"Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men and FRAY-MAHN"

The Golden Age of the Slogan, good sirs!

How strange it was to see Fremont thusly! I had, of course, crossed paths with him at Sutter's Fort and he seemed every inch the aspiring politician. But as my commanding officer, he never spoke at mess; in fact, he usually ate by himself in his tent and off to the side even there. In this context—the non-civilian one—the rash man looking to lead at any turn was strangely absent. His sporadic, forced glad-handing had been entirely absorbed by the mere idea of rank.

Those things, after all, were not his fort: survival was John Charles Fremont's forte. I at once saw I should have realized this from the first—how much more obvious could it have been! But, I—like so, so, so many others—had been duped. I had been duped by those ludicrous, girlish eyes that seemed to flirt no matter what the man did; I had been duped by his slight French frame; I had been duped by the foppish way in which he parted his hair. Surely, these things were no accidents, but they duped me all the same—I dare say FRAY-MAHN used them to dupe himself, else he never would have run for public office.

In being so duped and in being so annoyed by the resulting image, projected with the same flashy equanimity for anyone who came his way, whether for personal or public reasons, we all somehow glossed over his freakish endurance and absolutely iron self-discipline. These were John G. Fremont's most enduring characteristics and, despite the publicity granted his accomplishments, he somehow kept these qualities to himself.

After spending nearly ten months on the back of a horse chasing this freakish endurance athlete about the Central Valley, I rode back north with the same Edwin Bryant who had ridden with Reed for a time and whose letters Bridger had withheld. The two of us started north on emaciated charges with two vaqueros who promptly stole all of our clothing and deserted the very first night of our journey.

The two of us arrived in San Francisco on February 13, which was the first time I heard of the Donner Party's predicament.