TALES OF VEGAS PAST John C. Fremont

Thursday, June 26, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Tales of Vegas Past: The path from the Meadows to Glitter Gulch

By Gregory Crosby

From the ashes of campfires in the wilderness, their embers swirling up toward the great slope of stars in the firmament, arose the lights of the cities of the West. Or so it was said about the campfires of one young man, who brought the American interior to vivid life in the narratives of his expeditions into the largely unmapped terrain. In doing so, John Charles Fremont set the course of empire, living up to his nickname of "The Pathfinder," even though many of the paths he took had been well-trod by others: mountain men, fur trappers, emigrants to Oregon. But the path to making the west over into the mythic and literal landscape of the West, which we now occupy in our waking and subconscious dreams, fell to Fremont to clear.

In blazing the trail, he left his name, by design or tradition, seemingly everywhere. In Las Vegas alone--"the meadows," which were by the time his party of travelers visited them on May 3, 1844, just another spring and campground on the arid Old Spanish Trail between Los Angeles and Santa Fe-- Fremont's name abounds, gracing a junior high school, a hotel-casino, the city's first commercial street, and, of course, an Experience. Sitting in the Saloon Bar and Grill at Neonopolis on a recent afternoon, watching the sun-baked and beer-clutching denizens rest in the shade before being gently pushed on by security guards, I found it hard to connect the 31-year-old explorer with the densely urban scene that bore his name some 160 years hence. As the Rocky and Sierra ranges were distant dreams to most Americans in Fremont's time, so are his experiences, his wonderment at the landscape that his initiative and good fortune had brought to his eyes now distant to us across the gulf of time, the one frontier that is ever receding.

If anything connects the souls who wander from casino to casino beneath a canopy of electric starlight to Fremont and his party, it is their motley amalgamation, their disparate origins somehow converging into a new whole. "Our cavalcade made a strange and grotesque appearance," recalled Fremont of the ragged party that journeyed toward St. Louis after an epic survey that had touched upon the Great Salt Lake, the Snake River, Walla Walla, the Columbia, Pyramid Lake, a winter crossing of the Sierra into California's Central Valley. "Guided by a civilized Indian, attended by two wild ones from the Sierra; a Chinook from the Columbia; and our own mixture of American, French and German--all armed; four or five languages heard at once...American, Spanish and Indian dresses and equipments intermingled...in this form we journeyed; looking more like we belonged to Asia than to the United States of America." Of course, watching the tourists from near and far, the races descended from slave and immigrant, the generations seeking a little luck or sustenance up and down Fremont Street, one sees the same cavalcade, the mix that defines America: ever diverse, ever seeking.

In the heat beating down on those weathered loiterers chatting over a 40, a thin thread connects us to Fremont and his men, dropping beneath the shade of cottonwood for a moment's rest; weather lording over cities and campfires where no other connection remains. On that day in May, Fremont and his party found relief from the springs that would run dry a little more than 100 years hence: "Two narrow streams of clear water, four or five feet deep, gush suddenly, with a quick current, from two singularly large springs; these, and other waters of the basin, pass out in a gap to the eastward. The taste of the water is good, but rather too warm to be agreeable; the temperature being 71 degrees in the one, and 73 degrees in the other. They, however, afforded a delightful bathing place."

Thus, Las Vegas: a place to rest and bathe beneath a hot desert sun, and today a place to take a bath of an altogether different sort, beneath the black-domed eye of camera in air-conditioned comfort. John Fremont, in the midst of his Second Expedition that would further secure his fame and the nation's admiration (until his being sacked by Lincoln for his performance as a Union general in the Civil War diminished it), could not have possibly imagined the glittering, down-at-heels metropolitan street his name would bear. But he fully understood and saw clearly that cities would rise, the Indian removed in ever-increasingly genocidal methods, the land plowed and fenced and settled. He saw it before many others, the way the West would be won, and how it would then win America her continental empire. The renown of his exploits made sure of that, drawing hungry settlers westward in a great tide. Crossing the Great Basin (which he had named) on his way home, he left no earthly trace; but unlike the nameless voyagers who wander up and down Glitter Gulch, his name, ubiquitous, lingers in the West's collective imagination.