page_title: John C. Frémont
section_title: Frémont's explorations
hierarchical_section_title: John C. Frémont / Frémont's explorations
caption_attribution_description: English: An undated portrait of General John Charles Frémont (1813-1890)
context_page_description: John Charles Frémont or Fremont was an American explorer, military officer, and politician. He was a US Senator from California, and in 1856 was the first Republican nominee for President of the United States.
  A native of Georgia, Frémont acquired male protectors after his father's death, and became proficient in mathematics, science, and surveying. During the 1840s, he led five expeditions into the Western United States and became known as "The Pathfinder". During the Mexican–American War, Frémont, a major in the U.S. Army, took control of California from the California Republic in 1846. Frémont was convicted in court-martial for mutiny and insubordination after a conflict over who was the rightful military governor of California. After his sentence was commuted and he was reinstated by President Polk, Frémont resigned from the Army. Frémont led a private fourth expedition, which cost ten lives, seeking a rail route over the mountains around the 38th parallel in the winter of 1849.
  Afterwards, Frémont settled in California at Monterey while buying cheap land in the Sierra foothills.
context_section_description: The opening of the American West began in 1804, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Meriwether Lewis and William Clark) started exploration of the new Louisiana Purchase territory to find a northwest passage up the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. President Thomas Jefferson had envisioned a Western empire, and also sent the Pike Expedition under Zebulon Pike to explore the southwest. British and American fur trappers, including Peter Skene Ogden and Jedediah Smith, explored much of the American West in the 1820s. Frémont, who would later be known as The Pathfinder, carried on this tradition of Western overland exploration, building on and adding to the work of earlier pathfinders to expand knowledge of the American West. Frémont's talent lay in his scientific documentation, publications, and maps made based on his expeditions, making the American West accessible for many Americans. Beginning in 1842, Frémont led five western expeditions, however, between the third and fourth expeditions, Frémont's career took a fateful turn because of the Mexican–American War. Frémont's initial explorations, his timely scientific reports, co-authored by his wife Jessie, and their romantic writing style, encouraged Americans to travel West. A series of seven maps produced from his findings, published by the Senate in 1846, served as a guide for thousands of American emigrants, depicting the entire length of the Oregon Trail.
caption: John C. Frémontby George Healy unknown date
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