JESSIE BENTON FRÉMONT
Yosemite National Park, indeed the entire National Park System, might not exist today were it not for the influence of Jessie Benton Frémont.
Married to John C. Frémont and the daughter of the most influential Democratic senator of the mid 1800s, Thomas Hart Benton, she influenced such luminaries as Horace Greeley, Thomas Starr King, Richard Henry Dana Jr. and U.S. Sen. Edward Baker to join Galen Clark and Sen. John Conness in urging Congress to set aside Yosemite and its Giant Sequoias in what comprises the heart of Yosemite National Park, today.
In 1864 at the height of the Civil War, she traveled to Washington, D.C. with photographs of Yosemite Valley that she’d commissioned Carleton Watkins to take and personally entreated President Abraham Lincoln (they knew each other well), to save Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees by signing The Yosemite Grant, the first instance of land being set aside specifically for its preservation and public use by a national government. It was an extraordinary idea, proposed in extraordinary times, in part by an extraordinary woman.
Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and historian Craig MacDonald asked, "If not for what she did behind the scene (during an age when women did not have the vote or any voice in public life), would there be a Yosemite National Park today, would John Muir have been drawn to the Valley because of the attention given it by its protection, would there have even been the foundation necessary to lead to establishing national parks?"
The Yosemite Grant set the foundation not only for the national parks, but for the California State Parks, as well. Still today, the words "Since 1864" are inscribed on the California State Parks symbol, a reminder of what this California heroine helped set in motion.
Before her work to protect Yosemite, Jessie Benton Frémont grew up on the frontier in Missouri and was the pen behind John C Frémont's widely read reports of his western expeditions. She followed that up with best-selling stories of his adventures that made her and her husband mega stars in their day. Her words inspired hundreds of thousands to venture west. No female writer in American history had a greater formative influence on America's view of California. She was prolific throughout her life, writing A Year of American Travel about her 1849 trek to California and regularly contributing to national magazines. Through her writings, she added an early feminine voice to the history of California's outdoors. Jessie Benton Frémont is buried in Los Angeles, her adopted home.
