Pathmarker

NARRATIVES OF EXPLORATION AND ADVENTURE (532 pp.)--John Charles Fremonf, edlted with an Introduction by Allan Nevins--Longmans, Green ($8.50).

It is possible that only the vigorous exercise of bad judgment kept John Charles Fremont from becoming one of the authentic giants of U.S. history. His behavior in California during the Mexican War led to court-martial for mutiny, disobedience and conduct prejudicial to order, and his resignation from the Army. His search for a railroad route through the Southwest ended in disaster because he would not listen to men who knew better than he did the dangers of midwinter in the mountains. He was the first man nom inated for the presidency by a Republican convention, but he did not bother to campaign actively, and he lost to James Buchanan in 1856. His business ventures were disastrous. Toward the end (which came in 1890), only the writing of Jessie Fremont, one of history's sturdiest examples of the devoted wife, kept the two from want.

Helpful Wife. But of the many Fremonts imprisoned in the single man, there is one who survives with rare appeal: the young explorer who "saw visions," led expeditions to the West which made him a popular hero and brought back information so precise and engagingly written that the passage of more than a century has hardly affected its freshness. Fremont was a young officer in the Army Topographical Corps when he headed his first three Far Western expeditions in the 1840s. His reports to the Government were written with the help of his talented wife; the first two were brought out by several book publishers of the day and became enormously popular during the gold rush. They were, in fact, indispensable, because while many a mountain man had scoured the West before Fremont, no one had observed it so well, mapped it so accurately, measured so methodically the temperatures and elevations. It was the difference between men looking for skins and a man bent on showing that the U.S. could and should expand quickly and profitably to the Pacific.

Absent from bookshops for decades, the first two reports, as well as a third that was incorporated in Fremont's Memoirs, have now been knowledgeably edited by Historian Allan Nevins, who is the best of Feemont's biographers. That they constitute one of the great source books of U.S. history is obvious. But it is as vastly enjoyable armchair adventure that Narratives of Exploration and Adventure can be put into the hands of anyone capable of being stirred by great undertakings. Georgia-born Engineer Fremont, intelligent and fearless as well as an accomplished scientist, imprisoned the frontier in his reports and maps. His pictures of Indian life, the buffalo herds, the astonishing terrain, are among the best recorded. Though he never lost sight of his practical objectives, he never ceased to be exhilarated by the wild beauty of his surroundings. In the Rockies, as he was about to move forward on foot, he noted that "there were some fine asters in bloom." The scene before him was "a gigantic disorder of enormous masses, and a savage sublimity of naked rock, in wonderful contrast with innumerable green spots of a rich floral beauty shut up in their stern recesses."

In an unmapped country where Indians were apt at any time to take the warpath, Fremont persisted in carrying out his mission to the letter. When the Indians tried to use bluff, he bluffed back, and won. He won and kept for a lifetime the regard of Kit Carson and other mighty mountain men--proof enough that he had the courage and frontier skills to go with his looks and brains.

Cease to Tease? Fremont had what some might consider too neat a talent for winning the friendship of useful men. First it was a lawyer who sent him to college; then it was a man who became Secretary of War; most importantly it was Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, whose daughter Jessie he married. For the illegitimate son of a woman who had run away from her husband in favor of an itinerant French schoolteacher, Fremont came a long way. As a general in the Civil War, he incurred Lincoln's distrust, and for many that was enough to put him permanently under a cloud. But when the complex man whom Historian Nevins struggled with in Fremont: Pathmarker of the West has ceased to tease biographers, there will still remain the practical visionary of the Narratives, fully happy for perhaps the only period of his life as he crisscrossed and described a vast, spacious wilderness with the freshness of a man awakening in an Eden. His wife wrote his epitaph: "From the ashes of his campfires have sprung cities.''

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