ng on the highest peak of the Rockies, he looked down into
the vast area beyond, known as the Great Basin, comprising with its
mountain ranges the whole western portion of the continent of North
America. This he determined to explore, and it was on this second
expedition that Lakes Pyramid and Tahoe, the Truckee River, etc., were
discovered.

Later, Fremont made his third western journey, that in which he
came into conflict with the Mexican officials of California, became
governor of California, and was finally placed under arrest by General
Kearny, and taken back to Washington to be tried for mutiny. The
results of that unfortunate Kearny conflict are well known.

At the official close of the dispute he made his fourth expedition
and finally his fifth, all of which are fully treated in Smucker's and
Bigelow's _Life of Fremont_.

To return now to the second expedition. In the words of Mr. Smith:

The object of the expedition was purely for the purpose of
exploring and otherwise getting scientific information about
the great territory between the Missouri frontier and the
Pacific Ocean. Emigrants were making their way westward to
the new Oregon Territory, and hunters and trappers had been
visiting portions of that region. Farther north the fur
companies had their posts and did a regular business with the
trappers and Indians. But little was known about the regions
further south, and especially the great territory between the
Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountain chains, and that little was
freely adulterated with fiction.

Great Salt Lake was supposed to be a very strange and
wonderful lake, the islands of which were covered with woods
and flowers, through which roamed all kinds of game, and whose
waters were sucked down in a great awe-inspiring whirlpool
into an underground passage under the mountains and valleys
to the distant sea. Another myth, or rather pair of myths, in
which geographers placed sufficient faith to give a place on
the maps of the time, was the great Buenaventura River, and
that semi-tropical Mary's Lake, the waters from which found
their way through the Sierra Nevadas to San Francisco Bay.
Mary's Lake was supposed to be a body of water such as a
traveler dreams about, whose clear waters were bordered by
meadows ever green, a place on whose shores he could pitch his
tent and cast aside all thought or