John Charles Frémont was one of the those skyrockets that arch up across the American sky now and then—a wild quick climb, a dazzling shower of sparks, and then a headlong plunge down into the darkness. Seen from a distance, the man seems to have had a minimum of solid substance, so that it is hard to understand what people used to see in him.

Yet he burned with a bright light once. Many men believed in him passionately, and not all of them were innocents who gave their faith to men without stature. (There was Kit Carson, for instance.) If he did not precisely open the West, he made Americans aware of it, he put a gloss and a shine on it, he helped stamp the consciousness of a continental destiny on the American mind. A little later his name became part of a drum-beat rhythm . . . Free soil, Free men, Frémont! . . . and if, in the end, he was not the man the time of drums called for he at least had been a rallying point for men greatly in earnest.

He was an interesting man, in other words; and one of the interesting chapters in his career is reviewed in William Brandon’s The Men and the Mountain , which is the story of Frémont’s fourth, and disastrous, Rocky Mountain expedition in 1848.

Frémont was trying to chart a railroad route to California. The country badly wanted such a route, but under the rising tensions of the approaching Civil War the North and South were acutely jealous and suspicious of each other, and neither section would consent to a route which seemed to favor its rival. St. Louis, as an eastern terminus, might be a good compromise point; so Frémont, strongly backed by his father-in-law and political sponsor, Senator Thomas Hart Benton—but definitely not sponsored by the U.S. Government—set out from St. Louis to blaze the way.

He was a man in trouble, just then, and he needed to redeem himself. His part in the conquest of California had ended badly; the army had court-martialed and dismissed him for refusing to take orders from General Stephen Kearny, and for Frémont—a romantic if there ever was one, and possibly a little headlinehappy to boot—it was above all things important to perform some new deed that would restore all of his lost glory. He would head west, straight across the middle of the Colorado Rockies; further, to show that the route was feasible for year-round rail travel, he would make the trip in the middle of the winter. So he got together a group of 35 men, including some first-rate mountain men, and set out.

Unfortunately, he was heading into the most tangled set of mountains in the United States, and he had picked one of the worst winters in history. His party got up