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By Root 1886 0

hunt for flowers. A bunch of violets, or a sprig or two of brilliant color, intermixed with green, is a sufficient trophy of a tramp that chills you, damps your feet, and possibly leaves the seed of consumption. Here they have flowers in May, not shy, but rampant, as if nothing else had the right to be; flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile, flowers as the visible carpet of an immense mountain wall. You can gather them in clumps, a dozen varieties at a pull. You can fill a bushel basket in five minutes.” TSK, “Picture of California in Spring-Time—Around the Bay,” in Oscar T. Shuck, comp., The California Scrap-Book (San Francisco, 1869), pp. 47–50.

69. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, pp. 84–85; TSK, “A Vacation Among the Sierras—No. 2,” in John Adam Hussey, ed., A Vacation Among the Sierras: Yosemite in 1860 (San Francisco, 1962); Denton, Passion and Principle, p. 282. Oliver Wendell Holmes and John G. Whittier both wrote to King in California to praise his Transcript letters.

70. JBF, “A Home Found, and Lost”; Phillips, Damned Yankee, p. 231; Denton, Passion and Principle, p. 282.

71. TSK, “Selections from a Lecture-Sermon After Visiting Yosemite Valley, Delivered in San Francisco, July 29, 1860,” in The California Scrap-Book, p. 457.

72. See, e.g., TSK, The Organization of Liberty on the Western Continent, an Oration Delivered … July 5th, 1852 (Boston, 1892), pp. 10–12; also Wendt, pp. 25–26.

73. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, p. 185; Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 316; JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King,” New York Ledger, Mar. 6, 1875.

74. San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Feb. 23, 1861.

75. Sacramento Union, Feb. 25, 1861; Monzingo, pp. 71–74; Wendte, Thomas Starr King, pp. 159–60.

76. TSK to Randolph Ryer, Mar. 10, 1861, in TSK Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California; Herr, p. 317.

77. Starr, Americans and the California Dream, p. 103; JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King”; Monzingo, Thomas Starr King, p. 74.

78. TSK, “Daniel Webster,” in Whipple, Substance and Show, p. 302; Wendte, Thomas Starr King, p. 162; New York Times, May 13, 1861.

79. Charles P. Roland, Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics (Austin, Tex., 1964), pp. 245–46; Wilkins, The Great Diamond Hoax, p. 24.

80. JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King”; Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 319.

81. Chaffin, Pathfinder, p. 453.

82. Starr, Americans and the California Dream, p. 99.

83. In their private correspondence as published by Herr and Spence, the two continued to address one another as “Mrs. Frémont” and “Mr. King.” On the other hand, when Jessie—during her husband’s lifetime—published an article about her friendship with King, she quoted a letter to her that he signed, “Believe me to be to the brim and overflowingly, Yours, T.S.K.” Could the worldly Mrs. Frémont possibly have failed to consider what some readers might make of this? Was she flaunting his devotion in the faces of her husband, King’s family, and the general public, perversely daring them to accuse her and the sainted clergyman of adultery? Or was this, in a sense, her own tribute to the chastity they had maintained despite the confluence of attraction and opportunity? We may never know. Herr and Spence, Letters, passim; JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King.”

84. Edwin P. Whipple, ed., Christianity and Humanity: A Series of Sermons by Thomas Starr King (Boston, 1877), p. xlv; JBF to William Armstrong, June 10, 1861, Anderson Family Papers, Kansas State Historical Society; JBF to the Editors of the Alta California, Feb. 26, 1861, in Herr and Spence, eds., Letters, pp. 235–37.

85. JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King”; Ralph Waldo Emerson to TSK, Nov. 7, 1862, quoted in J. A. Wagner, “The Oratory of Thomas Starr King,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3 (Sept. 1954), p. 225.

86. Denton, Passion and Principle, p. 291.

87. San Francisco Bulletin, Apr. 20, 1861; Sacramento Union, May 4, 1861.

88. White, A Yankee Trader, pp. 187–88.

89. JBF to William