nothing to do with the emigration movement of 1843, was an incident of it. The expedition left the Missouri River, near the junction of the Kansas, on the 29th of May, travelling just behind the emigrants as far as Soda Springs at the Great Bend of Bear River, where they turned off to Salt Lake. Having made a hasty visit to that inland sea,[1] they returned to the emigrant road, which they followed to the Dalles,[2] arriving there on the 4th of November. There Frémont left his men and animals, and took a canoe to Fort Vancouver to purchase supplies for his expedition to California, which were furnished him on the credit of the United States, the company sending the goods to the Dalles in their own boats. The emigrants ridicule Fréemont's sobriquet of 'Pathfinder.'[3]
The naturalist Audubon was skirting the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1843, in pursuit of his favorite study of ornithology; and mention is made of a German botanist named Luders, whom Frémont met on the Columbia, at a little bay below the Cascades, which was called after him Luders' Bay. The toils and dangers of this class of men occupy but little space in history, yet are none the less worthy of mention that they are not performed for gain or political preferment. If it is a brave deed to dare
- ↑ The following absurd report appeared in the St Louis Gazette: 'On the 16th of September they surveyed the Great Salt Lake, supposed to empty into the Pacific, and computed its length to be 280 miles, and its breadth 100.' Niles' Reg., lxv. 243.
- ↑ Waldo's Critiques, MS., 17; Evans' Hist. Or., MS., 273. According to Nesmith, J. G. Campbell, Ransom Clark, Chapman, and Major William Gilpin travelled with Frémont's company. Or. Pioneer Assoc., Trans., 1875, 55-6; Frémont's Rept. Explor. Ex., 107.
- ↑ This feeling is illustrated by the following extract from Nesmith's Address in Or. Pioneer Assoc., Trans., 1875, 60: 'In the eastern states I have often been asked how long it was after Frémont discovered Oregon that I emigrated there. It is true that in the year 1843 Frémont, then a lieutenant is the engineer corps, did cross the plains, and brought his party to the Dalles in the rear of our emigration. His outfit contained all the conveniences and luxuries that a government appropriation could procure, while he "roughed it" in a covered carriage, surrounded by servants paid from the public purse. He returned to the States, and was rewarded with a president nomination as the "Pathfinder." The path he found was that made by the hardy frontiersmen who preceded him to the Pacific, and who stood by their rifles and held the country against hostile Indians and British threats, without government aid or recognition until 1849, when the first government troops came to our relief.'
