nded into a low country to the left (afterwards
known to be the Great Basin, from which no water issues to any
sea)--skirted an enormous chain of mountain on the right, luminous
with glittering white snow--saw strange Indians, who mostly
fled--found a desert--no Buena Ventura; and death from cold and famine
staring him in the face. The failure to find the river, or tidings of
it, and the possibility of its existence seeming to be forbid by the
structure of the country, and hybernation in the inhospitable desert
being impossible, and the question being that of life and death, some
new plan of conduct became indispensable. His celestial observations
told him that he was in the latitude of the Bay of San Francisco, and
only seventy miles from it. But what miles! up and down that snowy
mountain which the Indians told him no men could cross in the
winter--which would have snow upon it as deep as the trees, and places
where people would slip off and fall half a mile at a time--a fate
which actually befell a mule, packed with the precious burden of
botanical specimens, collected along a travel of two thousand miles.
No reward could induce an Indian to become a guide in the perilous
adventure of crossing this mountain. All recoiled and fled from
the adventure. It was attempted without a guide--in the dead of
winter--accomplished in forty days--the men and surviving horses--a
woeful procession, crawling along one by one; skeleton men leading
skeleton horses--and arriving at Sutter's Settlement in the beautiful
valley of the Sacramento; and where a genial warmth, and budding
flowers, and trees in foliage, and grassy ground, and flowing streams,
and comfortable food, made a fairy contrast with the famine and
freezing they had encountered, and the lofty Sierra Nevada which they
had climbed. Here he rested and recruited; and from this point, and
by way of Monterey, the first tidings were heard of the party since
leaving Fort Vancouver.

"Another long progress to the south, skirting the western base of the
Sierra Nevada, made him acquainted with the noble valley of the San
Joaquin, counterpart to that of the Sacramento; when crossing through
a gap, and turning to the left, he skirted the Great Basin; and
by many deviations from the right line home, levied incessant
contributions to science from expanded lands, not described before. In
this eventful exploration, all the great features of the western slope
of our continent were brough