One of the virtues of Steve Inskeep’s new book, “Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War” (Penguin Press), is that it tracks this American phenomenon back to something like a satisfying starting point—the life of the Frémonts and their pursuit, in the eighteen-forties, of the Oregon Trail, the very first real American adventure that was cynically stage-managed for propaganda (and commercial) value. Even before the ubiquity of speed-of-light communication, which one might have thought essential, John Frémont’s westward travel was rapidly shared, with Jessie helping to ghostwrite the exploits. It was almost as if he became famous for trekking the Oregon Trail before he ever made it to Oregon. “Celebrity” and “celebrity culture” are parts of modern life itself, and tracing them to a single source is silly—no celebrities could have been more popularly celebrated than the aristocrats of eighteenth-century French courts—but this particular American phenomenon, in which being a striver and becoming a star flow together in one field of action, really does seem to get started here.
Inskeep’s subtitle might be a bit showy, but the Frémonts turn out to be fine characters for a book, or a miniseries, for that matter. Pretty much the entire dramatic matter of America before the Civil War passes through their lives: the gold rush, the way west, the taking of California, the Donner Party, the growth of abolition, and the coming of the war. But it is their relation to publicity that seems most current. There were towns called Fremont and a street in newly minted San Francisco named for them while the couple were still trying to make their fortune with dubiously acquired property elsewhere in California. John Frémont emerges as one of those characters—like Aaron Burr or, in another way, Charles Lindbergh—who seemed born to end up with their face on currency but instead inspired only the names of streets whose origin the people who walk on them no longer know. An antislavery Republican candidate for President, Frémont also played a crucial role in what is in retrospect one of the most astonishing parts of the American story: the inclusion of California as part of the United States, and not as the separate, perhaps Spanish-speaking country—the North American Chile—that its geography and history would seem to dictate.