frémont wrote of Ned Kern, “his skill in sketching from nature and accurately drawing and coloring birds and plants made him a valuable accession to the expedition.” Ned Kern’s drawings and colorings provided the American public with some of the earliest depictions of the Western frontier.

Back in Philadelphia, Ned was celebrated as an acclaimed artist, cartographer, and bonafide Western explorer. He rubbed elbows with preeminent scientists and artists of the day. Soon, he was admitted to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. This was something that his brother Richard, fellow artist and naturalist, along with their older brother Benjamin — a physician whom they called “Doc” — had in common. By 1848, all three Kern brothers were members of the prestigious Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. And by September of 1848, all three of the Kern brothers had signed on with John Charles Frémont’s fourth expedition. Their accounts of the ill-fated journey would become some of the most vivid and detailed known to history.

Earlier that year, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton convinced a group of wealthy St. Louis-based merchants to finance the surveying of a railroad route through Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. As the California Gold Rush began to boom, demand began to grow for a safe, easily passable Pacific Railroad linking the mineral rich lands of the American West with the young country’s urban centers back East. Of notable interest was the “Central Route” — a mid-latitude railway running from St. Louis to San Francisco, following the 38th parallel across the country, straight through the center of the continental United States. But before the railroad could be built, an expedition needed to explore the area and chart the precise path.

Enter “The Pathfinder,” as he came to be known. John Charles Frémont was a Georgia native turned esteemed explorer of the Western frontier. He earned his nickname throughout the 1840’s, leading expeditions across the western United States in efforts to expand the then limited knowledge of the region’s geography. Though, it should be noted that Kit Carson did most of the pathfinding for him. In 1842, Frémont — with the guidance of Carson — surveyed and mapped the Wind River Range of Wyoming, along with prospective routes for the Oregon Trail. Returning to Washington D.C., Frémont — with the help of his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont — wrote and published an account with the ridiculously Victorian title of A Report on an Exploration of the Country Lying between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains on the Line of the Kansas and Great Platte Rivers. The report was printed in newspapers across the country, and Frémont began his rise to fame. A year later, in 1843, Frémont led a second expedition charting the western half of the Oregon Trail. He surveyed the Central Rockies in 1845, along with the Great Salt Lake region of Utah and vast portions of California’s Sierra Nevada. He even scouted what was to become the Colorado Trail’s route over Georgia Pass, back near Breckenridge.

Frémont’s explorations were exceedingly successful. His expeditions produced maps, carried out scientific surveys, and published written works that laid the groundwork for settlers to settle the West. Then a political quarrel left his name tarnished and disgraced. On an earlier expedition, in 1846, Frémont repurposed his party. Headed by Frémont, his men enlisted in the Mexican-American War. They called themselves the “California Battalion.” Prior to the war, however, the Battalion took a little trip up north. Along the way, they carried out the Sacramento River massacre in California, and the Klamath Lake massacre in Oregon. In both cases, the men committed nothing less than acts of genocide against native Wintu and Klamath peoples, respectively. Then they returned to California and claimed the municipalities of Sonoma, Monterey, San Diego, and Los Angeles for the United States (regions then belonging to Mexico). In the wake of the Mexican-American War, Frémont was, for a brief time, the military governor of California. That is, until Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny arrived on the scene, appointed by the Federal Government to fill the role. Frémont refused to subordinate to Kearney, and in the spirit of the ole’ American West, Frémont challenged one of General Kearney’s officers to a duel. In 1847, Frémont was convicted of “mutiny, disobedience, and conduct prejudicial to military discipline.”

John Charles Frémont, you’re probably beginning to realize, was a complex and deeply flawed human being. By 1848, he was one of the most famous men in America, for better or worse, and he sought to reclaim his good name with yet another ambitious and accomplished expedition. There was a problem, however. Frémont’s disgraceful reputation made expedition funding hard to come by. Luckily for Frémont, his father-in-law happened to be a certain Senator with some powerful (and profitable) connections. Thomas Hart Benton. Setting out from St. Louis on October 22, 1848, Frémont wrote:

It is October 1848. I and 35 men, 150 mules, and supplies are leaving St. Louis, Missouri to search for a southern train route through the Rocky Mountains. Unable to acquire government funding, my friend and father-in-law Senator Thomas Hart Benton has arranged for several St. Louis businessmen for financial support in hopes that it will help convince Congress to support this rail line to San Francisco. Many of my men have been with me before on my previous expeditions and will provide the necessary expertise and experience needed.

Three of those 35 men were the Kern brothers, hired by Frémont to establish some scientific reputability on the excursion. Frémont himself was neither an artist nor a man of science. Ned and Dick Kern were hired on as expedition cartographer and artist, respectively. The brothers would make maps and sketch and paint the people, places, and wildlife encountered along the way. For their fellow naturalists at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, the Kerns would gather plant and animal specimens of scientific interest. And Benjamin Kern, a respected physician back in Philly, was hired on as the expedition’s only trained doctor. He brought his amputation tools.

From St. Louis, the expedition followed the Kansas River to the west, across the Great Plains, through valleys of tall grass and seemingly endless, immense expanses of prairie. As the crew traveled across the plains, tensions began to build between the Kern brothers and their leader, John Frémont. Despite their acclaimed status as men of art and science, the brothers were routinely assigned the lowly tasks of gathering wood, saddling mules, and standing guard while fellow expedition members slept. The Kerns became little more than boujee muleteers. “This you must believe was somewhat cutting to our dignity,” Ned wrote, “not that any of us were unwilling to assist in any work if necessity required it — but this was not the case.” To make matters worse, Frémont loved “to be told of his greatness,” as Ned Kern put it, and “Flattery,” Ned wrote, “is certainly not a part of any Kern…Natures more illy suited could not well have been thrown together.”

Perhaps the well-to-do men from back East felt themselves above the plebeian tasks of saddling mules and massaging the fragile ego of their boss. Perhaps they were simply treated as equals among their fellow expedition members, sharing the rather demanding workload accordingly. In any case, the Kern brothers left St. Louis idolizing Frémont; they reached Colorado resenting him.

The party traveled across the plains of Kansas, among Missouri goldenrod and prickly pear cacti, herds of buffalo and pronghorn antelope. As early as November 3, the party braved blizzards, hurricane-esque winds, and near-zero temperatures. The buffalo made “quite a pretty picture through the driving snow,’’ Ned Kern wrote. The men traveled westward along the banks of the Kansas River. Then they veered south. They crossed “gravelly & deep crooked gulches” and traversed “rough country of a dismal gray color.” They hunted deer, bison, and racoons, and snacked on prickly pear. They camped among villages of Kiowa, trading meat, mules, and medicine. Reaching the Arkansas River on November 7, the men followed the river’s banks to a trading post known to history as “El Pueblo,” in present-day Pueblo, Colorado. There, scouts and trail guides warned Frémont and his men of a harsh winter already well underway in the Rockies.

“I am getting reports that snow is already deeper in the mountains than has been known so early in the season for a long time,” Frémont wrote, “and it is predicted to be a severe winter. Still, I am in no ways discouraged by the prospect, and believe that we shall succeed in forcing our way across!” Benjamin Kern, the scientist that he was, simply stated the facts: “Reports of deep snow in the mountains.” To make matters worse, the most dangerous terrain on the journey ahead remained terra incognita. In the words of Frémont:

While much of my route is known to me and my crew, our exact path through the headwaters of the “Del Norte,” [the Rio Grande River] descending on to the Colorado “River,” and so across the Wasatch Mountains has not been decided. But I am hopeful that I can find an experienced guide along our journey. This is especially important because we are beginning our journey in late autumn to test the practicability for winter use of this route for a railroad.

At El Pueblo, guide after guide rejected Frémont’s propositions to join the expedition. They deemed the route far too hazardous to traverse in the dead of winter. That is, until Frémont met a man by the name of William Sherley Williams, better known to history as “Old Bill” Williams. An eccentric character, Old Bill was a grisly, 61-year-old mountain guide with an affinity for booze and gambling and a wardrobe consisting of Shoshone-styled buckskins and warrior face paint. A former Methodist preacher turned fur trapper and mountain man, Old Bill Williams spent the better part of three decades traveling remote reaches of the Rocky Mountains, often alone. He knew the San Juans “better than Frémont knows his own garden,” Old Bill is supposed to have boasted. In his day, Old Bill Williams was revered for his scouting skills and detailed knowledge of Rocky Mountain geography. And much like Kit Carson’s assistance on Frémont’s earlier expeditions, Old Bill’s expertise as a mountain guide, along with his intimate familiarity with the San Juans, promised to be invaluable in the suspect terrain ahead.

And so, with Old Bill leading the way, the party departed El Pueblo on November 22. The men trudged on to the west. They trekked among cottonwoods and gamble oaks, yucca and juniper, piñon pine and groves of aspen. They climbed up and over the Wet Mountains and slogged on toward the Sangre de Cristos. In the distance, the “Blood of Christ” mountains stood as “one continuous sheet of snow,” one expedition member noted. Confronted with a seemingly impassable wall of white mountains, several men abandoned the party right then and there. The remaining men and mules began to suffer in the cold. Snow continued to fall. Temperatures continued to drop. But still, Frémont and his men forced their way across the landscape, toward the San Juans.

Following in the footsteps of Zebulon Pike, the expedition passed over the Sangre de Cristos at Mosca Pass. They continued on along the southern flank of the Great Sand Dunes, where the men waded through a deep snowpack. Overlooking the vastness of the San Luis Valley, the men thought they saw a basin devoid of snow and ice. Descending to the valley floor and trekking out across the 50 mile expanse, they saw only sparse blades of grass peeking through a thick layer of snow. Mules began to starve. Temperatures plummeted below zero. “Hair of mule & man was covered with frost,” Benjamin Kern wrote, and “icicles hung down from moustache below the chin.” On the night of December 6, the expedition camped beneath a crystalline, starry sky, on the floor of the San Luis Valley. “It was a clear & brilliant night,” Benjamin Kern noted, “but one of the most horribly uncomfortable.”

“Got my left foot badly frozen,” Ben continued the following morning — so badly frozen that his socks had to be shaved from his feet.

The men moved west across the San Luis Valley, among long grass weeds and cattails, among “sand, snow, sage bushes and greasewood,” to the foothills of the famed and feared San Juan Mountains. Faced with the prospect of traversing this rugged and mighty mountain range, the mightiest and most rugged in all of Colorado, debate arose between Frémont and Old Bill Williams. Frémont remained singularly focused on completing his survey of the Pacific Railroad’s proposed Central Route. Despite the severity of the weather and the magnitude of the terrain before him, Frémont intended to ascend the Rio Grande and pass over the San Juans (known then as the Wahsatch Mountains) along the 38th parallel. Old Bill suggested the party follow an alternate route over Cochetopa Pass to the north, or the Old Spanish Trail to the south, in attempts to bypass the harsh winter conditions then plaguing the mountains. “I wanted to go one way and Frémont will go another,” Old Bill quipped, “and right here our troubles will commence.”

The group pushed on among sagebrush and a “cold and ghostly” fog. They followed the canyon of the Rio Grande up into the San Juans. In Frémont’s mind, the route would take the men through the present-day site of Creede, over the Continental Divide, down to Cochetopa Creek, and west across the Cochetopa Hills, not far from where I now cycle. And somewhere beyond the Divide, just west of the Cochetopa Hills, Frémont thought he’d cross the Colorado River. (The Colorado, of course, flows nowhere near the Cochetopa Hills.)

As the expedition began their climb into the La Garita Mountains (a subrange of the San Juans) — where scores of peaks rise to heights of 13,000 and 14,000 feet above sea level — snow thickened upon the earth. Snow piled three and four feet deep as the men ascended the canyon of the Rio Grande, “a horrid place,” in the words of Benjamin Kern. Steep slopes stood on either side of the narrow, snow-packed abyss. The expedition’s thermometers froze. The feet, hands, and faces of the men grew terribly frostbitten. “The deep snow of today should have warned Col. Frémont of his approaching destruction,” Richard Kern reflected on December 9, “but, with the willfully blind eyes of rashness and self-conceit and confidence he pushed on.”

Blinded in a ghostly wilderness, the group lost their way. The route grew more arduous as the party gained altitude. Snow piled as deep as fifteen feet on the floor of the canyon, forcing Frémont and his men to traverse steep, ice-laden mountain sides with dozens of mules and hundreds of pounds of cumbersome gear. “The day excessively hard. Snow deep and huge drifts above ones elbows when on mule’s back,” Benjamin Kern wrote, “prospects becoming somewhat gloomy.” Come mid-December, the expedition “reached the naked ridges which lie above the timbered country,” in the words of John Frémont, where thirteen foot snowpacks socked them in and temperatures dipped well below zero. The rocky, treeless ridge of what’s now known as Pool Table Mesa, more than 12,000 feet above sea level, treated the cold, tired, terribly lost men to “a fine view of innumerable peaks clear over to the east side of the del norte valley.” Richard Kern called the vista “one of the finest mountain views in the world.”

Then, a veil of darkening winter skies enveloped the expedition.

The men deemed their camp atop this desolate mountain “Camp Dismal.” Richard Kern recounted the group’s experience in letters collected by the Mayborn Museum in Waco, Texas: “When on the top the snow dust so plenty that we could see nothing else. Some of the men sat on the stones and began to freeze, others became blind. It required the full energy of the remainder to turn camp back again on the trail to our former resting place which we happily reached all alive but many frost bitten.”

“My eyelids stuck together from cold & for a time I saw nothing but red,” Benjamin Kern wrote. “What will a few days bring forth, deliverance or destruction[?]”

Soon, the party’s famished but still surviving mules began eating ropes, blankets, and leather pack saddles. “Manes & mules tails were eagerly devoured by the starving animals,” Benjamin Kern noted. Then, Ben’s pack mule fell dead on the trail. Many more perished in the days to come. “Lost 7 mules today & 8 yesterday,” Benjamin’s diary reads on December 15. Two days later, more than half of the expedition’s 150 mules had died.

“We lived in camp fluctuating between hope and despair,” wrote Benjamin Kern. “A raven floating thro the cold air gave the music of its hoarse notes a perfect addition to camp dismal.” By this point in the expedition, the men grew wary of impending disaster. They were lost and stranded in the wilderness. “Blankets coats & ones hair froze indiscriminately together,” the Kern brothers reflected, “the whole party came very near to total destruction.” The expedition, in the words of Frémont, was “overtaken by sudden and inevitable ruin.” Faced with utterly unnavigable terrain (and, not to mention, a completely impractical route for the construction of a major railway), the group turned back on Christmas Eve.

Around then, Frémont sent Old Bill Williams and three other men ahead of the expedition. Their orders: follow the Rio Grande to the nearest settlement — Abiquiú, New Mexico, about 160 miles away — and acquire supplies to replenish the expedition. “We all wished them a successful journey & speedy succour,” Benjamin Kern scribbled in his journal. Breaking trail towards the Rio Grande, however, Old Bill and his comrades began to starve. With time, they would be boiling and eating their moccasins.

Meanwhile, Frémont and his men continued a slow and sluggish retreat of their own, bound for the floor of the San Luis Valley. Some grew too weak to walk. Some resorted to crawling. The expedition “broke into segments like a frayed rope,” in the words of Dick Kern. Those strong enough to keep moving pressed on down a narrow canyon lined by willows and timber; those too weak to persist fell behind. It was every man for himself. By December 31, the Kern brothers and three other men lagged some three miles behind Frémont and the bulk of the expedition. They must have felt deserted. “We have quite a feeling of novel loneliness,” Ben Kern despaired. Come January 6, Frémont and his crew reached the banks of the Rio Grande. The Kern brothers were still in the mountains, nearly seven miles away, camped in a shelter of saplings along a creek, on the floor of a sinuous canyon enclosed by snow-packed slopes.

On January 9, Raphel Proue, a member of Frémont’s three preceding expeditions, collapsed in the snow. He never rose again.

Come January 11, Frémont sought escape. With four of his strongest men, he abandoned the expedition and followed the Rio Grande to the south. He would wait for them in Taos, he told those left behind. Descending from the San Juans, bound for Taos, Frémont came across Old Bill and the rest of the relief party. Only three of the men remained alive. Their feet were frostbitten and bound with tattered rags. Their limbs were scrawny. Their faces were shrunken and slender and nearly unrecognizable. Frémont deemed the men “the most miserable objects” he’d ever seen. In the snow, a few miles up the mountain, laid the cannibalized remains of their fallen party member — a man by the name of Henry King.

Soon, Frémont, Old Bill, and the rest of the relief party came across a group of Utes, who resupplied the men and showed them the way to Taos. The Utes saved their lives. Frémont and his companions scarcely clung to life upon their arrival in Taos.

Meanwhile, back in the mountains, the Kern brothers struggled for survival. For ten days, they took shelter in a cave, eating mule soup and small birds. But most of the party’s fallen mules were left to rot, come spring. In the words of Benjamin Kern: “From reason or rather no reason and to which circumstance every death is due, the mules were left on the hill and thus months of good provision was sacrificed.” Inexplicably, Frémont ordered the men to leave the meat of their fallen mules in the mountains. Thus, as their food supply dwindled and soon disappeared, the Kern brothers resorted to eating buffalo hides and frayed strands of rope for sustenance. “Boiled up some parfleche & raw hide tug rope for breakfast,” Richard Kern’s diary reads, dated January 11.

Around that time, the frostbitten feet of one of the group’s scouts, a Ute guide by the name of Manuel, had grown so severe that he’d almost certainly need them amputated. He begged the men to shoot him and end his misery. They refused. Manuel staggered into the woods to die. Henry J. Wise, a frontiersman from Missouri, collapsed from a combination of exposure and starvation. A man by the name of Carver seems to have lost his mind. He wandered off into the forest, babbling incomprehensibly, never to be seen again. One by one, the men perished. Ned Kern wrote of the party’s attitude toward their fallen comrades, viewing their deaths “with as little sympathy as I would have done had they been dogs. Twill be my turn soon, poor fellow he has but a few hours start of me, or he was a good man.”

Coming down from the mountains at last, the Kern brothers rendezvoused with the rest of the expedition on the banks of the Rio Grande. In Frémont’s absence, the party was left in charge of a certain L. D. Vincenthaler — a man whom Ned Kern deemed “a weak & cowardly person to whose imbecility and cowardice may be laid the subsequent deaths of most of the men who were lost.” When the men successfully shot and harvested a deer, Vincenthaler ordered the meat to be divided among the strongest men in camp. The others, he proclaimed, were too far gone. It was the intention of Vincenthaler, Richard Kern wrote, “to have said nothing about the deer but to have taken it and the strong men & pushed on to Abiquiú and left the rest of us to perish. Our share of meat was so unjustly small that it did us no good.” Then, the Kern brothers, along with others too weak to persist, were abandoned. Vincenthaler “resigned all command of the party, declared it broken up and said each one must take care of himself,” Richard Kern wrote, going on to describe Vincenthaler’s actions as a “piece of rascality almost without parallel.”

Too weak to carry on to Taos, the Kerns and six others made camp in a thicket of cottonwoods. They ate bugs and rosebuds and the scavenged remains of a wolf; they ate the soles of their moccasins and their rawhide sacks. “We looked for muscles & snails & earth worms,” Richard desponded, but “found none…These were days of misery & death would soon have ended them.” Benjamin Kern wrote of rains freezing the weak, dying men and their blankets to the ground “till the warm sun loosened” them. Soon, the Kerns and their companions grew too weak to chop wood. Then they grew “too weak to move.” For days, they stayed in camp, mustering what little energy they could to gather willows — and eventually, their own clothing — to fuel the flames of a dying fire. “The more we starved the more we burned our clothes and blankets,” Ben Kern anguished.

“I became gradually the weakest of all,” he continued. “One day I laid down the shades of death were stealing gradually over me the others covered me with their blankets, there I lay till near sundown when I made an effort to arise, crawled to my sack and took out 3 or 4 inches lash rope, found a spoonful of sweet oil in my pocket with which I annointed the rope and then ate it, next morning felt somewhat refreshed.”

“During a snow storm as we all sat silently around our little willow fire,” Ben wrote on January 28, 1849, a man by the name of Charley Taplin struggled to his feet and said: “Christ there is a man on horseback over the river[!]”

“We gave a shout to be sure,” Kern continued, and “Almost in an instant Alexis Godey was with us.” Alexis Godey was a scout with the Frémont expedition.

“Well boys I am damned glad to find you alive,” Godey greeted the frozen, exhausted, half-dead men.

“He then pulled some bread from his pockets,” Benjamin wrote, “‘Oh he has bread’ we cried and some of us trembled with joy at the sight of it.”

“Yes boys and there is a mare you may kill.” Godey told the survivors, presenting them with a horse to slaughter and eat. Along with the mare, the men ate a “kettle of boiled bread and deer meat,” Kern noted, “and in two days we were again riding…”

The men rode south to Taos. By then, Frémont was long gone, having fled west to California, where he would soon become one of California’s first senators and the nation’s first Republican Party presidential candidate. When all was said and done, ten members of Frémont’s ill-fated fourth expedition — nearly a third of the party — had died. For years to come, Frémont refused to accept responsibility for the expedition’s disastrous conclusion. He blamed the entire ordeal on Old Bill Williams. “The error of our journey was committed in engaging this man,” Frémont wrote. “He proved never to have in the least known, or entirely to have forgotten, the whole region of country through which we were to pass.” Kit Carson, Frémont’s friend and guide on previous expeditions, expressed further suspicions of Old Bill Williams. “In starving times,” he said, “no man ever walked in front of Bill Williams.”

The Kerns, on the other hand, blamed Frémont’s blind ambition in forcing his way into the San Juans, despite all signs of impending doom. “He has broken faith with all of us,” Ned Kern wrote of Frémont, from Taos. “I have lost a start that I never expect to recover again.”

And in the words of Richard Kern:

Upon Colonel Fremont’s arrival at Thaos, Major Beall, commander at that post, ordered the commissary to issue to the colonel thirty days’ full rations for the twenty-five men then in the mountains, and expected in. These rations were never turned over to the men, and were probably taken to California by Fremont! The men were obliged to buy their own provisions from the people of the country, who came to their relief.

Stranded with no food, no money, and shattered dreams of exploring the West, the Kern brothers despaired. “The clothes we have on our back is all we have saved.” Come March of 1849, Benjamin Kern joined Old Bill Williams on a trip back into the mountains, on a mission to recover supplies left behind by their blighted expedition. “Doc has returned to the Mountains to try to recover some of our lost property,” Ned penned his sister Mary. “We are anxiously awaiting his return…”

A few weeks later, the corpse of Old Bill Williams was discovered “sitting bolt upright against a tree, frozen stiff,” half-buried in snow with a “Ute bullet through his body.”

Benjamin Kern was never seen again.