[X]
FRÉMONT CALLS AGAIN
Thus into that post of Fort Laramie which they outward-bound had left on July 21, now on August 31 they inward-bound rode again, triumphant. Nothing in particular had occurred here; ’twas they who brought the main news—of a South Pass surveyed and a highest peak christened and a Platte River boldly penetrated.
“And all we did was to wind an old chronometer!” complained Randolph, disgustedly. “But I suppose we had to.”
The day after the arrival at the fort the Taos men, including Kit Carson and Lucien Maxwell, started for home, southward; the Frémont party were to continue on, eastward, down the Platte, by the Oregon Trail, for Missouri; but at the parting it was understood that the next spring, after the lieutenant had made his report to the government, he was coming out with another expedition to explore along the Oregon Trail west of the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River, and that he would want Kit Carson again.
Down to old Taos rode the Carson trappers, home bent; and home they were, ere the middle of September. Taos was glad to see them and to hear their tales.
Sol Silver and his party were still out, of course, to remain until the fall fur hunt. There was the fall fur hunt for all, and the fall buffalo hunt to supply Bent’s Fort with winter meat. Then might the Carson men settle to a winter at Taos.
It proved to be a cold and snowy winter; but right in the midst of it, or about Christmas time, arrived excitement: three strangers, ragged and frost-bitten and weary, reduced almost to eating their buckskin clothing. A squad of Taos trappers brought them in from camp in the mountains.
One of the visitors was a half-breed guide from the trading post of Fort Uncompahgre, across near to the Grand River. Another was a tall, lean, roughly bearded man, with hair peculiarly marked in white and brown, deeply-set dark-blue eyes and large mouth. This was Dr. Marcus Whitman. The third was also a bearded man, broad-shouldered, light-blue eyed, with high forehead and calm mien. This was Mr. A. L. Lovejoy.
Dr. Whitman was a missionary doctor; he had been at the Green River trapper rendezvous in 1835, on his way west; and in 1836 he had led a party of missionaries including his bride and another woman (first white women to cross the Rockies, they) from the Missouri to the mission settlements of Oregon. Mr. Lovejoy had been among those American colonists who last spring, under Sub-Indian Agent Dr. White, had made the wagon-wheel tracks seen by the Frémont company, up the Platte and the Sweetwater, over the South Pass, and on.