By Phil Roberts
It was a cold, miserable day in January 1905, in Washington, D.C. , and a rising young army officer was marrying the daughter of one of the most influential members of the Senate. It was the social event of the year in the nation’s capital and wedding guests included President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt.
John J. Pershing, captain in the U. S. Army, was the groom. The bride was Frances Warren, daughter of Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming.
Pershing, the oldest son of a railroad section foreman, started his army career after several years of teaching school in his native Missouri. Admitted to West Point when he was 22 years old, he became a second lieutenant assigned to duty in the Southwest when he was graduated in 1886. He participated in the campaign against the Lakota culminating in the Wounded Knee massacre.
The next year he was appointed professor of military science at the University of Nebraska. After service in Montana, West Point and Cuba during the Spanish American War, he was promoted to captain and sent to the Philippines in 1901. His first national prominence came after he commanded the troops who defeated the Moros in fierce hand-to-hand combat in 1902.
He was on the general staff throughout 1903 in Washington, D.C., and on December 9, he met the daughter of Senator Warren at a dance at Fort Meyer, Virginia. They saw each other frequently throughout the next year. Even though Pershing was transferred to Oklahoma and Colorado Springs in 1904, he continued to visit Frances Warren. She was living at home in Cheyenne that year.
On Christmas Day, 1904, they were engaged and planned to marry the next June. Pershing, however, discovered that he would be assigned duty in Japan, so they chose to marry in January, a month after their engagement.
Snow was falling the morning of the 26th of January in Washington. By noon a full-scale blizzard was underway but the wedding at the Church of the Epiphany went on despite the storm. More than 500 guests attended, and the U.S. Senate adjourned so that the senators could go to the wedding of the daughter of one of their most influential members.
After the wedding, the couple visited Cheyenne for a few days before they were to leave together for Japan.
The Cheyenne Daily Leader reported on the Pershing visit less than two weeks after the wedding: “Cheyenne always does things well, and when Captain and Mrs. Pershing arrived from Washington, where honors have been lavishly showered upon them, where the winsome bride, Senator Warren’s accomplished daughter, has been feted and given all manner of prenuptial social entertainments by the President and Mrs. Roosevelt, the Cabinet, and other social leaders in Washington, there was a desire to do something worthy of the occasion.”
A “lavish reception” was held for the couple and a combination of the leaders of “Cheyenne society” and Fort D. A. Russell officers attended the affair. Governor B. B. Brooks and his wife and former governor Dr. Amos Barber were among the guests. Several days later the Pershings left for Japan.
Pershing was never stationed at Cheyenne, but while he was on duty out of the country, Mrs. Pershing was given quarters at Fort D. A. Russell. She rarely stayed there, preferring to live at the Warren home. Pershing and his family, however, frequently were visitors in Cheyenne during the next 10 years.
The fire at the Presidio in San Francisco in August of 1915, took the lives of Pershing’s wife and three of his four children. Pershing, by then a general, was on border patrol in Mexico. The funerals and burial were held in Cheyenne.
General Pershing went on to command the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I and become General of the Army, the highest rank possible in the American military service. He returned to Cheyenne for a visit in 1919 and a parade for the “commander-in-chief of the allied armies” was held in his honor.
He died July 15, 1948, at the age of 87, in the nation’s capital, the city where he married Frances Warren some 43 years earlier. The ‘commander-in-chief of the allied armies” in the next war, General Dwight D. Eisenhower attended the funeral and interment at Arlington National Cemetery.