John Charles Fr?mont. An explorer, soldier and politician, Fr?mont earned his nickname “The Pathfinder” because of his explorations of the Pacific Northwest, California, and Nevada during the 1840s. In 1856 he became the newly formed Republican Party’s first presidential candidate running on an anti-slavery platform, losing to James Buchanan by about 500,000 votes He went on to serve as territorial governor of Arizona from 1878 to 1883. Fr?mont was born in 1813 and died in 1890.