were then covered with ashes and tallow, and the boat left exposed to the sun for the greater part of one day, which was sufficient to dry and contract the skin, and make the whole work solid and strong. It had a rounded bow, was eight feet long and five broad, and drew with four men about four inches water. On the morning of the 15th we embarked in our hide boat, Mr. Preuss and myself, with two men. We dragged her over the sands for three or four miles, and then left her on a bar, and abandoned all further attempts to navigate this river. The names given by the Indians are always remarkably appropriate; and certainly none was ever more so than that which they have given to this stream"The Nebraska, or Shallow river." Walking steadily the remainder of the day, a litle before dark we overtook our people at their remaining camp, about twenty-one miles below the junction. The next morning we crossed the Platte, and continued our way down the river bottom on the left bank, where we found an excellent, plainly beaten road.

I had sent forward C. Lambert, with two men, to Bellevue, with direc tions to ask from Mr. P. Sarpy, the gentleman in charge of the American Company's establishment at that place, the aid of his carpenters in constructing a boat, in which I proposed to descend the Missouri. On the afternoon of the 27th we met one of the men, who had been dispatched by Mr. Sarpy with a welcome supply of provisions and a very kind note, which gave us the very gratifying intelligence that our boat was in rapid progress. On the evening of the 30th we encamped in an almost impenetrable undergrowth on the left bank of the Platte, in the point of land at its confluence with the Missouri-315 miles, according to our reckoning, from the junction of the forks, and 250 from Fort Laramie.

I rose next morning long before daylight, and heard with a feeling of pleasure the tinkling of cow-bells at the settlements on the opposite side of the Missouri. Early in the day we reached Mr. Sarpy's residence; and, in the security and comfort of his hospitable mansion, felt the pleas ure of being within the pale of civilization. We found our boat on the stocks; a few days sufficed to complete her; and, in the afternoon of the 4th, we embarked on the Missouri. All our equipage-horses, carts, and the materiel of the camp-had been sold at public auction at Bellevue. The strength of my party enabled me to man the boat with ten oars, relieved every hour; and we descended rapidly. Early on the morning of the 10th, we halted to make some astronomical observations at the mouth of the Kansas, exactly four months since we had left the trading-post of Mr. Cyprian Chouteau, on the same river, ten miles above. On our descent to this place, we had employed ourselves in surveying and sketching the Missouri, making astronomical observations regularly at night and at mid-day, whenever the weather permitted. These operations on the river were continued until our arrival at the city of St. Louis, Missouri, on the 17th of October.

The London Athenæum, of March, 1844, commences a review of the foregoing report in the following complimentary strain:

"The government of the United States did well when, in furtherance

of a resolution to survey the road across the Great Western Prairie and the Rocky Mountains to the Oregon territory, it selected Lieutenant Frémont for the execution of the work. We have rarely met with a production so perfect in its kind as the unpretending pamphlet containing this report. The narrative, clear, full, and lively, occupies only seventysix pages, to which are appended one hundred and thirty pages, filled with the results of botanical researches, and of astronomical and meteorological observations. What a contrast does this present to the voluminous emptiness and conceited rhodomontade so often brought forth by our costly expeditions. The country gone over by Lieutenant Frémont is certainly not the most interesting in the world, nor is it quite new. Yet he is evidently not the man to travel two thousand miles without observing much which is worthy of being recorded, or to write a page which is likely to prove tedious in the reading. His points of view are so well chosen, his delineation has so much truth and spirit, and his general remarks are so accurate and comprehensive, that under his guidance we find the far-west prairies nearly as fresh and tempting as the most favored Arcadian scenes, the hallowed groves of which were never trodden by the foot of a squatting emigrant or fur trader."

JOURNEY FROM MISSOURI TO OREGON.

Important as had been the results of Frémont's first expedition, he pined for others which were still greater and more extensive. He desired to complete his survey across the continent, not only in order to examine the line of travel between the state of Missouri and the tidewater region of the Columbia River, but also to explore that vast and then unknown region, which lay between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. This immense tract comprised the whole western slope of the continent. It contained more than seven hundred miles square; and the journey proposed was one of the boldest and most dangerous ever undertaken by an emmissary either of commerce, discovery, or science.

Lieutenant Frémont asked and obtained orders from the department at Washington to undertake this journey. His instructions directed him only to advance as far as the tide-water region of the Columbia River. He resolved to extend his researches into the untraveled solitudes of the western limits of the continent. But all his aspirations and triumphs were nearly defeated by the jealousy of the government, and the meanness of the imbecile officials who at that time, but happily only for a very short period, occupied the posts of influence at Washington. James M Porter, of Pennsylvania, was then secretary of war. Scarcely had Frémont reached the frontier of Missouri, when orders arrived at St. Louis, countermanding the expedition. The alleged ground of complaint was that he had prepared himself with a military equipment, which the pacific nature of his journey did not require. It was specially charged

as a heinous offense, that he had procured a small mountain howitze from the arsenal at St. Louis, in addition to his other fire-arms.

But the heroic resolution of the fair daughter of Missouri, his wife defeated the ignoble aims of those who would have stopped the young adventurer in his career of toil and glory. After her husband's depart ure from St. Louis, the letters intended for him were opened by her at his request, and such as needed immediate attention were sent after him. She perused the communication which contained the unwelcome news from Washington, and resolved to detain it, and Frémont knew nothing of the contents, until his return more than a year afterward.

In May, 1843, Lieutenant Frémont commenced this journey, having twenty-five men under him, and in November he reached the tide-water region of the Columbia. He carefully explored the whole intervening region, and had then already completed the service ordered by the gov ernment. He might have immediately returned home, and have chosen for that purpose the most convenient and secure road. But he had other and nobler aims in view. When at Fort Vancouver, a guest of Dr. McLaughlin, governor of the British Hudson Bay Fur Company, he obtained some information in reference to his proposed route, which was to cross diagonally that great unknown region, making a line from the Lower Columbia to the Upper Colorado, on the Gulf of California. The geography of this vast region was then entirely unknown. Conjectures existed as to the probable features of its grand outlines, but even these he discovered afterward to have been erroneous. A large river termed the Buena Ventura, was supposed to flow from the base of the Rocky Mountains to the Bay of San Francisco. But no such body of water existed; and the bold adventurer suffered many hardships from the absence of those resources which the existence of a great river along his route would have procured. As he journeyed along he encountered deep snows, and the most rigorous weather. Hostile Indians hovered around his path. He sometimes journeyed near dangerous precipices, and over rugged mountains. Occasionally from great eminences covered with a deep mantle of perpetual snow, he looked down upon verdant vales beneath, shut out by the high barriers of nature from all the rest of the world. One mule packed with a valuable burden of botanical collections, slid off from the verge of a cliff half a mile in hight, and was dashed to pieces in the far-off ravine below. No rewards could induce the Indians to venture into these perilous solitudes as guides to the travelers. Soon men and horses began to sink beneath the unparalleled sufferings of the journey. The slow and mournful procession of feeble starving skeletons crawled like a disabled serpent along the dangerous hights of their moun tain way in the dead of winter, surrounded by the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada, and by all the awful incidents of a march among the rudest fortresses and solitudes of nature. But no danger or suffering appalled the resolute spirit of the bold leader of the expedition. After a journey of two thousand miles, which for intrepid endurance, unconquerable determination, and skillful management, is not surpassed by the achievement of any conqueror, Frémont and his associates arrived at Sutter's Settlement in the valley of the Sacramento, and there rested and recruited from the sufferings which they had endured.

Frémont, after a short interval of repose, then resumed his journey to the still farther south, and explored the valley of San Joaquin. Thence, crossing the mountains through a gap, he skirted the Great Basin. As he journeyed through this comparatively unknown world, he made rich collections in various branches of science. All the great features of the western slope of our continent were then scrutinized. The Great Salt Lake, the Utah Lake, the Little Salt Lake, the present retreat and future empire of the Latter Day Saints, and the mountains of the Sierra Ne vada, from whose bowels, till then unviolated, the emigrant has torn un counted millions of gold treasure-all these were examined and explored by this expedition. During eleven months they were never out of sight of ice and snow. At length, having accomplished all that he desired, Frémont returned to his home, after an absence of a year, bearing the rich fruits of his toils, dangers, and heroism, in an enlarged and satisfactory acquaintance with the resources of those vast and unappropriated realms and contribution in botany, mineralogy, geology; together with valuable investigations in meteorology, geography climatology, and other departments of science, as will fully appear from extracts from his own narrative in the following pages.

To Col. J. J. Abert, Chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers: SIR :-In pursuance of your instructions, to connect the reconnoisance of 1842, which I had the honor to conduct, with the surveys of Commander Wilkes on the coast of the Pacific ocean, so as to give a connected survey of the interior of our continent, I proceeded to the Great West early in the spring of 1843, and arrived, on the 17th of May, at the little town of Kansas, on the Missouri frontier, near the junction of the Kansas river with the Missouri river, where I was detained near two weeks in completing the necessary preparations for the extended explorations which my instructions contemplated.

My party consisted principally of Creole and Canadian French, and Americans, amounting in all to thirty-nine men; among whom you will recognize several of those who were with me in my first expedition, and who have been favorably brought to your notice in a former report. Mr. Thomas Fitzpatrick, whom many years of hardship and exposure in the western territories, had rendered familiar with a portion of the country it was designed to explore, had been selected as our guide; and Mr. Charles Preuss, who had been my assistant in a previous journey, was again associated with me in the same capacity, on the present expedition. Agreeably to your directions, Mr. Theodore Talbot, of Washington city, had been attached to the party, with a view to advancement in his profession; and at St. Louis I had been joined by Mr. Frederick Dwight, a gentleman of Springfield, Massachusetts, who availed himself of our overland journey to visit the Sandwich Islands and China, by way of Fort Van

Jouver.

The party was generally armed with Hall's carbines, which, with a brass twelve pound howitzer, had been furnished to me from the United States Arsenal at St. Louis, agreeably to the orders of Colonel S. W. Kearney commanding the third military division. Three men were especially de

tailed for the management of this piece, under the charge of Louis Zin del, a native of Germany, who had been nineteen years a non-commision. ed officer of artillery in the Prussian army, and regularly instructed in the duties of his profession. The camp equipage and provisions were transported in twelve carts, drawn each by two mules; and a light covered wagon, mounted on good springs, had been provided for the safer carriage of instruments.

To make the exploration as useful as possible, I determined, in conformity to your general instructions, to vary the route to the Rocky Mountains from that followed in 1842. The route was then up the valley of the Great Platte river to the South Pass, in north latitude 42°; the route now determined on was up the valley of the Kansas river, to the head of the Arkansas river, and to some pass in the mountains, if any could be found, at the sources of that river.

By making this deviation from the former route, the problem of a new road to Oregon and California, in a climate more genial, might be solved; and a better knowledge obtained of an important river, and the country it drained, while the great object of the expedition would find its point of commencement at the termination of the former, which was at that great gate in the ridge of the Rocky Mountains called the South Pass, and on the lofty peak of the mountain which overlooks it, deemed the highest peak in the ridge, and from the opposite side of which four great rivers take their rise, and flow to the Pacific or the Mississippi.

Various obstacies delayed our departure until the morning of the 29th, when we commenced our long voyage; and at the close of a day, rendered disagreeably cold by incessant rain, encamped about four miles beyond the frontier, on the verge of the great prairies.

From Elm Grove, our route until the third of June was nearly the same as that described to you in 1842. Trains of wagons were almost constantly in sight; giving to the road a populous and animated appearance, although the greater portion of the emigrants were collected at the crossing, or already on their march beyond the Kansas river. Leaving at the ford the usual emigrant road to the mountains, we continued our route along the southern side of the Kansas, where we found the country much more broken than on the northern side of the river, and where our progress was much delayed by the numerous small streams, which obliged us to make frequent bridges.

We arrived on the 8th at the mouth of the Smoky-hill fork, which is the principal southern branch of the Kansas: forming here, by its junction with the Republican, or northern branch, the main Kansas river. Neither stream was fordable, and the necessity of making a raft, together with bad weather, detained us here till the morning of the 11th, when we resumed our journey along the Republican fork. By our ob servations, the junction of the streams is in lat. 39° 40′ 38", long. 96° 24' 36", and at an elevation of 926 feet above the Gulf of Mexico. For several days we continued to travel along the Republican, through a country beautifully watered with numerous streams, and handsomely timbered; and rarely an incident occurred to vary the monotonous resem blance which one day on the prairies here bears to another, and which