I would say that John C. Fremont is proof of Garrison Keillor’s observation that, “God writes a lot of comedy. The trouble is, he’s stuck with so many bad actors who don’t know how to play funny.” And that was why God created Charles Preuss.
The 27 year old Lt. John C. Fremont first met the 39 year old Charles Preuss just before Christmas of 1841. Fremont was an impulsive egomaniacal young officer with a character flaw, described succinctly by author Ferol Egan: “He lacked character.” Typical of his spontaneous nature was Fremont’s hiring of the methodical and dour cartographer on the spot because the father of two was broke. But if Fremont had rescued this European urbanite from poverty, he had also sentenced Preuss to five months of intensive labor, trapped in the wilderness with a lunatic, i.e. Fremont. The straight man and his second banana had met.
“We set out on the morning of the 10th (of June, 1842)”, wrote Fremont, as his 21 men left the site of present day Kansas City, seeking to map the eastern half of the Oregon Trail. The expedition was “well armed and mounted, with the exception of eight men, who conducted as many carts, in which were packed our stores, with the baggage and instruments…” Once truly upon the sea of grass Fremont waxed poetic. “Everywhere the rose is met with…It is scattered over the prairies in small bouquets, and, when glittering in the dews and waving in the pleasant breeze of the early morning, is the most beautiful of the prairie flowers.”
The same terrain failed to find the poet in Mr. Preuss, writing in German for his personal diary. “Eternal prairie and grass… Fremont prefers this to every other landscape. To me it is as if some one would prefer a book with blank pages to a good story….I wish I were in Washington”. And always hovering over Mr. Preuss there was the energetic and annoying commander. “There was such a hurry this morning, that Fremont became angry when my horse urinated. He whipped its tail when it had only half relieved nature.”
In Fremont’s record the expedition seems triumphant over any obstacle. “We reached the ford of the Kansas late in the afternoon of the 14th…(it) was sweeping with an angry current. The man at the helm was timid on water, and in his alarm capsized the boat…” The timid man at the helm was, of course, Preuss, who blamed his near drowning on the decision to chance the current. “It was certainly stupid of the young chief to be so foolhardy where the terrain was absolutely unknown.”
Unaccustomed to horseback, Preuss’ thighs quickly became chapped and Fremont ordered him to ride in a cart. But the Prussian was not grateful. “I have bruised my nose in this cart because of the bumpy road….I miss my wife.” A few days later Preuss insists on halting to sketch a distant cluster of trees, until the forest moved. He had spotted the expedition’s first herd of buffalo.
This became the occasion for a feast described by Fremont (“At any time of the night might be seen pieces of the most delicate and choicest meat, roasting…on sticks around the fire”) and by Preuss (“We start with the bullion which is, of course, not skimmed off. If one could eliminate the dirt it would be a delicate broth. The marrow was too raw and too fat for my taste, the ribs, likewise, too raw”) It is almost as if they are on separate picnics.
On July 10th Fremont notes, “For a short distance our road lay down the valley of the Platte, which resembled a garden in the splendor of fields of varied flowers, which filled the air with fragrance.” Meanwhile Preuss struggles to learn the art of survival from men like scout Kit Carson. “I have decided to imitate one of our hunters by keeping my shirt on my body until it falls off.” But experience eventually leads him to a happier solution. “I was lucky to engage one of the men to do my laundry.” Still, by Fort Laramie in present day Wyoming, Preuss is wearing two pairs of pants at a time “…so that one can cover the holes in the other.”
In mid August, with Preuss having mapped the south pass through the Rockies, Fremont picks a mountain almost at random and drags the party on a six day, five night exertion through snow and ice to the peak. 
The 27 year old Lt. John C. Fremont first met the 39 year old Charles Preuss just before Christmas of 1841. Fremont was an impulsive egomaniacal young officer with a character flaw, described succinctly by author Ferol Egan: “He lacked character.” Typical of his spontaneous nature was Fremont’s hiring of the methodical and dour cartographer on the spot because the father of two was broke. But if Fremont had rescued this European urbanite from poverty, he had also sentenced Preuss to five months of intensive labor, trapped in the wilderness with a lunatic, i.e. Fremont. The straight man and his second banana had met.“We set out on the morning of the 10th (of June, 1842)”, wrote Fremont, as his 21 men left the site of present day Kansas City, seeking to map the eastern half of the Oregon Trail. The expedition was “well armed and mounted, with the exception of eight men, who conducted as many carts, in which were packed our stores, with the baggage and instruments…” Once truly upon the sea of grass Fremont waxed poetic. “Everywhere the rose is met with…It is scattered over the prairies in small bouquets, and, when glittering in the dews and waving in the pleasant breeze of the early morning, is the most beautiful of the prairie flowers.”The same terrain failed to find the poet in Mr. Preuss, writing in German for his personal diary. “Eternal prairie and grass… Fremont prefers this to every other landscape. To me it is as if some one would prefer a book with blank pages to a good story….I wish I were in Washington”. And always hovering over Mr. Preuss there was the energetic and annoying commander. “There was such a hurry this morning, that Fremont became angry when my horse urinated. He whipped its tail when it had only half relieved nature.”In Fremont’s record the expedition seems triumphant over any obstacle. “We reached the ford of the Kansas late in the afternoon of the 14th…(it) was sweeping with an angry current. The man at the helm was timid on water, and in his alarm capsized the boat…” The timid man at the helm was, of course, Preuss, who blamed his near drowning on the decision to chance the current. “It was certainly stupid of the young chief to be so foolhardy where the terrain was absolutely unknown.”Unaccustomed to horseback, Preuss’ thighs quickly became chapped and Fremont ordered him to ride in a cart. But the Prussian was not grateful. “I have bruised my nose in this cart because of the bumpy road….I miss my wife.” A few days later Preuss insists on halting to sketch a distant cluster of trees, until the forest moved. He had spotted the expedition’s first herd of buffalo.This became the occasion for a feast described by Fremont (“At any time of the night might be seen pieces of the most delicate and choicest meat, roasting…on sticks around the fire”) and by Preuss (“We start with the bullion which is, of course, not skimmed off. If one could eliminate the dirt it would be a delicate broth. The marrow was too raw and too fat for my taste, the ribs, likewise, too raw”) It is almost as if they are on separate picnics.On July 10th Fremont notes, “For a short distance our road lay down the valley of the Platte, which resembled a garden in the splendor of fields of varied flowers, which filled the air with fragrance.” Meanwhile Preuss struggles to learn the art of survival from men like scout Kit Carson. “I have decided to imitate one of our hunters by keeping my shirt on my body until it falls off.” But experience eventually leads him to a happier solution. “I was lucky to engage one of the men to do my laundry.” Still, by Fort Laramie in present day Wyoming, Preuss is wearing two pairs of pants at a time “…so that one can cover the holes in the other.”In mid August, with Preuss having mapped the south pass through the Rockies, Fremont picks a mountain almost at random and drags the party on a six day, five night exertion through snow and ice to the peak. "I sprang upon the summit, and…fixing a ramrod in a crevice, unfurled the national flag to wave in the breeze where never flag waved before….We had climbed the loftiest peak of the Rocky mountains, and looked down upon the snow a thousand feet below; and, standing where never human foot had stood before, felt the exultation of first explorers.”
It was an inspiring moment, soon to be recorded in paintings and poetry, but as Preuss suspected Fremont had not climbed the highest mountain in the Rockies. He had not even climbed the highest mountain in Wyoming. But he took the time while on the summit to insist his freezing companions suffer through to a speech. And only then was Mr. Preuss allowed time to read his barometer and sketch the landscape. Then, Preuss groused to his journal, “As on the entire journey Fremont allowed me only a few minutes for my work….After about fifteen minutes we started on our return trip.” On the way back down the mountain in the dark Preuss fell and tore his only pair of pants. He began to refer to Fremont as “The Field Marshal”.
On October 10th, the expedition returned to the mouth of the Kansas River, and by the end of October Fremont and Preuss were back in Washington. In spring of 1843 Fremont’s report was released (AN EXPLORATION OF THE COUNTRY LYING BETWEEN THE MISSOURI RIVER AND THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS…), and “touched off a wave of wagon caravans filled with hopeful emigrants” heading west. Fremont became famous as “The Pathfinder”, even though all the paths he found were already found, and it was Preuss who drew the maps of them.
But Preuss’ diary would not be translated and published until the 1950’s. And only then would it become clear that John C. Fremont, long ago written off as a pompous self promoter was actually one of the funniest writers in American history. As a social commentator once observed, “Life is full of second bananas. But they are never really funny without a straight man.”
It was an inspiring moment, soon to be recorded in paintings and poetry, but as Preuss suspected Fremont had not climbed the highest mountain in the Rockies. He had not even climbed the highest mountain in Wyoming. But he took the time while on the summit to insist his freezing companions suffer through to a speech. And only then was Mr. Preuss allowed time to read his barometer and sketch the landscape. Then, Preuss groused to his journal, “As on the entire journey Fremont allowed me only a few minutes for my work….After about fifteen minutes we started on our return trip.” On the way back down the mountain in the dark Preuss fell and tore his only pair of pants. He began to refer to Fremont as “The Field Marshal”.On October 10th, the expedition returned to the mouth of the Kansas River, and by the end of October Fremont and Preuss were back in Washington. In spring of 1843 Fremont’s report was released (AN EXPLORATION OF THE COUNTRY LYING BETWEEN THE MISSOURI RIVER AND THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS…), and “touched off a wave of wagon caravans filled with hopeful emigrants” heading west. Fremont became famous as “The Pathfinder”, even though all the paths he found were already found, and it was Preuss who drew the maps of them.But Preuss’ diary would not be translated and published until the 1950’s. And only then would it become clear that John C. Fremont, long ago written off as a pompous self promoter was actually one of the funniest writers in American history. As a social commentator once observed, “Life is full of second bananas. But they are never really funny without a straight man.”- 30 -
Did the American born wife of the British commander betray his secrets to Paul Revere? Gage thought so. After his twin disasters at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, Gage complained to a fellow officer that, “I communicated my design to one person 
Every winter a low pressure zone forms off the southeast coast of Greenland. And while this it not Greenland’s fault, it still makes them a very bad neighbor. Because lows rotate counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere, this low draws bursts of warm moist southern air into the arctic and fuels one storm after another, creating a dully predictable pattern of lousy weather for Europe all winter long, a legacy from Greenland.
It is not an accident that Alfred Wegener, the scientist who first suggested what he called "Continental Drift", died on an expedition to Greenland in 1930. One of the first pieces of evidence which caused Wegener to suspect the world had not always looked as it does today, came when he compared longitude measurements from the 1820’s with those made in the first decade of the 20th century and found that, in a hundred years, Greenland had somehow moved a mile further away from Europe.
More than 80% of Greenland is covered in glacier ice several miles thick, which has compressed the land underneath to 1,000 feet below sea level. If all that ice were to melt quickly (as it appears to be doing) then a map of the largest island in the world (which Greenland is) would have to be redrawn as a string of islands.
Greenland represents the first great marketing scam in history. Norseman Erik the Red was such a violent maniac that in the year 983 he was banished from his native Iceland for three years. When he returned he told everyone about a wonderful place he had discovered over the western sea. He called his nirvana Greenland, because if he had called it “Popcicle Land" or “land frozen solid”, nobody would have followed him there.
Looking at a map, Greenland is not as big as you think. On the average map it looms like a center piece on a banquet table, as large as Africa or South America. But in fact it is about the same size as Mexico But at least we know who to blame for this particular misconception, a Belgium cartographer named Gheert Cremer. In Flemish the family name means merchant, and that was why, when, as was the custom in the Middle Ages, Gheert chose a Latin name for his professional career, he chose the Latin word for merchant; Mercator.
It was after his moved to Duisburg, in 1569, that Gheert discovered a way to transfer the great circle routes, which are the shortest travel distance between two points on the surface of a globe, to the shortest routes drawn between two points on flat sheet of paper, a straight line. The system he came up with, what is today called a Mercator Projection, compressed the distances between latitudes at the equator and lengthened those nearer the poles, allowing all the lines of longitude and latitude to cross at right angles even as the surface area they are demarking expanded and shrank. The result makes Greenland (836,000 sq. miles) appear to be the same size as the African continent (30 million sq. miles) and twice the size of China, which is actually about the same size as the United States.
Using this projection a navigator does not have to account for the curvature of the earth, the map does it for him. That makes a Mercator Projection a true tool, like a ruler or a hammer. And that makes what the local Catholic Church officials did to Gheert in the name of defending the faith an actual betrayal of that faith. Because it denied Gheert the use of God’s greatest tool - his brain.
Perhaps it is best to remember the words of one map shop owner, who wrote on his blog, “I sell this map. I don't warn people when they buy it that, like any good newspaper, it contains a few lies".
By the way, Gheert Cremer (Mercator) did something else for us. He dedicated his first collection of maps to the mythical African King of Mauretania, who, according to legend, built the first celestial globe to show the positions of the stars and thus balanced the whole world on his shoulders. Today we refer to all collections of maps by the name of that king; Atlas.
