the forethought, supplies, there was
an India-rubber boat. This was ordered to be made ready for a trip
to the island early the following day. No doubt our readers will be
pleased to enjoy Colonel Fremont's account of this lake, its scenery
and characteristics. We insert therefore as much thereof as our space
will admit. It was the twenty-first day of August 1843 that the little
party reached Bear River, which, as has already appeared in another,
part of this work, was the principal tributary of the Great Salt Lake.
At this point of Colonel Fremont's narrative, he says: "We were now
entering a region which, for us, possessed a strange and extraordinary
interest. We were upon the waters of the famous lake which forms
a salient point among the remarkable geographical features of the
country, and around which the vague and superstitious accounts of
the trappers had thrown a delightful obscurity, which we anticipated
pleasure in dispelling, but which, in the meantime, left a crowded
field for the exercise of our imagination.

"In our occasional conversations with the few old hunters who had
visited the region, it had been a subject of frequent speculation;
and the wonders which they related were not the less agreeable because
they were highly exaggerated and impossible.

"Hitherto this lake had been seen only by trappers, who were wandering
through the country in search of new beaver streams, caring very
little for geography; its islands had never been visited; and none
were to be found who had entirely made the circuit of its shores;
and no instrumental observations, or geographical survey of any
description, had ever been made anywhere in the neighboring region. It
was generally supposed that it had no visible outlet; but, among the
trappers, including those in my own camp, were many who believed that
somewhere on its surface was a terrible whirlpool, through which
its waters found their way to the ocean by some subterranean
communication. All these things had made a frequent subject of
discussion in our desultory conversations around the fires at night;
and my own mind had become tolerably well filled with their indefinite
pictures, and insensibly colored with their romantic descriptions,
which, in the pleasure of excitement, I was well disposed to believe,
and half expected to realize.

"'In about six miles' travel from our encampment, we reached one of
the points in our journey to which we had always looked forward