Peak, 13,570 feet in
height. "We mounted the barometer in the snow of the summit,"
Fremont wrote, "and fixing a ramrod in the crevice, unfurled the
national flag where never flag waved before.... While we were
sitting on the rock a solitary bumble-bee came winging its flight
from the eastern valley, and lit on the knee of one of the men."
They run a canon in the Platte, singing a Canadian boat-song for all
the peril.... Their boat is whirled over, food, ammunition, and
valuable records lost. Climbing up and out of the canon, they admire
the scenery in spite of their forlornity ... cacti and bare feet,
hunger and thirst ... but astronomical and barometrical observations
and drawings are made, botanical specimens collected, and a mass of
information, making the report of this expedition[19] what has been
called the most enduring monument of Fremont's fame. The report was
hailed in England as well as the United States, and was followed by
an increase of the wagon-trains across the mountains via the South
Pass.

[Footnote 19: Fremont's Oregon and California. (1849.)]

The first expedition was absent some six months. Fremont's Peak
marks the western point of that journey.

The next order from the Government sent Fremont, in the spring of
1843, to begin exploring where he had left off in 1842; to connect
his survey with that of Commodore Wilkes on the Pacific coast. Kit
Carson was again his guide; many of the previous expedition
enlisted, 32 men in all. Across the forks of the Kansas the route
lay west of Fort Laramie, through the Medicine Butte Pass and the
South Pass to the northern end of Great Salt Lake. Fremont's report
of this region led the Mormons to settle at Salt Lake afterward,
believing they would be in Mexican territory. The record of this
expedition, like the preceding one, is a story of fearful suffering
and heroic endurance. It is given in detail in Fremont's "Memoirs,"
and Benton's "Thirty Years in the Senate." Deep snows on the
mountains, no sign of the Buena Ventura River, Indians refusing to
guide such a foolhardy venture; "skeleton men leading skeleton
horses;" the descent into the Sacramento Valley at last, and the
arrival at Fort Vancouver, November 1843, gives but a glimpse of the
heroism of this second expedition. The suffering endured in reaching
the coast was as nothing to that of the return through the great
valley between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, looking for the
river they