of his life were spent in comparative
retirement.

Not long before his sudden death in New York City July 14, 1890, at
the age of seventy-seven years, he had been placed on the retired
list of the United States Army with the rank of Major-General. When
he passed away the Pathfinder of Africa was filling the public
ear--the wedding of Stanley in Westminster Abbey was the theme of
the hour.

He was buried in Kensico Cemetery, Piermont-on-the-Hudson, about
thirty miles from New York City, near the country home of his
prosperous days. His widow, Jessie Benton Fremont, is at this
writing (1893), a resident of Los Angeles, Cal. Three children
survive their father, an unmarried daughter, Elizabeth McDowell
Benton, Lieutenant Frank Preston Fremont, U. S. A.; and Lieutenant
John Charles Fremont, U. S. N. After his death Mrs. Fremont demanded
compensation for, or restitution of the property appropriated by the
United States Government for military purposes in San Francisco
harbor, in 1863, and for which she has never received a dollar
(1893). The settlement of this claim in her favor is anticipated by
the bench generally, long as justice to her has been delayed. At
present she has a pension from the Government.

Some profess to find it hard reading the character of John Charles
Fremont, calling it enigmatical and baffling. Not so with those who
knew him best. "His unwritten history," writes one of these, "gives
the clew to his life."

That he was a man of indomitable courage none can deny; a man of
lofty principle and unblemished character. An atmosphere of romance
makes him the American Chevalier.

He did more than any other man to open the pathways to the Pacific
coast. The bitter feeling engendered by the California conquest, and
his policy in the Civil War, is not yet extinct. Partisanship has
biassed the most of his biographers. The intense feeling underlying
the presidential campaign of 1856 did not conduce to a fair estimate
of the man, who has suffered hardly less from the intense admiration
of his friends than from jealousies of rivals and foes. "I tried to
do my duty," he would say in his old age, when asked to explain
knotty points about the conquest.

"All that he ever did for the Government," says one who knew him
well, "was uniformly repaid with injury." That is the verdict of one
side of the controversy. The sifting and weighing of a mass of
conflicting evidence, preceding the final verdict of permanent
h