Fremont's Mining Empire
Near Mariposa, California
John Charles Fremont called himself a pathfinder, and the name was not entirely wrong. He led three major exploration expeditions into California in the eighteen-forties, mapped routes through the Sierra Nevada, and played a central role in the Bear Flag Revolt of eighteen forty-six, the brief armed uprising that preceded American annexation of California from Mexico. He was famous before the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush made him rich, at least for a time.
In eighteen forty-seven, Fremont purchased the Las Mariposas rancho, a large grant in the Sierra foothills, which he had acquired ostensibly as agricultural land. When gold was found in California in eighteen forty-eight, he looked at his land grant and decided that it covered not just the acreage he had purchased but the entire gold-bearing watershed of Mariposa Creek, a considerably more expansive interpretation than the grant's language clearly supported. He began moving the claimed boundaries of his property whenever new gold was found within a reasonable distance of the original grant.
He hired armed men to drive competing miners off ground he was claiming. He took those competing miners to court repeatedly. He was elected one of California's first two United States senators in eighteen fifty, on the strength of his California fame, while the land-grant litigation was still ongoing. He ran for president in eighteen fifty-six as the first Republican candidate, on an antislavery platform, campaigning in part on the wealth and reputation he had built from gold that was legally disputed at the time he was spending it.
The Supreme Court eventually ruled against his most expansive interpretation of the grant. His mining operations failed. He died in eighteen ninety in New York, without money, far from the foothills where his empire had briefly made him one of the most powerful men in California.
The road through Bear Valley passes what remains of his base of operations here. The landscape is quiet now. What it was, briefly, was the headquarters of a private mining empire built on conquest, litigation, and a very aggressive reading of a land deed.
