Frémont, the Pathfinder—Ownership of the Colorado—The Road of the Gold Seekers—First United States Military Post, 1849—Steam Navigation—Captain Johnson Goes to the Head of Black Canyon.
The great Western wilderness was now no longer “unknown” to white men. By the year 1840 the American had traversed it throughout, excepting the canyons of the Colorado, which yet remained, at least below the mouth of Grand River, almost as much of a problem as before the fur trade was born. Like some antediluvian monster the wild torrent stretched a foaming barrier miles on miles from the mountains of the north to the seas of the south, fortified in a rock-bound lair, roaring defiance at conquistadore, padre, and trapper alike.
Kaibab Pai Ute Boys Playing a Game of Wolf and Deer.
Photograph by J.K. HILLERS, U.S. Colo. Riv. Exp.
Till now the trappers and fur companies had been the chief travellers through this strange, weird land, but as the fourth decade of the century fairly opens, a new kind of pioneer appears suddenly on the field; a pioneer with motives totally different from those of the preceding explorers. Proselyting or profit had been heretofore the main spurs to ambition, but the commanding figure which we now observe scanning, from the majestic heights of the Wind River range, the labyrinthian maze of unlocated, unrecorded mountains, valleys, rivers, and canyons, rolling far and away to the surf of the Pacific, is imbued with a broader purpose. His mission is to know. The immediately previous elements drifted across the scene like rifle-smoke on the morning breeze, making no more impression on the world’s knowledge. They recorded little, and, so far as information was concerned, they might almost as well never have set foot in the wilderness. But the new man records everything: the wind, the cold, the clouds, the trees, the grass, the mice, the men, the worms, the birds, etc., to the end of his time and his ability. He is the real explorer, the advance guard of those many expeditions which followed and whose labours form the fourth division of our subject. Frémont is the name, since that time called “Pathfinder,” though, of course, the paths he followed had often before been travelled by the redoubtable trapper, whose knowledge, like that of the native, was personal only. Indeed, he was guided in his journeys by several men now quite as famous as himself—Kit Carson, Fitzpatrick, Walker, and Godey. But the field was still new to the world and to science. Quite appropriately, one of the highest peaks from which the Colorado draws its first waters, is now distinguished by the name of the earliest scientific observer to enter its basin. Frémont came up the North Platte and the Sweetwater branch, crossing (1842) from that stream by the South Pass thirty-four years after Andrew Henry had first traversed it, over to the headwaters of the Colorado. The ascent to South Pass is very gradual, and there is no gorge or defile. The total width is about twenty miles. A day or two later Frémont climbed out of the valley on the flank of the Wind River Mountains. “We had reached a very elevated point,” he says; “and in the valley below and among the hills were a number of lakes at different levels; some two or three hundred feet above others, with which they communicated by foaming torrents. Even to our great height the roar of the cataracts came up, and we could see them leaping down in lines of snowy foam.” Thus are the rills and the rivulets from the summits collected in these beautiful alpine lakes to give birth to the Colorado in white cascades, typical, at the very fountainhead, of the turbulence of the waters which have rent for themselves a trough of rock to the gulf.[[1]] Springing from these clear pools and seething falls, shadowed by sombre pines and granite crags, its course is run through plunging rapids to the final assault on the sea, where wide sand-barrens and desolation prevail. Frémont understood this from his guides and says: “Lower down, from Brown’s Hole to the southward, the river runs through lofty chasms, walled in by precipices of red rock.” The descent
“of the Colorado is but little known, and that little derived from vague report. Three hundred miles of its lower part, as it approaches the Gulf of California, is reported to be smooth and tranquil; but its upper part is manifestly broken into many falls and rapids. From many descriptions of trappers it is probable that in its foaming course among its lofty precipices, it presents many scenes of wild grandeur; and though offering many temptations, and often discussed, no trappers have yet been found bold enough to undertake a voyage which has so certain a prospect of fatal termination.”
[1] These mountains, as the glacial accumulations began to permanently diminish, must have annually sent a long-continued huge flood of water down the rivers heading there.
