No beaver cuttings were found upon any of the streams. High and cold on the right continued the long tier of the Sierra Nevada mountains—sometimes white and shining, sometimes dimmed by fresh storm; blotched by snow, welted with bare ridges, brushy and bleak on the left stretched for leagues unknown the desert of the Great Basin: pent betwixt the two, southward through the mid-winter pushed the wearied Frémont and Carson men. Around about, on every hand, welled into the frosty air the signal smokes of unseen peoples.
Now on the third day, which was January 18, after leaving Pyramid Lake, the lieutenant called a council, of Kit Carson, and Fitzpatrick the Bad Hand, and the German Preuss, and Mr. Talbot the Washington young man, Alexander Godey, Baptiste Bernier, and one or two others.
“I teenk,” said Baptiste Tabeau, “Meester the Lieutenant, he would try to cross the mountains to other side, where all is warm. Kit Carson say it very warm, with much grass an’ horse an’ deer over that side. Ma foi——” and Baptiste, who always was one of the jolliest of the company, shrugged his shoulders, shiveringly. “I hope we go.”
“That snow look mighty deep, on those big mountains,” uttered Jacob the colored youth. “But I guess we gwine to freeze to deff as easy as we gwine to starve to deff. Marse Lieutenant an’ Mistuh Kit’ll get us through, though.”
The council broke up; Thomas Fitzpatrick, hastening to look after the animals, which were in his charge, made the announcement.
“We cross to the Valley of the Sacramento, boys,” he informed, passing through.
At the news a cheer rang out. Kit Carson added to the enthusiasm, that night, around the camp fires of cottonwood and sage.
“I war in the Valley o’ the Sacramento, summer o’ Twenty-nine, with Ewing Young,” he related. “We’d crossed the desert from Touse. That war my fust trapping trip, an’ it war fifteen year an’ more ago; since then I’ve travelled pretty much over all the West, hunting the beaver, but I tell you, boys, that thar country o’ the Californy coast beats all. We entered from the south, an’ followed down the San Joachin, to the Sacramento, an’ trapped that a ways; an’ the beaver an’ the otter an’ the wild hosses an’ the elk an’ the deer an’ the trees an’ the forage war something wonderful. It snows on the mountains, we heard tell, but down in the valleys it air green an’ spring-like all winter; a fat country. Thar’s whar we’re heading, to-morrow.”
“Hooray!” they cheered, again. “No more bad water and salt grass and starvation trail for us. Hooray!”
So the expedition turned west, for the towering white peaks not far.