PATHFINDER

A comprehensive, lively study of one of America’s greatest—and most controversial—explorers.

John Frémont scaled mountains, coined the geographical term “Great Basin,” and battled renegades and rebels while traversing and mapping the American West. For his troubles, he was accused at various points of lying about the places he’d been, of inventing adventures in the interest of self-promotion, and of committing various crimes, from fomenting revolt to dining on his dead companions. His political rivals, who were legion, also never failed to mention that he was the illegitimate son of a French homewrecker. Frémont himself didn’t help matters much, writes Chaffin (History/Emory Univ.): he was arrogant, to be sure, and so loose with the accounting in his role as a would-be mining and railroad magnate as to verge on fraud. He also had a profound talent for picking “formidable enemies, including General Stephen Watts Kearny, the philosopher Josiah Royce, and Frank Blair of Washington’s powerful Blair family”—to say nothing of Abraham Lincoln, who removed Frémont from Civil War command and effectively ruined his postwar career. (He also had a good eye for choosing allies, however, among them the powerful politicians Thomas Hart Benton and Joel Poinsett.) Chaffin takes pains to show what in Frémont’s record was of his own making, and what was laid at his door by enemies. He recognizes Frémont’s many accomplishments as an explorer and geographer whose work advanced the cause of American empire—not only by helping thwart the ambitions of Mexico in California and of Britain in the Northwest, but, more simply, by providing accurate charts for those who followed (“Frémont’s 1843 map [of the interior West]—eschewing anecdotes, legends, and other half-truths repeated from past maps—included only areas that he had personally seen and surveyed. Areas uncrossed by the expedition remained blank”).

Little remains blank in this thorough life, of great interest to students of Western history.