The story of Jessie Benton Frémont's life is closely allied with that of the acquisition and development of the vast territory west of St. Louis, which even in her young womanhood was the outpost of habitation. Beyond its confines stretched that wonderland of her childhood, whence came the trappers and hunters with their wild tales of adventure, and whither she was destined to follow one day the princely pied piper of her girlhood. The seed of the thought which bore its first fruit when Frémont raised our flag on Wind River Mountain, thirteen thousand feet above the Gulf of Mexico, was sown in the mind of her father when, in 1812, he followed Andrew Jackson from Nashville to New Orleans to defend the Mississippi. In the stirring life on its broad bosom, together with a first realization of the extent of our domain, he recognized the possibilities of our future expansion and greatness. He had already been admitted to the bar of Tennessee and was a member of the Legislature of that State. With the idea, however, that the government of the United States should extend its protecting arm over the great western wilderness, in which it evinced no interest and whence it anticipated no benefit, he moved, in his thirtieth year, to its border-land. Its people recognized his friendly attitude, and when Missouri rose to the dignity of a representation on the floor of the United States Senate, Benton was the first man to whom she delegated that honor. There, for over thirty years, with a limited following, he fought aggressively foot by foot for the development of the West. He often wearied his hearers, who had but little sympathy with projects that to the remote Eastern mind seemed preposterous. It was not infrequently a signal, when Benton mounted his hobby, for his fellow-Senators to take up their letter-writing and for the galleries to be deserted. It made little difference to them if England's hand were outstretched and her fingers daily tightening their clutch upon our northwestern territory. The mouth of the Columbia River was about of as much consequence to the welfare of the United States, in the estimation of the people on the Atlantic seaboard, as are the canals on the planet Mars. Commercial relations with Asia and ports on the Pacific, however Utopian they may have seemed to others with less of a grasp on the world's history than his scholarly mind possessed, were to Benton vital questions, for which he fought with that vigor of utterance that provoked John Randolph into saying that his family motto, "Factus non verbis," should be "Factus et verbis."