Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/264

 this solitary pioneer of the advance of civilization continue his way unharmed; but we carried out the law of this country, where all animated nature seems at war." The bee was caught, killed, and placed among the flowers collected on the way up; and in this slight incident we read a melancholy prophecy of the fate awaiting the human inhabitants of the lands now for the first time brought within the limits of that civilization which has never yet proved itself wide enough to contain the red man and the white.

From the summit of Fremont's Peak the explorers could see on the one side the innumerable lakes and streams among which sprang the Colorado of the Gulf of California, while on the other lay the romantic Wind River Valley, whence flows the Yellowstone branch of the Missouri; while far away on the north rose the snow-crowned heads of the Trois Tetons, the first homes of the Missouri and Columbia, with the less lofty peaks at the southern extremity of the range which witnessed the birth of the Nebraska. Of the whole scene, the most remarkable characteristic was, and is, the traces of terrible convulsions of nature. The chain is split from end to end into ridges and chasms, alternated with thin walls of rock, broken at their terminations into natural minarets and columns, producing an effect of weird, unearthly beauty peculiarly striking.

Noting, however, but the main features of a district now associated with so many scenes of adventure in the great rush of emigration westward so soon to follow, Fremont hastened back to his camp in the South Pass, and thence returned to Fort Laramie, which he reached in safety without the loss of a single man, all the prophecies as to the dangers awaiting him being unfulfilled. A few weeks later, his report was in the hands of his Government, who marked their sense of their services by at once appointing him to the command of a second expedition; this time with orders to connect the work he had already done with that of Wilkes, by examining the country between the southern half of the Rocky Mountains and the shores of the Pacific. With this end in view, Fremont, accompanied by some thirty-nine men—Canadians, Creoles, and Americans—started from Kansas, near the junction of that river with the Missouri, early in June, 1843.

Following the now well-beaten emigrant tracks for the West, the expedition reached the Rocky Mountains considerably to the south of the pass discovered on the previous trip, and near the connecting ridge between the Utah or Bear River Mountains and the Wind River chain. This ridge