only twenty-five companions, he turned his face once more towards the Rocky Mountains. Then began that wonderful expedition, filled with romance, achievement, daring, and suffering, in which he was lost from the world nine months, traversing three thousand five hundred miles in sight of eternal snows; in which he explored and revealed the grand features of Alta California, its great basin, the Sierra Nevada, the valleys of San Joaquin and Sacramento, exploded the fabulous Bienaventura, revealed the real El Dorado, and established the geography of the western part of this continent."

The account of the terrible passage of the Sierra Nevada in the months of February and March, is one of the most thrilling narratives ever recorded of the triumph of heroic endurance over every conceivable difficulty. The ascent was commenced on the 2d of February; the Indian guide "shook his head as he pointed to the icy pinnacles, shooting high up into the sky," and opposing an apparently insuperable barrier to further progress. After weeks of toil and suffering, subsisting upon their mules and horses, for whom it was almost impossible to procure sufficient grass and herbage to support life, the party descended the western slope of the Sierra. Two of the men had lost their reason from suffering and anxiety: one of them, Derosier, who had stayed behind for the purpose of bringing up a favorite horse of Colonel Fremont, on rejoining the party, in the words of the narrative, "came in, and sitting down by the fire, began to tell us where he had been. He imagined he had been gone several days, and thought we were still at the camp where he had left us; and we were pained to see that his mind was deranged. The times were severe when stout men lost their minds from extremity of suffering-when horses diedand when mules and horses, ready to die of starvation, were killed for food. Yet there was no murmuring or hesitation."

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"In August, 1844, Colonel Fremont was again in Washington, after an absence of sixteen months. His report put the seal to the fame of the young explorer. He was planning a third expedition while writing a history of the second; and

before its publication, in 1845, he was again on his way to the Pacific, collecting his mountain comrades, to examine in detail the Asiatic slope of the North American continent, which resulted in giving a volume of new science to the world, and California to the United States."*

The events immediately succeeding, although highly interesting, as connected with the most important particulars in the political history of the United States, are beyond our limits to record. It is sufficient to state that throughout the difficulties in which Colonel Fremont was involved, and the lengthened examination to which he was subjected before a court-martial, the sympathies of the public were generally enlisted in his behalf.

As a private citizen, he contemplated yet another survey of a southern route through the western territory to California, and we cannot sufficiently admire the ardor and self-reliance with which he entered upon the undertaking, after such fearful experience of the dangers attendant on attempting an unknown passage of the great mountain ranges which must be crossed. To resume the remarks of Mr. Lester: "Again he appeared on the far west: his old mountaineers flocked around him: and, with thirty-three men and one hundred and thirty mules, perfectly equipped, he started for the Pacific.

"On the Sierra San Juan all his mules and a third of his men perished in a more than Russian cold; and Fremont arrived on foot at Santa Fé, stripped of every thing but life. It was a moment for the last pang of despair which breaks the heart, or the moral heroism which conquers fate itself.

"The men of the wilderness knew Fremont; they refitted his expedition; he started again, pierced the country of the fierce and remorseless Apaches; met, awed, or defeated savage tribes; and in a hundred days from Sante Fé he stood on the glittering banks of the Sacramento." In the new State while he took up his abode, his popularity and prosperity have been unsurpassed.

Gallery of Illustrious Americans.