PROBABLY there was no happier young man in the coun-
try on May 2, 1842, than John C. Frémont. We can
imagine him taking leave of his wife of six months in
the Benton home; kissing Mrs. Benton; receiving some pomp-
ous, fatherly admonitions from the Senator; and, spruce in his
blue and gold uniform, running down the steps in the warm
spring sunshine to the carriage that was to take him to the rail-
way station. He was but twenty-nine years old. Yet he was at
last in full command of his own expedition, with a long summer
of outdoor life and adventure ahead of him, and an opportunity
to achieve new distinction as an explorer. The poor half-orphan
of the Charleston streets, the youth brought into the backdoor
of the Army by Poinsett's influence, had achieved a position
that any West Pointer might envy: the son-in-law of Senator
Benton, the husband of the most charming girl in the capital,
the successor of the famous Nicollet.

Could he have foreseen what a pleasant and profitable expe-
dition lay before him, his feeling of elation would have been
heightened. Frémont within the next decade was to pass
through harrowing physical hardship, but this first expedition
included few days that he could not remember with pleasure.
It was a summer's tour in the kindliest of weather. It was not
too ambitious; going only as far as the South Pass and Wind
River Mountains, he penetrated no dangerous country. Yet it
was sufficiently full of contacts with Indians, buffalo, and
frontiersmen, of adventures on plain, mountain precipice, and
river rapids. At the end he was to receive not only the con-
gratulations of Lieutenant-Colonel Abert and Senator Benton,

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