Little of the eventful occurred in the long journey across Kansas to Fort Laramie, and so at last they arrived at the South Pass, having met no Indians at all, although they had feared the Sioux. Frémont rode across the gentle summit so long known to the fur traders, climbed the mountain that was later named for him, and returned to Fort Laramie in September, 1842. Thus ended his first expedition, which began his reputation as a “pathfinder.” Let him who has followed the travels of Kit Carson in the trapping trade state who was the real finder of the paths.
After the first Frémont expedition, Carson returned to Bent’s Fort, and in February of 1843 married the young Mexican woman who remained his faithful companion throughout his life. Carson was sent with a message to Governor Armijo with a warning for the latter, but one hundred of the Mexicans connected with Armijo’s wagon train were killed by the Texans on the historic wagon road up the Arkansas River; we being thus now in touch with the strong and warlike population that, led by Houston, Travis, Fannin, Crockett, had been fighting the Spanish arms to the southward of Carson’s hunting grounds.
Up to this time Kit Carson had been more savage than civilized. He had never cast a vote for any office. He had lived on the product of his rifle. He had learned the habits of the wild men and wild animals of the West. Yet he seems to have gained something of that forcefulness and self-confidence which sooner or later is bound to impress itself upon others; for on May twenty-ninth of 1843 we find Frémont again sending for him, and asking his services as guide for his second expedition.
This time it was Frémont’s purpose to connect his last year’s work with the Pacific Coast surveys which had been begun by Wilkes. All know how Frémont exceeded his orders, how his wife pluckily held back from him the knowledge of his recall, and how this transcontinental expedition, by no means the first, though one of the most widely acclaimed, made its way over grounds new to Frémont but old to Carson. The first part of the journey was among the old trapping grounds along the North Fork of the Platte and on the Sweetwater, thence to Salt Lake—all points fully known to the fur trade many years before. The journey thence ran to Fort Hall and along the perfectly determined trail northwest to the Columbia River. Frémont then pushed on to Tlamath Lake, Oregon, heading thence for California.
This country between the Tlamath Lake and the Sacramento valley was new even to Carson. Everybody supposed[[31]] that there was a great river, known as the Buena Ventura, which rose on the west side of the Rocky Mountains at a point directly opposite the headwaters of the Arkansas, and flowed westward directly into the Pacific ocean. The little fact of the Sierra Nevada mountain range was wholly overlooked.
Carson honestly did his best, but he was in the hands of a leader who undertook to cross the Sierras with a pack-train where there was six feet of snow, and with a party the total number of which counted only two men that had ever before worn snowshoes in all their lives! Never was there poorer mountaineering or worse leadership than this. But it was not Kit Carson that was responsible.
After very many hardships, the expedition worked to the south and southeast of the Tlamath country, and got down near to what is now known as Pyramid Lake. Then they started across for the Sacramento, not having discovered the fabled Buena Ventura. Carson, quiet, not boasting, openly confessing his ignorance of a country he had never seen, none the less in these hard conditions proved serviceable as a guide. He pushed on ahead, and from a peak of the Sierras got a glimpse of the Coast Range. He had not seen this Coast Range chain for seventeen years, but now he noted two little mountains that seemed familiar to him. He told his leader that if only they could win across the Sierras, they would presently be in a country of warmth and plenty.
The men by that time were eating their saddle leathers, the mules were eating each other’s tails. It was a starving, freezing time, this foolish bit of mountain work, such as in all his trapping experience Carson never saw equalled. Yet at last they did reach Sutter’s Fort, on March sixth, 1844, two thousand miles from Fort Hall. Some of the men were physically ruined and mentally deranged from their sufferings. It was military and not mountain leadership that was responsible for all this.
But our continually traveling man, this little man, Kit Carson, was not to have any rest even in the pleasant valley of the Sacramento. We find the expedition soon starting East again, now by way of the San José valley, over the Sierras to the Mojave River, country long known to the traveling trappers. Here Carson and his friend Godey conducted a little enterprise of their own, undertaken in sheer knight-errantry, in behalf of a party of Mexicans that had been nearly annihilated by the Indians. These two men rode a hundred miles in thirty hours, and alone attacked a large camp of Indians, killing two of them and stampeding the remainder.
The Frémont party arrived at Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas July second, 1844. They had traveled somewhere between thirty-five hundred and four thousand miles, had circumnavigated the mysterious “Great Desert,” and for eight months had never been out of sight of ice and snow. Frémont was able to report upon the great Columbia River, and he and his contemporaries did not hesitate to extol the value of Oregon as a gateway of the Asiatic trade—a line of commerce which for half a century did little to establish the truth of their prophecy.