Volume 50, Number 15 · October 9, 2003
Mountain Man
By Larry McMurtry
Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire
by Tom Chaffin
Hill and Wang, 559 pp., $35.00
The farther we get from the times of the explorer and presidential candidate John Charles Frémont the less important he seems, and yet a long shelf of tolerant, even protective biographies—seven in my own bookshop—attest to the fact that he once seemed very important indeed. He was, as a result of expeditions to the West, a superstar long before the word came into use; he may have been the first American celebrity to be destroyed by celebrity itself. Much of his behavior was dubious, and some of it clearly disgraceful; his biographers, including Tom Chaffin, are often forced to scold him, and yet most of them continue to forgive him, as mothers forgive their adored but unreformable sons. Establishing exactly why Frémont, whose glory was brief and embarrassments many, became so very famous is a problem his battery of biographers have not entirely explained.
Review, 3898 words
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