Frémont’s Wrong Turn

John C. Frémont’s disaster—a gory scene where desperate, freezing voyagers resorted to cannibalism to stay alive—is an infamous chapter in American history. In this feature that ran in a May 1994 issue of our magazine, writer Steve Howe puts himself in the unfortunate group’s frozen shoes on the La Garita Mountains. — Emma Veidt, associate editor

A TAILWIND PUSHES me up the trail, high into the La Garita Mountains of southwest Colorado. The thin air at 12,700 feet disappears into my lungs as I plod toward the high, barren notch ahead. Grudgingly, the gap comes closer, I crest the saddle, and the north face of Mesa Mountain rears overhead. I had forgotten how satisfying it feels to reach a high pass and straddle the world.

Just to my right, north of the pass, sit small lichen-stained outcrops of Fish Canyon tuff, a dark, igneous mineral formed by volcanic ash. These bookshelf-size cliffs fan down and out toward the gap, facing Mesa Mountain. This is a magnificent place but not a particularly hospitable one, especially at dusk, when thermometers plunge and night winds rise. I will be camping here tonight but only because I am following others.

At the base of one cliff sits a low D-shaped wall of toppled flagstones scattered by time so they nearly blend with the path that winds through the saddle. If you hunker down into the comer of the ring and look closely at the polished cliff face, shallow scratches can be seen. Even under nose-to-rock scrutiny they are barely visible, but with patience and imagination, these scratches can be read: “1848,” a faint testimony to the first party, and certainly the most unfortunate one, ever to amp here at Inscription Rock.

On December 15 of the year inscribed, about a half hour before sunset, western explorer John C. Frémont arrived here with a party of 35 men and 120 mules. It was Frémont’s fourth westward expedition. At age 34, he was already a national hero, one of America’s most prolific explorers, a golden child of Manifest Destiny.

His purpose was to test the feasibility of a year-round transcontinental railroad route along the 38th parallel. To do that, the privately sponsored expedition would have to cross the Continental Divide during winter. Despite Frémont’s experience, his attempt on the La Garitas ended in retreat, frostbite, starvation, and cannibalism. Here, at Inscription Rock, is where things began to go wrong.

Frémont’s disaster is a famous chapter in western Americana, largely because of the gruesome tales of desperate men who stayed alive by eating their dead companions. Without the titillation of ghoulish voyeurism, his group as well as the Donner Party, Alfred E. Packer, and half the island of New Guinea, would long ago have faded from our collective memory. Why are we so fascinated by interpersonal consumption? Well, a little giddy nausea while breaking taboos is usually entertaining.

MY SLEEK FOUR-SEASON tent is pitched on a flat spot among the boulders, then rocked down heavily. On this mid-October night, the winds should hit 40 mph and the thermometer 15°F. I’m grateful for every shred of technology in my pack. Suffering is best experienced vicariously, in a nostalgic, analytical sort of way.

To Frémont and his men, this wind-scoured pass must have represented a desperate launching point for a risky crossing over what they thought was the Continental Divide. It wasn’t. Clad only in wool and leather, they endured two nights in the open here at -20°F. Starving mules ate the blankets off the sleeping men.

The expedition was 74 days out from St. Louis, Missouri, having trekked up the Missouri River, along the Platte River, then south around the Colorado Front Range to the tiny trapper’s outpost of Pueblo. There, at the eastern foot of the Rockies, Ute Indians and mountain men told Frémont to hunker down until spring because he’d picked the wrong winter. But young John C. had an entire nation looking over his shoulder.

“Old Bill” Williams, a 61-year-old mountain man, was the only person in Pueblo anxious to hire on as guide. Williams was a strange one. Expedition member Micajah McGehee remembered him as “full of oddities. … He could never hold his gun still, yet his ball went always to the spot … he never could walk on a straight line, but went staggering along, first on one side and then the other.” Williams rode his mule jockey-style, with stirrups hitched high and leather breeches pushed above the knee. He wore buckskins, a French military jacket, and Shoshone face paint.

On December 4, the expedition crossed south of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, skirting present-day Great Sand Dunes National Monument. Williams continually led the party by inefficient routes. Delays gnawed at the supplies, particularly shelled corn for the mules. On December 12, the group heads into the La Garitas through the narrow mouth of Hellgate, turning up Carnero Creek rather than taking standard passes to the north.

Fifteen feet of snow filled the canyons, much of it spindrift from the plateaus above. With no snowshoes, the party wallowed in a maze of steep drainages, pounding out a trail with shovels. Mules began dying. Nearly all the men had frostbite. Dr. Benjamin Kern, one of three Kerns whose diaries figure heavily into expedition accounts, had his stockings freeze to his feet. Four days of struggle across timber-choked side hills brought them here, to Inscription Rock, a windswept pile of stones in the middle of nowhere.

Darkness descends like a hammer. Wind thunders across the pass. Deep in the night, nature calls me out for a well-ventilated constitutional. I stumble along the ridge to moon the wind in futile defiance. On my return, I pass the little rock wall. Curiosity lays me down against the polished escarpment. Wind knifes between the rocks, cutting through space-age clothing, sucking heat from arms and legs. Within minutes, I retreat to the tent. It’s only October, a far cry from the jaws of the blizzard-locked December Frémont and his men spent here.

The next morning, the compass leads me southwest over the windblown summit of Mesa Mountain. I’m following a map of Frémont’s campsites compiled by Pat Richmond, a historian from the San Luis Valley who spent 20 years searching for clues to the expedition’s route. She pinpointed locations by keying in to old tree stumps left behind by Frémont’s men as they frantically burned wood to stave off the cold. In this timberline environment, with its harsh microclimates and extremely slow growth rates, those ragged ax-cut trunks have sat like tombstones for 146 years.

Frémont’s men took two days to claw their way over these 4 short miles of open tundra. Ground blizzards stopped them dead on their first attempt, and Dr. Kern described the party as being within a half hour of “total destruction.” On the second try, December 17, they managed to cross over to timberline in the headwaters of Wannamaker Creek, with mules and men dropping “every 50 yards or so.”

Leaning into the gales, I pause on an overlook into the abyss of Wannamaker Creek. A series of vast, rounded peaks cradle the tan and gray autumn meadows, their marshy landscapes ringed by stands of Engelmann spruce. Mesa Mountain looms like a gray and pink sand painting. To the west, massive eroded pyramids, white with snow, rise from the La Garita Wilderness.

An elk bugles from the ridge. Two bulls and their harems climb up from Benino Creek no more than 100 yards distant. The largest turns to stare. His massive rack counterweights back and that wild, magic whistle echoes across the ridges. I count 36 animals and follow them into Wannamaker Creek.

Traveling this historic path, you can see how hypothermia, exhaustion, and altitude affected the expedition. Route choices make little sense. I try to put myself in the group’s frozen shoes, circling the perimeter of this high plateau, inspecting and rejecting perfectly feasible descents. As a result of Frémont’s confused route-finding, retracing the path today doesn’t actually take you anywhere, in a modern context. While most contemporary wilderness routes are trails with camps, Frémont’s fourth expedition involves locating a series of historic campsites, most with no existing trails between them.

At Wannamaker Creek, I stand among stumps bleached white by time. Ax cuts scar their tops. The freezing men dashed for the first grove of timber they found. Most of the mules were left o starve on the ridge I just descended.

Nightfall at Wannamaker camp: The static rush of wind through pines. Resin-fire odors mix with gusts of crystal air. Did the men, in their extremis, notice the towering spruce set into flickering glow by campfire light? They waited desperately in this grove as German cartographer Charles Preuss tried to locate a westward descent out of the La Garitas. Frémont was altitude sick, his thinking muddled and indecisive. Storms pounded them.

“It was impossible to see in any direction, for the high wind filled the air with drifting snow at all times,” Thomas Breckenridge recorded in his diary. “We could hear the roar of snowslides as they rushed from the steep sides of mountain peaks … carrying everything before them.” The men huddled together in fire pits, floundering out through the blizzards only to chop more wood. They called it Camp Dismal and Camp Desolation.

When Preuss returned, unsuccessful, Frémont decided to turn back and retreat through the forests south of Mesa Mountain. The men began relaying loads, dragging them in 70-pound bundles, beating a trail along timberline toward the southeast. On December 25, the first parties reached what became known as Christmas Camp, perched on a ridge between the forks of Rincon Creek. Back in Wannamaker that night, deputy leader Alexis Godey cooked a lavish Christmas dinner of elk stew, doughnuts, biscuits, coffee, and mule-meat pie. Despite the sumptuous menu, food supplies were running critically low.

I abandon Camp Dismal the following day in a heavy fog, starting late to travel in the stillness of dusk. Above the west fork of Rincon Creek, more rough-hewn stumps decorate a scenic timberline knoll above a beaver pond— one of the baggage relay camps. Flocks of mountain bluebirds spill across the meadow. I descend into the silence of the Engelmann groves as snow begins to filter through the forest. At last alpenglow, I encounter a trail and follow the circle of headlamp light down through a tree tunnel.

I climb a scree pile the track crosses, and then begin walking a grid pattern through the pitch-black forest, searching for the bone-white stumps of Christmas Camp. A deep, inexplicable contentment settles over me here, even though I don’t know where “here” is—Christmas Camp, presumably, but no proof appears. I give up my search and fall asleep among spruce trunks groaning in the wind.

Here, or hereabouts at least, Frémont decided to send four men for help: Bill Williams, William Creutzfeldt, Thomas Breckenridge, and Henry King as leader. Their destination was Taos, 160 miles downstream on the Rio Grande. Godey accompanied them to scout ahead, while the main group followed, tumbling their baggage downhill toward Camp Hope. Warm weather prevailed. Spirits ran high. The last of the mules were left behind. No one bothered carrying the meat from the dead mules because they assumed the expedition would soon be resupplied.

Four days later, Godey returned and said the gorges below were t0o steep for the baggage train. Devastated and exhausted, the men departed their rechristened Camp Disappointment and muscled it back up through steep drifts and forest deadfall for three days. By “sliding bundles” and “hand-and-knee crawls,” the party began a confused series of traverses east toward Groundhog Creek. Along the way, they began to starve.

The forest has reclaimed Camp Disappointment. Despite years of searching, it has never been accurately located, so I follow a faint trail running north from the rock slide. The track climbs gently through deep temples of scaly bark colonnades. Witchy gray fingers scratch beneath the canopy. Fronds of verdant needles wave to the black and orange cliffs. For all its beauty, following Frémont’s route can frustrate a modern observer. You want to yell back over the century, telling them to dump their weighty baggage and run for civilization. Only the wind replies, laughing softly among the branches.

The trail bursts into Embargo Creek’s headwater park: New Year’s Eve Camp. A ragged Frémont stump sits rimmed by living pines, the centerpiece of a small sanctuary. Chipmunks have made their home in an archway between its roots. This camp was occupied almost exclusively by the three Kerns, rather effete Philadelphia gentlemen who signed on with Frémont for recreation and self-improvement. While the rest of the expedition dragged baggage endlessly past this camp, the genteel Kerns played music and practiced drawing, secure in their gentlemanly arrogance—a distilled naivete of both the expedition and its era.

Far down valley, the “rescue” party led by King was eating its candles. Frostbitten and snow-blind, their feet inflamed and covered with sores, the four could travel only four or five miles a day. They ate their boots, belts, knife scabbards, and a dead otter they’d found. They were forced to go around a Ute village, which might have been their salvation, had Williams not betrayed the tribe years before. Into this 15-mile detour over open ground “were crowded all the agonies of hell,” Breckenridge later wrote.

Frémont’s main party split into three groups as it struggled past New Year’s Camp toward Groundhog Creek. The lead group consisted of Frémont; cartographer Preuss; Saunders Jackson; scout Godey; and Theodore McNabb, Godey’s 14-year-old nephew. The last group was made up of the three Kerns; Captain Andrew Cathcart of the Scottish hussars; and three Cosumnes natives from California: Manuel, Joaquin, and Gregorio. The middle group, led by Lorenzo Vincenthaler, contained the rest of the party.

The Rio Grande was only 15 or 20 miles from Groundhog Creek, but it was 20 days before the last men reached it. Frémont’s group arrived at riverside even as the Kerns remained, apathetic, at New Year’s Camp. As the expedition struggled to regroup, Raphael Proue, an experienced French-Canadian voyageur in the middle party, collapsed and died near the Rio Grande. Frémont was furious, afraid that morale would begin to fail now that death had entered the ranks.

January 11 arrived, the scheduled day for the King-led rescue party’s return. The four men were still moving, but only by stumbling and crawling. Henry King, married just days before the expedition, laid down and died a quarter mile from a sheltering riverside campfire. Creutzfeldt sank into depression.

Frémont assumed the rescue party had been ambushed by Indians, so he struck out for Taos with a second group consisting of himself, Godey, McNabb, Preuss, and Jackson. Despite the quartet’s three-week head start, Frémont caught up with them in just five days, having had the good fortune of encountering a Ute brave who loaned the group horses. When questioned, the surviving trio of Williams, Creutzfeldt, and Breckenridge gave evasive responses to questions about King’s whereabouts. Frémont backtracked 7 or 8 miles and found King’s butchered body. The three men, who were gorging on a deer they’d miraculously shot just before Frémont arrived, all denied any cannibalism.

“I cut the deer open, and tearing out its liver devoured it as ravenously as I have seen hungry wolves devour the flesh of a buffalo,” Breckenridge later recalled. “It was the sweetest morsel I ever ate. (Williams) came and took the meat in his long bony hands and began tearing off great mouthfuls of the raw flesh, like a savage animal. Creutzfeldt was so elated after his meal of raw meat that he went out and brought in the carcass of the deer, a piece at a time—entrails and all.”

Dinnertime arrives. I’ve thought long and hard about a commemorative menu for this trip, something readily available without dissecting one’s companion or poaching the local canines. A gristly appetizer of beef jerky suffices, while the Spam bubbles away in its can, deep in the fire ashes. Delightful smells waft from the flames. Dinner is served, charred to perfection. Despite vegetarian misgivings, the Spam tastes heavenly. No regrets there.

Of course, circumstance is the veritable spice of gourmandism. After long arctic winters, polar explorers fondly recalled “spring caribou meat, sour, green, and stinking, fresh from last fall’s cache.” And Inupiat loved to squeeze the fat warble fly larvae out of fresh caribou kills and eat them like popcorn. Such appetites are largely a matter of cultural happenstance. The Great Basin tribes had always known the value of a pragmatic diet, and early white explorers quickly learned it. Cannibalism was rare on the frontier, but accepted in the face of starvation. Trials such as the one held for Alfred Packer, the West’s most notorious cannibal, occurred later, near the turn of the century, by which time frontier culture was degenerating, and citified ethics were the norm.

In the morning, I head east, cutting cross-country toward Groundhog Creek through an old forest lush with moss, mushrooms, and good cone production. Gray jays whistle sadly to each other as they leapfrog through the groves. Bobcat tracks stitch their way across a patch of snow. A ptarmigan, steel gray and white, explodes from trailside to strut away in short, zigzagging bursts.

History quickly becomes secondary to a successful pilgrim tracing Frémont’s route. This country seduces you. Fog descends with the dusk as I wander amid the stumps of Groundhog Camp. Elk graze slowly out from the forest edge as a snowstorm curtains across the meadow.

MORALE COLLAPSED IN the rear groups. Manuel, one of the Cosumnes Indians, froze his feet and the soles were rotting off. He begged Vincenthaler to shoot him, but was refused. Joaquin and Gregorio helped their friend back up the canyon to a sapling shelter, where they built a fire and left him to die.

The party continued toward rock outcroppings on the floor of the San Luis Valley. The next day, Antoine Morin and Vincent Tabeau, two French voyageurs, fell behind and froze to death. Carver snapped and began raving, regaling his companions to accompany him back upstream, claiming he had a plan to save everyone. Fearful for their safety, they allowed him to wander from camp. Manuel, awaiting death in his shelter, was the last of the party to see Carver.

On January 20, Frémont and the two rescue parties rode into Taos, stumbling through the door of Kit Carson’s cabin. Frémont was frostbitten and shattered, but Godey turned around virtually without pause and led a rescue party of Ute Indians back to the San Luis Valley.

Meanwhile, Vincenthaler reneged his command, telling the others to split up and run for it. Seven of the stronger men abandoned the nine weaker members by sneaking out of camp at midnight. Within a day, Joaquin and Gregorio, who had been left behind, forced themselves to catch up with the breakaway group; threats had been made within the Kern camp to kill and eat the three should conditions grow more desperate.

The remaining men rested for five days, while those who weren’t snowblind hunted. Two grouse were found and eaten, as were some beetles and a rotted wolf carcass; then they started in on their moccasin soles and skin bags. On January 24, Elijah Andrews died. The next day, Henry Rohrer, a dropout from the faster Vincenthaler group, began to thrash aimlessly. He didn’t see nightfall. According to McGehee’s diary, they discussed cannibalizing both men even as Rohrer lay dying. One enthusiastic proponent, whom McGehee declined to identify, offered to do the butchering to spare others the horror. The suggestion was voted down, and the group planned to wait three days before considering “so horrible an alternative.”

Most historians assume they held off, although neither body was ever found. A letter written by Edward Kern immediately after the disaster alluded to “unlawful” food. Captain Cathcart later wrote that “some of the survivors fed on the dead bodies of comrades. I saw some awful scenes.”

On January 24, Godey and his rescue band rode into the San Luis Valley and found five members of the Vincenthaler party. Farther on, George Hubbard lay wrapped in a blanket, dead but still warm. They found John Scott barely alive and insane. Taking a shortcut across a meander of the Rio Grande, Godey missed the Kerns, Catheart, Charles Taplin, McGehee, and John Stepperfeldt, even as they were discussing necrophagia.

Instead, Godey encountered Ben Beadle and Josiah Ferguson, who had dropped exhausted from the Vincenthaler group and been passed by the Kerns. Beadle was dead, Ferguson nearly so. Ferguson told Godey that the Kern group was ahead, and on January 28 they were found.

Godey left all the men with food and continued upriver in a superhuman effort to recover baggage. Arriving at Manuel’s sapling shelter, Godey found him alive, The young Indian said Carver had passed through, bound up canyon with a large chunk of “deer meat” because he had “forgotten something” in the upper camps.

Godey attempted to climb farther, but several mules died in the process. He took the hint and descended, picking up survivors along the way. By February 11, they were safely in Taos. There was a lot of serious frostbite, but no amputations. Stepperfeldt went mad and ran off into the desert. In the end, 10 of the 36 men didn’t make it. Or maybe it was nine. The Utes, who kept a close eye on their winter hunting grounds, told Frémont and Preuss they had seen a white man crossing the floor of the San Luis Valley, but they had not approached the lone traveler with the two human legs slung across his back. It could only have been Carver. The legs must have belonged to Proue, the first member to die. Carver was never seen again. Oddly, none of the diaries or expedition accounts list his first name. He is known to history only as “Carver.”

The survivors of Frémont’s fourth expedition quickly shook off their grisly misfortunes and passed on through the devastated pueblos of Apache war country, marching west along the Gila Trail toward the 49er gold fields of California. We were a young nation then, and people seldom looked back, which is a pity because, as Kierkegaard noted, life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.

The blizzard thickens over Groundhog Creek. Winter has arrived and nightfall won’t be far behind. It’s time to leave these mountains. I hoist my pack and slip off quietly through the spruce groves, still haunted by echoes of past disaster.

We should heed the lessons learned so torturously by John C. Frémont and his band of unfortunates. Despite our modern luxury of hindsight, all too many present-day adventurers—people with far simpler challenges and far more recreational armament than Frémont ever dreamed of—continue to brew up backcountry disaster by holding to goals in the face of unexpected conditions. Consequently, should you and your companions set out to cross the high, windy La Garita Mountains in winter, go prepared, be flexible, and don’t forget the toothpicks.