Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/334

Rh (pp. 32-34) has given a summary of the results reached by Fremont in his first and second expeditions, as follows:

“Fremont’s map and geographical researches embrace the immense tract of land extending from the confluence of the Kansas River with the Missouri to the cataracts of the Columbia, and the missions of Santa Barbara and the Pueblo de los Angeles in New California, presenting a space amounting to 28 degrees of longitude (about 1,300 miles) between the 34th and 45th parallels of north latitude. Four hundred points have been hypsometrically determined by barometrical measurements, and for the most part astronomically; so that it has been rendered possible to delineate the profile above the sea’s level of a tract of land measuring 3,600 miles, with all its inflections, extending from the north of Kansas to Fort Vancouver and to the coasts of the South Sea (almost 720 miles more than the distance from Madrid to Tobolsk). As I believe I was the first who attempted to represent, in geognostic profile, the configuration of Mexico, and the Cordilleras of South America,—for the half-perspective projections of the Siberian traveler, the Abbe Chappe were based on mere, and for the most part on very inaccurate, estimates of the falls of rivers,—it has afforded me special satisfaction to there find the graphical method of representing the earth’s configuration in a vertical direction, that is, the elevation of solid over fluid parts, achieved on so vast a scale. In the mean latitude of 37° to 43°, the Rocky Mountains present, besides the great snow-crowned summits, whose height may be compared to that of the Peak of Teneriffe, elevated plateaux of an extent scarcely to be met with in any other part of the world, and whose breadth from east to west is almost twice that of the Mexican highlands. From the range of mountains which begin a little westward of Fort Laramie,