Columbus and Other Heroes of American Discovery

by N. D'Anvers

The newly-found sheet of water, which was ascertained to be the source of one branch of the Colorado of the West, was named Mountain Lake; and the instructions of the Government having now been fully carried out, it was resolved to return eastward. Before sounding the retreat, however, Fremont noticed a lofty mountain peak in the vicinity of the South Pass, and resolved to ascend it. This turned out to be a matter of considerable difficulty. First the mules were left behind, then boots and stockings were discarded, the use of the toes being absolutely necessary to the advance of the climbers.

Fremont himself was the first to reach the summit. Availing himself of a kind of comb of the mountain, he gained a point with an overhanging buttress, round which he crept, putting hands and feet in the crevices between the blocks, and often hanging over a vertical precipice several hundred feet deep, where a moment’s giddiness would have been fatal. At last he stood, to quote his own words, “on a narrow crest about three feet in width, with an inclination of about 20° N., 51° E.;” and though he did not know it then, he had reached the highest point of the great Rocky Mountain Range, 13,590 feet above the sea-level—a point still known, in honor of its discoverer, as Fremont’s Peak.

As he paused to rest, and gazed down upon the lovely view at his feet, stretching away to the shores of the Pacific, Fremont relates that a solitary bee came flying up from the eastern valley, and settled on the knee of one of the men, “A moment’s thought,” he adds, “would have made us let this solitary pioneer of the advance of civilization continue his way unharmed; but we carried out the law of this country, where all animated nature seems at war.” The bee was caught, killed, and placed among the flowers collected on the way up; and in this slight incident we read a melancholy prophecy of the fate awaiting the human inhabitants of the lands now for the first time brought within the limits of that civilization which has never yet proved itself wide enough to contain the red man and the white.

From the summit of Fremont’s Peak the explorers could see on the one side the innumerable lakes and streams among which sprang the Colorado of the Gulf of California, while on the other lay the romantic Wind River Valley, whence flows the Yellowstone branch of the Missouri; while far away on the north rose the snow-crowned heads of the Trois Tetons, the first homes of the Missouri and Columbia, with the less lofty peaks at the southern extremity of the range which witnessed the birth of the Nebraska. Of the whole scene, the most remarkable characteristic was, and is, the traces of terrible convulsions of nature. The chain is split from end to end into ridges and chasms, alternated with thin walls of rock, broken at their terminations into natural minarets and columns, producing an effect of weird, unearthly beauty peculiarly striking.

Noting, however, but the main features of a district now associated with so many scenes of adventure in the great rush of emigration westward so soon to follow, Fremont hastened back to his camp in the South Pass, and thence returned to Fort Laramie, which he reached in safety without the loss of a single man, all the prophecies as to the dangers awaiting him being unfulfilled. A few weeks later, his report was in the hands of his Government, who marked their sense of their services by at once appointing him to the command of a second expedition; this time with orders to connect the work he had already done with that of Wilkes, by examining the country between the southern half of the Rocky Mountains and the shores of the Pacific. With this end in view, Fremont, accompanied by some thirty-nine men—Canadians, Creoles, and Americans—started from Kansas, near the junction of that river with the Missouri, early in June, 1843.

Following the now well-beaten emigrant tracks for the West, the expedition reached the Rocky Mountains considerably to the south of the pass discovered on the previous trip, and near the connecting ridge between the Utah or Bear River Mountains and the Wind River chain. This ridge separated the waters flowing to the Gulf of California on the east, and those on the west which run more directly to the Pacific, from that vast inland basin of lakes with no outlet to the ocean.

Crossing the Rocky Mountains, the party entered the fertile and picturesque valley of the Bear or Utah River, the chief tributary of the Great Salt Lake, first alluded to by Baron La Hontan in 1689, but never before visited by any white man except wandering trappers, whose eyes had been blind to the wonderful nature of the phenomenon now to be examined.

Slowly descending the lovely valley, tenanted only by a few Shoshone Indians, Fremont reached the now famous Beer Springs, situated in a mountain-locked basin of mineral waters, on the 25th August. These springs burst from openings in the rocks, and give off an effervescing gas, which produces an effect of great beauty, the water rising in trembling column to a considerable height, accompanied by a subterranean noise, accounted for by the natives in many a weird legend.

Beyond the Beer Springs the cavalcade pressed on to the wild western region between them and Salt Lake inhabited by the scattered Root Indians, who live almost entirely on roots and seeds, and on the 1st September reached the junction of the Bear and Roseaux Rivers, where an india-rubber boat provided for river navigation was inflated and launched on the waters of the united streams. A little further on, however, the river, which Fremont had hoped would carry him down to the lake, itself suddenly divided into a number of shallow branches, and the land journey had to be resumed.

Through low flats, across salt marshes, or the salt incrusted beds of dried-up lakes, the weary travelers plodded. On the 6th September their perseverance was at last rewarded by reaching the summit of a kind of ridge, from which they beheld, immediately at their feet, the waters of the long-sought inland sea, stretching in silent grandeur far beyond their range of vision, and receiving in its cold and lifeless bosom all the rivers of the vast basin of Utah, except the head branches of the Colorado and Humboldt.