Robert Lee Murphy

On August 7, 2025, I watched a very disappointing rebroadcast of a docudrama on the History Channel. The Men Who Built America: Frontiersmen originally appeared in 2018, but I had not seen the show before.

The program purports to explain how John Frémont and Kit Carson were instrumental in taking California away from Mexico in the 1840s to fulfill the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The History Channel presentation, however, is flawed with numerous inaccuracies.

There is no proof that Frémont had secret orders from President James K. Polk to invoke insurrection in California. Frémont did not participate in the capture of Sonoma which resulted in the creation of the short-lived Bear Flag Republic. Carson did not travel the Sonoran Desert alone when he was dispatched from California to carry word of the “capture” of California to Washington, DC. Stephen Watts Kearny was a brigadier general not a colonel. Kearny’s Army of the West was a unit of mounted dragoons (predecessors to cavalry) not infantry. The Battle of San Pasqual was between the US dragoons and Mexican lancers. It was a cavalry battle not an infantry engagement. Carson did not make the hazardous trip alone to San Diego following the Battle of San Pasqual with Kearny’s request for reinforcements. Commodore Robert Stockton (for whom that city is named) is not mentioned even though he was as significant a player as Kearny and Frémont. I know movies and television shows must condense issues to fit within limited screening time, but this episode was particularly bad in its egregious misrepresentations. The historians and professors who commented “expertly” during the program surprised me that they were not better informed about the facts.

If you want to know what really happened, read my recently published historical novel, Bear Flag Revolt. Yes, it is a fictionalized version, but the historical personages and events are accurately described. Frémont and Carson were truly instrumental in taking California away from Mexico. You will learn more from my book about how and what they accomplished than from watching the History Channel’s abysmal docudrama.