John C. Fremont was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1813, the son of Charles Fremont, a French emigre, and Ann Beverly Whiting of Virginia. Fremont spent his boyhood in Charleston and was educated in the Scientific Department of the College of Charleston before his expulsion in 1831, three months short of graduation.

In 1833 Fremont obtained a civilian post as teacher of mathematics to midshipmen; 1836-37 found him assisting in the surveys of the projected Charleston and Cincinnati Railroad and in the Cherokee country; and in 1838 he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Corps of Topographical Engineers and assigned to accompany the French scientist Joseph N. Nicollet on a two-year reconnaissance of the Minnesota country. Under Nicollet's tutelage, Fremont quickly absorbed a great deal of information about science and sophisticated methods of geodetic surveying as well as about how to organize and manage an expedition. When the two returned to Washington to work on the report and map of the survey, he met Jessie, the talented daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, with whom he eloped in October 1841. The …show more content…
On the first, he surveyed the Platte "up to the head of the Sweetwater"; on the second, of fourteen months duration, he made a circuit of the entire West, launching his India-rubber boat on the Great Salt Lake on the outbound trip and examining Utah Lake on the return. The third expedition took him across the Salt Lake Desert and also involved him in the struggle to wrest California from Mexico and eventually in a court-martial trial which ended his government-sponsored explorations. The fourth, a winter expedition designed to ascertain the feasibility of a central railroad route, became stranded in the snows of the rugged San Juan Mountains of Colorado. The fifth and final expedition, which also had a railroad objective, was saved from disaster by the Mormons of