A Year of American Travel
A Book by Jessie Benton Fremont
Frémont, Jessie Benton. A year of American travel. New York, Harper & brothers, 1878. Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <https://www.loc.gov/item/18002864/> acccessed 21 January 2017
Author’s Biography
“Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902), the daughter of a
Missouri Senator and wife of explorer John Charles Frémont, first came to
California in 1849, when she and her young daughter spent six months at her
husband's newly-acquired ranch at Mariposas, 140 miles east of San Francisco.
The Frémonts also spent the years 1851-1852 and 1857-1861 at the Mariposas
ranch before moving to St. Louis during the Civil War. They returned to
California in 1887 and made Los Angeles their home for the rest of their
lives.”[1]
I chose this resource as a way to explore the paradox of the
American Dream as discussed by Jim Cullen and James Truslow Adams.[2]
Is the Dream a journey or a destination? Is it achieved through personal
endeavour and hard work or is it about having the outward trappings of success?
Cullen writes of its multivalency - having many applications, interpretations
and meanings and yet for him ‘ agency’
lies at the very core of the American Dream.
The book tells the personal story of a middle class woman
who is actually living the life of striving towards the American Dream whilst
at the same time the narration exemplifies the development of the notions that
are used to analyse ‘the American Dream.’ Thus we see the pull of the constant
movement West, the qualities required for frontier life, the obsession with
business success and vignettes of the
dispossessed. - French and Spanish settlers submerged by the machinations of
the Louisiana Purchase - an enormously advantageous acquisition for the land
hungry United States.
Fremont’s family enjoyed a very comfortable life in the East
with political and business interests in two capital cities and Virginia. But
the imperative of the West meant a perilous seaboard journey for Jessie and the
winter mountain route for her husband, in which few of his party survived.
Adams describes the speed and randomness of town development. (Adams p216)
Fremont describes Kansas growing from a steam boat landing to city since her
last visit. She experiences the ‘quantitative measure of value’ (Adams p215)
where settlement was a succession of log
cabins; a series of rooms alternating with open spaces with a connecting roof
and which were easy to build with the increased man-power that came with
new-comers.
Her days in early Gold Rush California provide examples of
how desire for prosperity and easy money took precedence over living conditions
-’no man would have diverted his attention from the mines to go house-building.
They used blankets and tents.’
In trying to recover some semblance of Eastern society,
Fremont attends a party where the ‘whole force of San Francisco society came -
the ladies sixteen in number.’ She was informed that visits by men would be
brief as “time was worth fifty dollars a minute. The American Dream was being
forged…..
No comments:
Post a Comment