Reaches Fort Vancouver
After making preparations, the party crossed over to a branch of the Columbia River. Down this stream they traveled until Fort Vancouver was reached on November 4. Here Fremont was the guest of the governor of the British Hudson Bay Company.
FREMONT'S EXPEDITION REACHING SUTTER'S FORT, CALIFORNIA
Travel in deep snow
Crossing the Sierra Nevada
November 10, on the way home, the little party started to make the circuit of the Great Basin, a vast depression beyond the east wall of the Sierra Nevada. But very soon they found deep snow on the mountains. Turning to the west at about the latitude of San Francisco, Fremont determined to cross the Sierra Nevada into the valley of the Sacramento. The river was not many miles distant.
But what miles! Up and down, up and down that snowy mountain range, which the Indians told him no man could cross in winter, with snow lying upon it as deep as the dark forest trees were high, and places where, if a man slipped off, he would fall half a mile without stopping!
In the Valley of the Sacramento
They attempted to cross without a guide, in the dead of winter. In forty days the men and the surviving horses—a woeful procession crawling along one by one, skeleton men leading skeleton horses—arrived at Sutter's Fort (Sacramento) in the beautiful valley of the Sacramento. Here genial warmth, trees in foliage, grassy ground, and flowers made a fairy contrast to the famine and freezing they had met on the mountains they had climbed.