At Fort Vancouver he found a number of Hudson’s Bay people, with whom the time passed very pleasantly. Then, again taking to his canoe, he passed down to the mouth of the river, where he found the good ship “Vancouver,” Captain Duncan; and shortly after, passing out to sea, Farnham’s travels in the great Anahuac were ended.
CHAPTER XXVI
FREMONT I
The inequality with which fame distributes her favors has always been a fertile subject for moralist and philosopher. One man may do great things, and yet through innate modesty, or ill fortune of some sort, may make no impression on the popular imagination; so that his deeds are soon forgotten. Another, by a series of fortunately narrated adventures of relatively much less difficulty and danger, may acquire the name of having accomplished great things. Zebulon M. Pike, the explorer, was a man of the first kind. John C. Fremont, commonly spoken of as the Pathfinder, and by many people believed to have been the discoverer of the Rocky Mountains, belonged to the second class. The work that Fremont did was good work, but it was not great. He was an army officer, sent out to survey routes across the continent; and he did his duty, and did it well; but he did not discover the Rocky Mountains, nor did he discover gold in California, as often supposed. He passed over routes already well known to the men of the plains and the mountains, and discovered little that was new, except the approximate location of many points. Nevertheless, in his two expeditions, which cover the years 1842 and 1843, and 1844, he traversed ten thousand miles of wilderness, between the Missouri River and the shores of the Pacific; and he connected the surveys of the State of Missouri with those made by the Wilkes expedition at the mouth of the Columbia. This involved much labor and hardship, and was of high value at the time, but it is not to be compared with the work done by Lewis and Clark, and Pike; and the fact that Fremont gained great fame while his predecessors seemed until recently to be almost forgotten, seems unjust.
Fremont’s first expedition went only as far as the Rocky Mountains, terminating at the South Pass and Fremont’s Peak. The second, which reached those mountains by another route, crossed them at the South Pass, and proceeded West to the Oregon River—the Columbia—and northern California.
The story of these two journeys is embodied in a report addressed to the Chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, and published in Washington in 1845.
Although a formal report, made by an army officer, and written in the ordinary style of an itinerary of the daily march, yet Fremont’s account of his travels is told with much vividness; and quite apart from the interest which attaches to it as a description of the still unexplored West, it attracts by its graphic style. The accounts of the hunting, encounters with Indians, and mountain climbing are spirited; and the descriptions of wild scenery show real feeling.
MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN C. FREMONT.