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before President John Tyler vacated the White House.
    That didn’t end the Texas story, however. Nor did it satisfy the aggressive appetite of Manifest Destiny. Although Texas had claimed independence from Mexico in 1836, the Mexican government rejected the claim and sent troops to suppress the rebellion. The Texans lost at the Alamo, but won at San Jacinto and forced the Mexicans to withdraw. Even so, Mexico refused to make peace or recognize the independence of the Texas republic. Consequently, when the United States annexed Texas in 1845, Mexico protested vehemently.
    James Polk, inheriting the dispute, might have ignored the Mexican protests, except for one thing. Polk had read Richard Dana’s book, and he became convinced that California—that marvelous land so neglected by its feckless people—should be brought into the Union. He offered to buy California from Mexico. When the Mexican government refused, he insisted. When the Mexicans refused again, Polk determined to take California by force.
    The dispute with Texas provided the pretext. The president ordered General Zachary Taylor to assume a provocative position on the border between Texas and Mexico, intending for Taylor to be attacked. The attack was slow in coming, and the frustrated Polk began drafting a war message without it. But at the last minute the welcome news arrived that hostilities had commenced. Eleven Americans had been killed—on American soil, Polk explained to Congress. War was necessary and justified. Congress agreed, and in June 1846, Manifest Destiny went to war.
    T HE DECLARATION OF WAR came none too soon for John Frémont, who was in California anxiously awaiting the belligerent word. Frémont’s anxiety reflected both his personal ambition and his uneasy conscience. His ambition drove him to dream of conquering California for the United States; his conscience nagged him for having started the war already, without authorization from Washington.
    Frémont was one of the great enigmas of his generation. For ten years during the 1840s and 1850s he was as famous as anyone in America, a celebrity-hero whose star rose like a rocket in the West and flashed brilliantly from coast to coast. Young men idolized his physical courage and political audacity; young women swooned over his sad eyes, his black curls, and olive complexion, and the catlike grace with which he walked. In an era entranced by exploration, Frémont was the explorer par excellence, the “Pathfinder of the West.” Thousands followed the trail he blazed toward Oregon; thousands more read the reports he published on the vast region that stretched from the Great Plains to the Pacific.
    Yet though the whole country knew Frémont, almost no one knewhim well. His origins were shrouded in mystery and scandal. His father was an itinerant French adventurer, an émigré from the French Revolution with a trail of transatlantic amours who seduced Frémont’s mother and cuckolded the man to whom she was married. Consumed by her desire, she ran off with her lover and lived with him in common-law bigamy. From this illicit union sprang John Charles Frémont, who inherited his father’s handsome face and dangerous habits, and his mother’s passionate impulsiveness. But he inherited little else, certainly nothing on which a man could build a career.
    Where he got his burning ambition was another mystery. Neither parent displayed anything comparable. Perhaps it had skipped a generation or two; perhaps it came from having to live down his illegitimate birth. In any event, it caused him to join the army, that historic institution of elevation for the ambitious but badly born. It provoked him to risk his own life and those of his men on daring crossings of the Rockies, the Great Basin, and the Sierras. And it drove him, in the spring of 1846, to dream of liberating California from Mexico and to grossly exceed his military orders.
    Frémont had reached California some months earlier, on his second