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Chapter 1: A Disorder of Enormous Masses

They set out, fifteen men on fifteen mules, shortly after dawn on August 12, 1842, carrying two days' worth of food -- dried buffalo meat, macaroni, and coffee. In the lead, as usual, rode Kit Carson, threading a trail through tangles of downed limber pine, across tilted slabs of granite where the mules' hoofs skated and slipped, beneath waterfalls and around cobalt lakes. And as usual, calling the shots from the middle of the pack, John C. Frémont straddled his mule as the alien landscape enfolded him, his quicksilver spirit veering between exultation and despair. Directly ahead of the party loomed its goal, the peak Frémont had judged loftiest in all the Rocky Mountains, snowfields gleaming in the sun, rock towers spiking the sky.

As yet, these two were nobodies, Kit Carson and John Frémont, their deeds discussed, if at all, only within the arcane circles of their peers and cronies. But this summer's jaunt would make them famous, launching a joint passage into the realms of myth that would place them, before the century's end, among America's eternal heroes. From the 1842 expedition onward, their destinies and renown would be intertwined; yet in all the West, no pair of adventurers more different in character than Carson and Frémont could be found.

Ten weeks before, the two men had first met, aboard a steamboat crawling the Missouri River upstream from St. Louis. Twenty-nine years old, a southerner born in Savannah and raised in Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina, Frémont had escaped a life of incipient dandyism to become an ambitious lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, a branch of the U.S. Army. He had served adequately on several surveying trips in the South and Midwest, but the present journey was Frémont's first thrust into the Great West, as well as his break in life. For the first time, he was in charge of an expedition. The explicit mandate given Frémont was to survey the first half of the Oregon Trail; his implicit charge was to keep an eye out for the best places to build forts along the way to safeguard emigrants from the "redskins" who (in the phrase of the day) "infested" the territory.

Frémont needed a guide who knew the West. Three years his elder, out of Kentucky via a hardscrabble homestead on the Missouri frontier, Carson had run away from home at the age of sixteen. For thirteen years he had trapped beaver and fought Indians from California down to Chihuahua, from New Mexico up to Idaho, without amassing the most modest fortune or dulling one whit his wanderlust. Now, with the collapse of the beaver trade, he was simply another down-on-his-luck mountain man looking for work. Aboard the steamboat, in response to Frémont's earnest questions, Carson (as he recalled many years later) "told him that I had been some time in the mountains and thought I could guide him to any point he wished to go."

By mid-August, the expedition had traversed a thousand miles of prairie, ascending a series of rivers: the Missouri, both the North and South Platte, and the Sweetwater. On August 7, the team had traversed South Pass -- the ill-defined saddle, some 7,500 feet above sea level, that affords the easiest crossing of the Continental Divide between Mexico and Canada -- and turned the south end of the majestic Wind River Range. Now, for the ascent of what would come to be known as Fremont Peak, the lieutenant divided his party, leaving twelve men beside a lake on the western fringe of the range to stand guard against the Blackfeet Indians, who Frémont feared would seize the first opportunity to ambush his team.

For all his western experience, Carson had never before penetrated the Wind Rivers. Both he and Frémont seriously underestimated the range's defenses. What from a distance looked like a straightforward slope leading to the mountain (which days before, from the plains, Frémont had singled out as clearly the apex of the chain) proved to hide a wildly convoluted terrain. Unguessed chasms thwarted their progress, the forest grew in places too dense to ride through, and chaoses of sharp-edged talus made for treacherous footing. By nightfall, the team had found a grassy bottom among the pines where the mules were turned out to graze and the men set up their bivouac.

For all the difficulties thrown across his path, Frémont pushed into the heart of the range in a state of rapture. "It seemed as if," he later wrote, "from the vast expanse of uninteresting prairie we had passed over, nature had collected all her beauties together in one chosen place." An avid if uncritical self-taught botanist, Frémont gathered samples wherever he went: here, he waxed ecstatic over "a rich undergrowth of plants, and numerous gay-colored flowers in brilliant bloom." (Looking over Frémont's pressed specimens four months later, anticipating the lieutenant's second western expedition, the great Harvard botanist Asa Gray wrote to his equally luminary Princeton colleague John Torrey, "I wish we had a collector to go with Fremont...If none are to be had, Lieut. F. must be indoctrinated, & taught to collect both dried spec. & seeds. Tell him he shall be immortalized by having the 999th Senecio called S. Fremontii...")

Yet Frémont's rapture was darkened with a sense of awe that bordered on dread. In the primeval wild into which he had trespassed, the young lieutenant discerned "a savage sublimity of naked rock." As crag and ridge and abyss forestalled his blithe plans, he felt all but trapped within "a gigantic disorder of enormous masses."

In the morning, still optimistic, Frémont moved three miles deeper into the range, through "a confusion of defiles," until his party came to a clearing with a magnificent view of their objective. Here the leader set up an advanced base, leaving the mules with several men and all their camping equipment. After an early dinner, the would-be alpinists set out on foot, carrying neither coats nor food: "The peak appeared so near, that there was no doubt of our returning before night..."

Once again, Frémont misjudged the Wind River Mountains. "We were soon involved in the most ragged precipices..., [which] constantly obstructed our path, forcing us to make long détours; frequently obliged to retrace our steps, and frequently falling among the rocks." One man averted death as he pitched toward a cliff's edge only by "throwing himself flat on the ground." By late afternoon, the men were close to exhaustion, and Frémont himself had succumbed to a violent headache and vomiting.

Stretching 110 miles across western Wyoming, with its countless lakes, its meadows fringed with evergreens, its cirques teeming with solid walls of granite and gneiss, the Wind River Range has become today a favorite playground for backpackers, fishermen, and mountaineers. From Elkhart Park, at 9,100 feet on a mountain shoulder above Fremont Lake, a well-traveled trail winds fifteen miles north and east toward Titcomb Lakes.

The path winds up a shallow vale, then angles across a plateau thick with limber pines and Engelmann spruce, making a gratuitous jog north to treat pilgrims to a splendid panorama at Photographers Point, where they gain their first view of distant Fremont Peak. Forest Service crews have chainsawed downed tree trunks out of the way, but in the trackless woods on either side, fallen, mossy logs form a maze of obstacles that would still make for tortuous going on muleback.

The best guess of modern historians as to where Frémont entered the Wind Rivers is at Boulder Lake, some dozen miles south of Elkhart Park. Approaching the mountains from South Pass, Frémont might easily have believed he was taking the shortest route to his objective; but the delusions of mountain foreshortening that bedeviled all early climbers in the West thus added those dozen miles to the party's ordeal. It is possible that the path Carson found through tangles and ravines during the party's first two days veers close to the Titcomb trail, but equally likely that the 1842 explorers wandered several miles farther east.

By mid-August, the summer's riot of wildflowers has peaked and waned, leaving only the hardier survivors: not only the profusions of purple asters over which Frémont raved, but swaths of Indian paintbrush, elephantela (with its tiny pink trunklike blossoms), buttercups, blue lupine, and magenta fireweed blooming down the stalk. Squirrels skitter among the pine needles, and Canada jays, emboldened by the crumbs a summer's troop of hikers have dropped along the trail, perch on nearby branches.

Ten miles in, the trail skirts Seneca Lake. The odds are good that Frémont's party passed by here, for it lies on the direct route to Titcomb Basin, southeast of Fremont Peak. For all the vexations of trail finding in the forest, for all the scrapes and scares of negotiating granite slabs and cliffs, in the Wind Rivers, Frémont's spirit soared with joy. As he emerged upon an unexpected lake (possibly Seneca), "a view of the utmost magnificence and grandeur burst upon our eyes. With nothing between us and their feet to lessen the effect of the whole height, a grand bed of snow-capped mountains rose before us, pile upon pile, glowing in the bright light of an August day."

The evening of August 13, on the north side of a sizable lake with a rocky island in the middle of it, the team prepared for a second bivouac. Island Lake, as Frémont named the site of their nocturnal vigil, is the first point on the party's mountain itinerary where the modern traveler can be sure of walking in their 1842 footprints. The lake lies close to timberline, at 10,346 feet -- 3,400 feet of altitude and three miles as the hawk soars beneath the summit of Fremont Peak.

On a broad flat rock, the men stretched their weary bones in hopes of sleep. They had nothing to eat, and not even their coats to cover themselves. Before dusk, the best hunters had set off hoping to shoot a bighorn sheep or two, but had come back empty-handed. The men built a bonfire of downed pine, but a gale out of the north robbed the bivouackers of its heat. Most of the worn-out party endured the ten hours of darkness without a wink of sleep.

Frémont, however, had already proved himself the most stubborn of explorers. Despite vomiting late into the night, he rose on August 14 still determined to conquer the mountain. As he later jauntily wrote, "[W]e were glad to see the face of the sun in the morning. Not being delayed by any preparation for breakfast, we set out immediately."

By the end of his voyaging, twelve years hence, Frémont could lay fair claim to having explored more terrain west of the Mississippi than any other American. The historian Allan Nevins would subtitle his 1928 biography of the man The West's Greatest Adventurer. Frémont would enter the pantheon of his country's heroes tagged with the resounding sobriquet the Pathfinder.

Yet compared to the monumental government expeditions to the West that had preceded his, Frémont's 1842 voyage does not easily lend itself to pioneering superlatives. Lewis and Clark's journey of 1804-6 fulfilled Thomas Jefferson's empyrean expectations: to explore the Louisiana Purchase and beyond, all the way to the Pacific; to search for a northwest passage by river across the continent (Lewis and Clark proved there was none); and to gauge the potential of that vast wilderness for American commerce and settlement. The next two western expeditions -- Zebulon Pike's in 1806-7, and Stephen Long's in 1819-20 -- furthered the reconnaissance of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, as well as probing the Spanish stronghold in the Southwest.

But Frémont's 1842 mission was a comparatively modest one -- essentially, to make an accurate map of the first half of what was already being called the Oregon Trail. The journey's covert purpose, Frémont comprehended well: for his push west might help serve the intrigues of politicians who dreamed of seeing the American flag wave not only over Oregon, but Texas and California as well. Only three years after Frémont set out from St. Louis, the editor of the New York Morning News, John L. O'Sullivan, would publish a manifesto whose key words became the catch phrase that rallied tide after tide of American expansionism. It was, O'Sullivan wrote, the "manifest destiny of this nation to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

It required, however, a linked chain of fortuitous events to place Frémont in charge of the expedition that would launch his lasting fame. As the survey took shape in the minds of its government sponsors, it was assumed that Joseph Nicollet would lead the party, as he had the 1838-39 jaunt into the Midwest; once again, Frémont would serve as a useful but decidedly subordinate second-in-command. An astronomer, cartographer, and member of the French Legion of Honor, Nicollet had fled his native land in 1830 for political reasons; within a decade, he had landed a cherished job as explorer for the War Department. A brilliant innovator, Nicollet was the first to use the barometer to measure altitudes; one historian calls him "the first systematic modern cartographer." It was Nicollet, on the 1838-39 expedition, who taught Frémont everything the young lieutenant knew about mapping and surveying.

By 1842, however, Nicollet was gravely ill with cancer. It was almost more than he could do to write up the report of his previous journey, let alone lead another one.

The great American champion of westward expansion was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who had served in the Senate since 1821. A close confidant of Thomas Jefferson, Benton had tirelessly lobbied for expeditions to take up the challenge laid down by Lewis and Clark; in the last meeting he ever had with an ailing Jefferson, in 1824, their talk had been of the need for further exploration of the unknown West.

By 1840, as Nicollet's mapmaker, Frémont had won the attention and approval of the stormy senator from Missouri. But it was far from a foregone conclusion that, in default of Nicollet, a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant in the Topographical Corps would be entrusted to lead the survey up the Missouri and the Platte.

And Frémont came very close to ruining not only his chance at command, but his whole career -- by falling in love with Benton's daughter. Jessie was fifteen when she met the twenty-six-year-old Frémont. They courted discreetly, then were secretly married by a Catholic priest on October 19, 1841. When Jessie presented her father with this startling fait accompli, the senator flew into one of his legendary rages, then banished his son-in-law from the house. Still only seventeen, Jessie stood firm, declaring her fealty to the man she loved, and Benton was so moved that he performed an about-face. By early 1842, the rash lieutenant had become Benton's protégé.

To finance the expedition, Benton pushed a $30,000 appropriations bill through Congress. Within the senator's heart burned a clandestine passion to flood the West with Americans, and so drive out the British, who were gaining more than a foothold in Oregon. Clandestine, because relations with Great Britain would be seriously compromised by any overt avowal of such an American goal.

Thus the official orders for Frémont's expedition make no hint of paving the way for emigrants or of claiming land for the United States. The only document that has ever come to light, a laconic five-sentence directive from the chief of the Bureau of Topographical Engineers, demands only that Frémont "make a Survey of the Platte or Nebraska river, up to the head of the Sweetwater." The party's whole foray into the Wind River Range was thus technically -- and characteristically -- a case of Frémont's deliberately overstepping his mandate.

By his late twenties, the explorer was a man driven by restless curiosity. His love of nature ran deep, and his enthusiasm for botany and geology far exceeded that of a dilettante. Yet in view of his ultimate glory as "the West's greatest adventurer," it is striking that at the age of twenty-eight, Frémont had no particular interest in the West. He was the prototype of that classic nineteenth-century American, the man of intense but vaguely directed ambition. To the extent that he had a goal in life before 1842, it was simply to become a "great engineer," whatever that might mean.

It was Benton who awakened the lieutenant to the West. Forty-five years later, Frémont recalled that his first talk with the senator, full of Benton's rosy visions of an American Hesperides, "was pregnant with results and decisive of my life."

Yet that modest expedition up the Platte to the head of the Sweetwater might well have passed into the limbo of a historical footnote to the Americanizing of the West. By 1842, three and a half decades' worth of far more extraordinary journeys beyond the Mississippi had been performed by Americans unknown to the eastern public. Those ephemeral but epic voyages began with John Colter, who, after almost three years of privation and adventure in the employ of Lewis and Clark, decided that he craved more of the same, begged leave of his bosses on the Missouri, and headed back into the wilderness in August 1806. During the next few years, Colter made the Anglo discovery of the geysers and hot springs of Yellowstone (Colter's Hell, his scoffing auditors dubbed this landscape of a crazed loner's fantasy) and miraculously survived his execution at the hands of the Blackfeet.

Colter, Manuel Lisa, Jedediah Smith, Joseph Reddeford Walker, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Old Bill Williams, Joe Meek, Jim Bridger -- these, and many another mountain man, including Kit Carson, prosecuted journeys all over the West that made Frémont's 1842 outing look like a milk run. Indeed, no part of the itinerary on Frémont's first expedition -- except his probe into the Wind Rivers -- covered ground that was new to Americans. South Pass, the key to the Oregon migration, had been discovered by Anglos as early as 1812; Benjamin Bonneville had taken wagons across it in 1832; and six years before Frémont came along, the first white women (missionaries' wives named Narcissa Whitman and Elizabeth Spalding) successfully traversed the divide.

Yet, as Allan Nevins writes of the mountain men, "Though they were the true pathfinders, their knowledge was relatively useless, for it could not be diffused." The cardinal contribution of Frémont's first expedition, as well as the pedestal of his fame, lay in the map his expedition produced (the best yet drawn beyond the Mississippi) and the report he published (at the time, the most stirring, romantic, and influential narrative of the western frontier to appear in English).

Around St. Louis, Frémont had recruited the personnel for his expedition. Nearly all were French voyageurs who already knew the Great Plains. Frémont's own father was French, an itinerant painter and womanizer who had drifted to Tidewater Virginia; the future explorer grew up fluent in French and comfortable with his paternal culture. Though Kit Carson would become Frémont's most trusted scout, at first on the 1842 expedition, "my favorite man" was one of the voyageurs, Basil Lajeunesse. It was Lajeunesse to whom the lieutenant turned for onerous errands and dangerous missions, which the Frenchman performed without stint. We know very little about this worthy, who, at the outset of the journey, had only four years to live: on Frémont's third expedition, in 1846, an ax wielded by an Indian in southern Oregon would split his skull as he slept by the campfire.

From the start, however, Frémont was impressed by Carson's quiet competence and savoir-faire. In an oft-quoted passage in his official report, Frémont observed his new friend with admiration tinged perhaps with envy: "Mounted on a fine horse, without a saddle, and scouring bare-headed over the prairies, Kit was one of the finest pictures of a horseman I have ever seen." For if there was a single quality the vain and impetuous lieutenant hankered after, it was the kind of unconscious grace Carson exuded. Kit was, moreover, a better buffalo hunter than the mountain man (Lucien Maxwell) Frémont had hired to be the expedition's meat hunter.

Carson's salary for the three-month journey was $100 a month. This may not seem a princely stipend on a frontier where inflated prices held sway: at Chouteau's Landing (near present-day Kansas City), Frémont laid in such supplies as tea at $1 a pound and linseed oil at $2 a gallon. But the salary was more than three times as much as Carson had made the previous year, as a meat hunter for Bent's Fort on the Arkansas. Basil Lajeunesse, in contrast, was paid only 75 cents per day.

For all his enthusiasm about the journey west, Frémont found crossing a thousand miles of prairie an ordeal by tedium. Though his report would eventually help sell the Great Plains to several generations of emigrants, Frémont could not help recording "the same dreary barrenness" day after day, "the same naked waste." Of the view from a marly ridge in what is today western Nebraska, he wrote, "I had never seen anything which impressed so strongly on my mind a feeling of desolation."

On July 8, on the North Platte, while Frémont himself was absent on a reconnaissance to the south, the main body of his team crossed paths with an entourage of trappers led by the already legendary mountain man Jim Bridger. Returning from the very headwaters toward which Frémont's party was aimed, Bridger was full of dire alarms. The Sioux to the west and north, he reported, were on the rampage, having "declared war on every living thing." Bridger was certain the exploring party could not continue westward without risking pitched battles against the maddened Indians.

Frémont's account of the 1842 expedition is an artful concoction. Beneath a veneer of modesty about his own deeds, the narrative pivots around uplifting instances of its leader's courage and resolve. Bridger's scare furnishes the first such exemplum.

That night around the campfire, with Frémont still off on his reconnaissance, the voyageurs chew the fat of their fears, muttering, "Il n'y aura pas de vie pour nous" (in western movie lingo, "We're goners now"). Even Carson has dark thoughts, agreeing with Bridger about the certainty of warfare, and going so far as to make out his will.

Frémont, returning a few days later (if we can believe his own account), gives not a moment's thought to turning back down the Platte. Instead, he gathers his men, declares his intention to march forward, and offers to discharge with full pay any "who were disposed to cowardice, and anxious to return." Only one voyageur seizes this humiliating escape clause. "I asked him some few questions," Frémont smugly reports, "in order to expose him to the ridicule of the men, and let him go."

On Lewis and Clark's landmark journey almost four decades before, the men had been encouraged by their leaders to keep journals, in hopes of compiling the richest possible record of their pioneering odyssey. In 1842, Frémont forbade the keeping of diaries among his own expeditioners. The only account that would emerge from his survey of the Oregon Trail would be Frémont's own.

This precaution might have seemed all but moot, for most of the voyageurs were illiterate -- as was Kit Carson himself. But Frémont had failed to calculate for the clandestine disobedience of the only other well-educated member of his team, the man who was, by any reckoning, the least likely adventurer in the lot: his German cartographer, Charles Preuss.

Frémont had met the mapmaker the previous December, when a shy supplicant bearing a letter of introduction had arrived at his home in Washington one evening as Frémont sat with Jessie before the fireplace. Years later, Frémont recalled his first sight of the man -- "a shock of light curly hair standing up thick about his head, and a face so red that we attributed it to a wrong cause instead of to the cold and the nervousness and anxiety which turned his speech into stammering."

A less generous man might have sent Preuss packing; but Frémont quickly saw that the diffident German was a superb draftsman and topographer -- and that he was destitute. He gave Preuss menial work reducing astronomical observations from the 1838-39 survey, then, as soon as he was put in charge of the western expedition, hired Preuss as his cartographer.

Born in western Germany in 1803, Preuss was a decade older than his employer. Since 1834, when he had emigrated to the United States, he had puttered away at a series of desk jobs, most of them with the U.S. Coast Survey, whose superintendent was a fellow expatriate German. But when a congressional appropriation failed to come through, Preuss, his wife, and young daughter (a son had died in childhood two years earlier) faced virtual starvation.

Preuss would eventually accompany Frémont on three expeditions, including the lieutenant's disastrous fourth, when both men were lucky to get out of the San Juan Mountains in Colorado alive. But in June 1842, as the party left Chouteau's Landing on the Missouri, Preuss was an utter greenhorn. Thirty-nine years old, he had never ridden a horse before; it is possible that he had never camped out.

Preuss kept his secret diary in German, which language Frémont did not read. It is a completely private document, with no pretensions to a wider audience than that of his wife, Gertrud, whom he addresses by the diminutive Trautchen. Lost in family attics for more than a century, the diary was rediscovered by a scholar in 1954 and published in an English translation four years later.

In the absence of any other account of the expedition besides Frémont's suave and self-congratulatory report, Preuss's unvarnished diary supplies a corrective viewpoint. The narrative also sparkles with accidental comedy, as Preuss plays an unwitting Sancho Panza to Frémont's Don Quixote.

Yet the German must have been a trying companion on the trail. Compulsively gloomy, homesick not only for his ménage outside Washington but for his native Germany, a hopeless bumbler about camp, an egregious know-it-all despite his shortcomings, contemptuous of the rough-hewn voyageurs who were his comrades, Preuss grumbles his way from St. Louis to the Wind Rivers and back again.

A bit of a toady to Frémont's face, Preuss delights in lampooning his commander in his private pages. Already, on the first day out from Chouteau's Landing, the leader is "that simpleton Frémont" and "a foolish lieutenant." Without stating his grounds, Preuss derides Frémont's astronomical observations, his botanizing, and his mineralogy. Carson fares a little better, though from the first pages on, Preuss nicknames him Kid Karsten.

Like many another tenderfoot dragged half-willingly along on a difficult journey, Preuss obsesses about food. After an ox was slaughtered, "Some of the men tried to eat the liver raw. I was satisfied with bread and coffee." Preuss's squeamishness about trail food intersects with his dudgeon against the French cook. "Have trapped a large turtle, which is being prepared for soup tonight. If our cook, the rascal, will only know how to fix it." One day later: "A prairie chicken was shot. If the cook cannot prepare it any better than the turtle, let him gulp it down himself." In his famished funks, Preuss retreats to smoke a solitary pipe on the edge of camp.

Proving himself an incompetent horseman, on only the fifth day out Preuss is relieved of the chores of grooming, saddling, and feeding his mount. Remarkably indulgent of the eccentric German's foibles, Frémont wins no gratitude in Preuss's diary. After a sleepless night among clouds of mosquitoes, Preuss grouses, "The others lay safely under their nets; mine had been forgotten because of Frémont's negligence." Unable to get used to wearing the same clothes day after day, Preuss hires a voyageur to do his laundry. The cartographer joins Frémont's splinter party for the reconnaissance of the South Platte, but, incapable of keeping up, is sent back with a single companion. Having regained the main trail, Preuss sits under a juniper and smokes his pipe, while his partner sets off on muleback to look for the rest of the team. Late in the afternoon, the companion returns, bearing a hamper of beef, buffalo tongue, bread, and brandy. "What a joy, what a delight!" Preuss crows in his diary. Yet in the next breath: "When I was eating, I thought that those people could have sent along a little salt if they had had anything of a cultured taste."

Frémont's initial fear that the man was a serious drinker, when he met the red-faced Preuss the previous December, may have hit the mark. At one point, Preuss reassures himself "that I am not such a bibbler as I believed at times." Yet his thoughts are constantly on ardent spirits. "I wish I had a drink," he blurts out the night of the failed turtle soup. A few evenings later: "If only I had a bottle of wine..." Meat hung from the wagons to dry reminds Preuss of red curtains in the windows of a German tavern. "Oh, if there were a tavern here!" he sighs. Preuss lives for the keg of brandy Frémont taps on special occasions, cursing the "miserable red wine" that the lieutenant serves up for breakfast to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Nor is the topographer much interested in the landscape. "Nothing but prairie. Made twenty miles. Very hot," he natters early on. And near the end of the expedition, with the Missouri almost in smelling distance: "I find it quite impossible to say anything interesting about this trip and about the country. I see nothing, I know nothing, I think only of wife, child, bread, and coffee. Also, a little drink passes through my thoughts from time to time..."

Even the Indians fail to engage the dyspeptic traveler. Crowding around camp, they are "irksome, pesky as children." In the face of Jim Bridger's warning about Sioux on the warpath, Preuss is all for going home. When Frémont announces his decision to press on, Preuss, too humiliated to back out in front of his colleagues, bitterly regrets having joined the expedition in the first place. Anticipating his death by a Sioux arrow or knife, he proclaims, "I see no honor in being murdered by this rabble."

Yet Preuss's iconoclastic mutterings puncture the chivalric idyll that emerges in Frémont's report. A stirring typical passage in the latter details the lieutenant's part in a buffalo hunt at full gallop: "I fired at the distance of a yard, the ball entering at the termination of the long hair, and passing near the heart. She fell headlong at the report of the gun...." In Preuss's telling, Frémont regularly returns from such chases with no quarry more tangible than a boast: "'I knocked down one, and that fellow will not get much farther,' etc."

To cover the hiatus in his main party's progress while he is off on his South Platte reconnaissance, Frémont pretends to transcribe entries penned by Preuss in his absence; these are plainly the lieutenant's compositions, based perhaps on notes by the German. After Jim Bridger warns the t