Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/471

420 nothing to do with the emigration movement of 1843, was an incident of it. The expedition left the Missouri River, near the junction of the Kansas, on the 29th of May, travelling just behind the emigrants as far as Soda Springs at the Great Bend of Bear River, where they turned off to Salt Lake. Having made a hasty visit to that inland sea, they returned to the emigrant road, which they followed to the Dalles, arriving there on the 4th of November. There Frémont left his men and animals, and took a canoe to Fort Vancouver to purchase supplies for his expedition to California, which were furnished him on the credit of the United States, the company sending the goods to the Dalles in their own boats. The emigrants ridicule Fréemont's sobriquet of 'Pathfinder.'

The naturalist Audubon was skirting the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1843, in pursuit of his favorite study of ornithology; and mention is made of a German botanist named Luders, whom Frémont met on the Columbia, at a little bay below the Cascades, which was called after him Luders' Bay. The toils and dangers of this class of men occupy but little space in history, yet are none the less worthy of mention that they are not performed for gain or political preferment. If it is a brave deed to dare