Salt Lake." Manly took down the signed names
of this party but his diary was later lost by fire. Apparently the
cooking utensils, etc., were the same we saw twenty-two years later at
that place and thought were wreckage (see p. 255). Manly died February
5, 1903, and is buried at Merced, California.

CHAPTER VI

Fremont, the Pathfinder--Ownership of the Colorado--The Road of the
Gold Seekers--First United States Military Post, 1849--Steam
Navigation--Captain Johnson Goes to the Head of Black Canyon.

The great Western wilderness was now no longer "unknown" to white men.
By the year 1840 the American had traversed it throughout, excepting the
canyons of the Colorado, which yet remained, at least below the mouth
of Grand River, almost as much of a problem as before the fur trade
was born. Like some antediluvian monster the wild torrent stretched a
foaming barrier miles on miles from the mountains of the north to the
seas of the south, fortified in a rock-bound lair, roaring defiance at
conquistadore, padre, and trapper alike.

Till now the trappers and fur companies had been the chief travellers
through this strange, weird land, but as the fourth decade of the
century fairly opens, a new kind of pioneer appears suddenly on the
field; a pioneer with motives totally different from those of the
preceding explorers. Proselyting or profit had been heretofore the
main spurs to ambition, but the commanding figure which we now observe
scanning, from the majestic heights of the Wind River range, the
labyrinthian maze of unlocated, unrecorded mountains, valleys, rivers,
and canyons, rolling far and away to the surf of the Pacific, is imbued
with a broader purpose. His mission is to know. The immediately previous
elements drifted across the scene like rifle-smoke on the morning
breeze, making no more impression on the world's knowledge. They
recorded little, and, so far as information was concerned, they might
almost as well never have set foot in the wilderness. But the new man
records everything: the wind, the cold, the clouds, the trees, the
grass, the mice, the men, the worms, the birds, etc., to the end of
his time and his ability. He is the real explorer, the advance guard of
those many expeditions which followed and whose labours form the fourth
division of our subject. Fremont is the name, since that time called
"Pathfinder," though, of course, the paths he followed had often before
been travelled by the redoubtable t