Kansas to fall directly on to the Arkansas and survey it to its head, cross-
ing the mountains by that prong which forms the boundary between the
United States and Mexico. Continuing along the western base of the
mountains and crossing the heads of all the streams which take their rise
in that portion of the mountains, join on to your positions of 1842 on the
Colorado of the Gulf of Mexico. Thence continuing northwestwardly
across the waters of the Columbia, turn westwardly into the Flat-Head
country, and join on to Lieut. Wilkes's Survey. From that point to return
by the Oregon road, and on again reaching the mountains, diverge a little
and make a circuit of the Wind River chain, which is about eighty miles
long. This circuit would embrace within its limits the heads of the
Colorado, the Columbia, some of the heads of the Missouri proper, the
Yellowstone and the Platte.

But Frémont, responsive to the wishes of an expansionist group of
Western senators, did not tamely return from the Columbia River
by the Oregon Trail. Instead, with both political and geographical
motives, he boldly proceeded southward, mapped an unknown ter-
rain, and by a reckless winter passage of the Sierras entered Alta
California, ultimately coming back by a route of his own. His report
on this second journey created a sensation, and was circulated in
uncounted thousands of copies both as a Congressional document
and as a book issued by various publishers.

Doubtless it is because of the wide currency of Frémont's Report
of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year
1842, and to Oregon and North California in 1843-44, as the book
combining his accounts of his first two Far Western tours was called,
that his graphic record of his journeys has found no modern re-
publication. He made five trans-Missouri expeditions in all. Of the
first two he wrote official reports; the third he described in full
in his Memoirs of My Life ( 1886); the fourth and fifth he left with-
out record, though S. N. Carvalho has given us a graphic narrative
of the last. All editions of the reports have become somewhat dif-
ficult to obtain, and the Memoirs are rarely found. The time seemed
ripe for a volume which would combine the reports, the relevant
material in the Memoirs, and the important description of the Great
Basin in Frémont's Geographical Memoir accompanying the Fré-
mont-Preuss map of that region, in one consecutive record of his
explorations. This record will, it is hoped, be as interesting to the
general reader as it is valuable to the student.

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