He appointed Kit Carson in charge of the camp, and up the back trail he sent a note for Thomas Fitzpatrick, instructing him to drop the carts at Dr. Whitman’s, and to come on to The Dalles with pack-saddles. Kit Carson also was instructed to be making pack-saddles.
All this was very interesting.
“Do you think we’ll go back by the same trail we came out, Kit?” queried Oliver.
“Wall, I dunno,” mused Kit Carson. “But I reckon not. That’s not Frémont way. We found the trail out hyar already made, an’ nothing left for us to do but to follow along an’ calkilate figgers. So the government at Washington’ll know all about the Oregon Trail an’ about the lake, too; an’ it won’t be like Frémont to take the back track. He prefers the new to the old. Once or twice he’s spoken of going back by the north, around the head o’ the Missouri, an’ down. But these hyar pack-saddles mean a new trail somewheres.”
The Reverend Mr. Perkins had suggested to the lieutenant that he could reach Washington quickest and easiest by chartering a small brig, which was anchored in the river below Fort Vancouver, and sailing down the coast to the Isthmus of Panama, there to cross and charter another vessel for the United States. Consequently, with this in prospect, and with the return by way of the sources of the Missouri in prospect, the future looked bright. Besides——
“Or else,” remarked Kit, “thar’s the southern trail, to find that Buenaventura River emptying from the desert into the ocean, and to strike the Spanish Trail for the mountains an’ the States. The lieutenant has been mightily interested in the Buenaventura. He’s talked considerable about it.”
Here was the third route.
The lieutenant returned on the afternoon of the eighteenth. At once was it known that he had decided for the southern trail, into the unexplored, where awaited the fabled Buenaventura.
According to the lieutenant, and to Kit Carson, and all, this was a country well-nigh unexplored, this country south, lying between the Wasatch Range of the Great Salty Lake on the east and the Sierra Nevada Range bordering California on the west. All accounts agreed that it was a great basin, of sandy, salty, sagy bare-rock desert broken by sudden peaks and ridges. In it Lieutenant Frémont anticipated finding strange peoples and wild valleys and curious waters.
First to be encountered, upon the march down from the Columbia of the north, was a lake called Tlamath or Klamet or Klamath Lake, which in the spring was a real lake, but which in the summer and the fall was only a green meadow. This lake was at the head of the Rivière des Chutes or Falls River, which from it flowed north for the Columbia. From the neighborhood of the lake the Sacramento River of California flowed south, and the Tlamath River flowed west to the ocean. Moreover, the Tlamath Indians, living at the lake, were said to be treacherous and hard fighting.