The People and the Books

Fremont was both revered and reviled during his lifetime and there are dozens of biographies of him, of varying quality.  Among those I found most useful were Fremont, Pathmarker of the West by Allan Nevins;  John Charles Frémont : Character as Destiny by Andrew F. Rolle;  and A Newer World by David Roberts (which explores in detail the relationship between Kit Carson and Fremont.)

Fremont himself wrote several reports and books which are covered  under the Maps and Reports heading.

The website http://www.longcamp.com/ — created and maintained by Bob Graham — was also a phenomenal resource, full of cross-linked references to Fremont’s writings as well as original research by Graham.

Solomon Carvalho’s writings about the expedition were published as Incidents of travel and adventure in the far West  by Solomon Nunes Carvalho ; edited and with an introduction by Bertram Wallace Korn

Another angle on him is Robert Shlaer’s  Sights Once Seen: Daguerreotyping Fremont’s Last Expedition Through the Rockies, University of New Mexico Press, 2000

This book was invaluable because it not only explained in detail what was involved in Solomon Carvalho’s work on the expedition but also enabled me to “see” exactly what my characters saw as they made the journey.    Since Carvalho’s daguerreotype plates were all lost in the fire described by Jessie Benton in Some Facts on the Plates, Shlaer worked either from Carvalho’s oil paintings or from the engravings in Fremont’s Memoirs, as he reproduced with his own daguerreotype equipment the very views Carvalho had captured.    Shlaer quotes amply from both Carvalho’s and Milligan’s writing about the expedition but I still found it useful to read them in their entirety.

Milligan’s diary, the source of so much conflict in Uncharted, has been reprinted as James F. Milligan : his journal of Fremont’s fifth expedition, 1853-1854, his adventurous life on land and sea  by Mark J. Stegmaier and David H. Miller.

Milligan was only 24 at the beginning of the expedition, though already a Naval veteran of the Mexican War and the African Squadron.   Unfortunately the only photograph available of him is as a much older man.

 

 

The Baron (Frederick W. von Egloffstein) is not an especially important character in Uncharted but he was very much a part of the Fifth Expedition and his life in the West is thoroughly chronicled  in The Baron in the Grand Canyon: Friedrich Wilhelm von Egloffstein in the West by Steve Rowan.  

As for Adeline, the Marc Simmons book Kit Carson & His Three Wives paints the most complete picture of Addie (and her stepmother Josefa and her lover George Stilts ) that we have though,  of course it isn’t very complete at all.  Fittingly, Adeline has a gravestone at Mono, California, but  the date on it is clearly wrong and  it is hard to be  sure she is buried anywhere near it.

There is also an incredible article in the May, 1948 Desert Magazine in which someone named Henry Hall is described as  hearing as a boy (in 1890) the stories of the man he knew as Uncle  Louy Simmonds.  At the time  Louy was an ancient relic of the trapper era, still living alone in the mountains and dressing in furs but the tales he told about Adeline and George Stilts before the Hall fireplace are very close to the ones in Uncharted except that he “confesses” to having murdered George Stilts in 1859 and we know that George Stilts died of old age in Idaho in 1894.

Louy Simmons or Simmonds or Simonds is also discussed at length in Wah-To-Yah by Lewis Garrard and there are a few pages on him in The Mountain men and the fur trade of the far West; biographical sketches of the participants, Volume 6, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen.