Frémont was the hero of the hour, and could have been governor of the new State or one of its first Senators. He chose the latter, however, though it took him away from those material interests which California then held for him. Going into the Union as a free State, it would need in Congress a defence such as no man could give it with greater loyalty than Frémont. There is an anecdote told and applied indiscriminately to various political heroes, most frequently, perhaps, to Lincoln, to whom, therefore, it may possibly appertain, demonstrating delicately his deference for the marital tie. On the night of his election to some office, and while he was being inundated with the congratulations of the friends who had assisted in the achievement of his triumph, he further captivated their fancy by remembering his wife. "Well, gentlemen," he said, quietly, "this is very nice, but there is a little woman around the corner who will be interested in hearing this news, and if you will just excuse me, I think I'll step around and tell her." One woman interested in the balloting of the delegates at San José for California's first Senators was not so conveniently situated. She was at Monterey, and as a season of heavy rains was on, there was but little prospect that her keen desire to know the result would find immediate gratification. Before just such a merry blazing fire as his imagination had once conjured up as a central feature of their library sat Frémont's wife, her fingers for the first time fashioning a dress for herself on the trustworthy outlines of one that had been ripped up for the purpose. Her little daughter had been put to bed, and her companions for the evening were the Australian woman who had replaced her two Indian servitors, and whose accustomed fingers plied the needle with a more rapid stroke than her own, and the woman's baby, playing on the bear-skin rug near the fire. Besides the voice of the woman and an occasional chirrup from the baby, she heard nothing but the storm without, till the door opened and a man, dripping with rain, stood on the threshold and asked, in consideration of his sorry plight, if he might enter. It was Frémont. He had torn himself away from his idolizing followers and ridden out into the darkness and storm to tell his wife, seventy miles away, that he had been elected to the United States Senate. Though it was late in the night when he reached Monterey, he was in the saddle again before dawn and on his way back to San José, making in all a ride of one hundred and forty miles. The home-bound steamer, sailing from San Francisco on the 1st of January, 1850, carried, among others, the first two Senators from the new State, Frémont and Givin. At Mazatlan a British man-of-war fired a salute in honor of these two distinguished passengers.