Due to Canada’s fear of successful right-wing coup in America, the battle for the Republican party, is huge! I read a letter by Jessie Benton-Fremont to a British official in Canada, assuring him her father was not pro-slavery, and thus the return of the Oregon Territory could happen, there no chance Slave States will take root. However, the Southern Traitors have risen again, and may allow slavery in all fifty states. Will Canada. and Britian, be forced to act?

I Claim The Mariposa Land Grant

Posted on August 22, 2015 by Royal Rosamond Press

     

As a relative of John and Jessie Fremont, I lay claim to the Rancho Las Mariposa. I have contacted attorney Eileen McKenzie who specializes in Spanish Land Grants.

http://www.eileenmckenziefowler.com/

In 2005 I took a train to Sonoma to see my newborn grandson, Tyler Hunt. He had been abandoned by his father. Heather Hanson and I took Tyler to Vallejo’s home which is a museum. Juan Bautista Alvarado used to live here. Juan used to own Rancho Las Mariposa. I informed my daughter our family history exceeded that of Vallejo. I could tell she did not get it. She is not well read and shuns history. The next day we drove to Colma and I entered the lost tomb of our Stuttmeister and Janke ancestors who were Prussian Forty-Eighters who helped Fremont found the Republican Party.

http://www.sonomaparks.org/pub/place/4

My niece, Drew Benton, is the daughter of Garth Benton, and Christine Rosamond (Presco)  Benton. Garth is the cousin of the famous artist, Thomas Hart Benton, the grandson of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, whose daughter, Jessie Benton, married John Fremont.

It is not gold I am after – but I will take any ore that is rightfully mine. What I would like to do with any land due me, is fulfill my grandfather’s dream. Royal Rosamond was a author and poet who discussed with his good friend, Otto Rayburn, the founding of a Poet’s Colony on forty acres Royal owned in Arkansas. To make this Dream come true, I have founded ‘The Royal Rosamond Academy of Art and Poetry’. I will try to make RRAAP an accredited college so my students can qualify for a Student Loans.

If any gold is found, I will name my mine ‘The Tyler Mine’ after my grandson.

John (Jon) Gregory Presco

President: Royal Rosamond Press & Royal Rosamond Academy of Art and Poetry

Copyright 2015

Rancho Las Mariposas was a 44,387-acre (179.63 km²) Mexican land grant in present day Mariposa County, California given in 1844 by Governor Manuel Micheltorena to Juan Bautista Alvarado.^[1] The grant takes its name from Mariposa Creek, which was named for the butterflies (“mariposas” in Spanish) in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The grant was near Yosemite on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain chain, and encompasses present day Mariposa and the former towns of Agua Fria and Ridleys Ferry.^[2][3]

The Fremonts at Black Point
Posted on September 11, 2011 by Royal Rosamond Press

Jessie Benton held a Salon at the Fremont home on Black Point. Hermnan Melville stayed with the Fremonts, and Bret Harte was a frequent guest. Three miles away in Belmont, William Ralston was entertaining Mark Twain in his Salon. You can see Jessie’s features in my niece, Drew Benton. How could the so called “Caretaker” of the Rosamond legacy miss all this important family history?
Jon Presco

Jesse Benton Fremont by Susan Saperstein She is thought to be the real author behind the successful writings of John C. Fremont (general, senator, presidential candidate, and the Pathfinder of the West) describing his explorations. Jesse Benton Fremont (1824– 1902), Fremont’s wife, was also the daughter of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a leading advocate of Manifest Destiny, a political movement pushing expansion to the West. And in her event-filled life, some of her happiest times were at her house in San Francisco’s Black Point area, now known as Fort Mason. The Fremonts lived there between 1860 and 1861. The prop- erty included three sides of the point, and Jesse described it “like being on the bow of a ship.” They had a clear view of the Golden Gate, so named by John when he first viewed it in 1846. Alcatraz was so close that Jesse is said to have called the lighthouse on the island her nightlight.

The Spanish called the area Point San Jose and built a battery in 1797. However, cold winds and fog soon made the cannons useless. By the time the Mexicans were ruling in the 1820s, the area was known as Black Point for the dark vegetation on the land.

Their house was one of six on the point. Jesse remodeled the house and added roses, fuchsias, and walkways on the 13 acres. Their home became a salon for San Francisco intellectuals. Thomas Starr King, the newly appointed minister of the Unitarian church, was a fixture for dinner and tea. Young Bret Harte, whose writing Jesse admired, became a Sunday dinner regular, as did photographer Carleton Watkins. She invited literary celebrities when they came to townó including Herman Melville, who was trying to get over the failure of Moby Dick. Conversations in her salon led to early conservation efforts when Jesse and a group including Watkins, Starr King, Fredrick Law Olmsted, and Israel Ward Raymond lobbied Congress and President Lincoln to preserve Yosemite and Mariposa Big Trees. Jesse’s husband, however, often away on business ventures, was not a regular at her gatherings.

Jesse’s education was unusual for a woman of her time. She accompanied her father to the White House when he visited presidents and spent time at the Library of Congress while he was working in the Senate. In her childhood home she heard William Clark tell stories about his travels with Meriwether Lewis.

The sixteen-year-old Jesse met the handsome and dashing Fremont when he worked at the mapping wing of the United States Army, where her father spent time because of his interest in Western expansion. When her parents noticed Jesse’s interest, they forbade her to see Fremont. After the two eloped, her parents stopped speaking to her, but later reconciled. Thomas Hart Benton then pushed funding for Fremont’s 1842 trip to explore the Oregon Trail. On returning from Oregon, John Fremont was required to report his findings to Congress, but suffered writer’s block. As Jesse later recalled, “the horseback life, the sleep in the open air” made him “unfit for the indoor life of writing.” She offered to write as he dictated to her, and the report with its descriptions of the western lands was a success. Succeeding expedition reports made Fremont and his scout Kit Carson famous. People heading west for gold bought copies with their supplies. Historians are mixed on who was the actual writer. One, John W. Caughey, indicated that Fremont was one of those writers who “acquired by marriage a very attractive literary style.” During an 1846 expedition to California, Fremont found himself caught between conflicting orders of feuding Army General Stephen Kearny and Navy Commodore Robert Stockton. He declared himself military governor and was subsequently arrested and court-martialed. In a strange twist of fate, Fremont asked American Consul Thomas Larkin to purchase land in the San Jose area before he left California for his trial. Larkin instead purchased land in Mariposa, where a few years later gold was discovered, making the Fremonts very rich. When Fremont lost his trial, he left the Army and headed west on another expedition. Just as the discovery of gold was announced, Jesse traveled to California to meet him, using the Isthmus of Panama route. This was something very few women did–even fewer with only a six-year-old child, her daughter Lily, as a companion. Fremont tended his business at the mines in Mariposa, and the Fremonts lived in Monterey, Bear Valley, and San Francisco at periods between 1849 and 1861. Fremont bought the house at Black Point in 1860 for $42,000. When civil war seemed likely, the Fremont family returned east for John’s new Army appointment, which lasted only a few months. (He decreed his own emancipation proclamation in Missouri, which angered Lincoln.) He lost control of his mines, and after a number of other job attempts declared bankruptcy in the 1870s. Jesse supported the family with her writing. Fremont died during a trip to New York in 1890, and Jesse died twelve years later while living in Los Angeles. Black Point was taken by the military for defense during the Civil War, and the Fremont home was demolished. One of the original six houses is used today as the Fort Mason Officers Club. Jesse filed lawsuits for compensation for the property, but the government countered that the families living on the point were squatters and produced documentation from President Millard Fillmore reserving it for military use. After Jesse’s death, her daughter continued to file claims, but the family was never reimbursed. Some of the heirs of Black Point families, including the Fremont’s great-grandson, were still pursuing legal action in the 1960s. The area was renamed for Colonel Richard Masonóappointed military governor of California in 1847 when his predecessor, Stephen Kearny, went to Washington to testify against Fremont in his court-martial. Sources: Jesse Benton Fremont, American Woman of the 19th Century, Pamela Herr
Jesse Fremont at Black Point, Lois Rather The Age of Gold, H. W. Brands You can walk the area where the Fremonts and the other Black Point families lived following the Fort Mason walk described in Stairway Walks in San Francisco by Adah Bakalinsky. Historic photos reprinted with permission, SF History Center, SF Public Library Black Point with the Fremonts house on the far right. Today this is Fort Mason land, bordered by Aquatic