2 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 1 10 



black-haired, 5 feet 7 inches tall. He was assigned to Company K, 

 Fourth Infantry Regiment. A few days later his Company was or- 

 dered to board the steamship Golden West for service on the Pacific 

 Coast. After a brief stop at Benicia, Calif., Headquarters of the 

 Military Department of the Pacific, Company K was ordered to the 

 frontier military post of Fort Dalles on the Columbia River in Ore- 

 gon Territory. The men arrived at Fort Dalles in September 1852. 



Sohon went west at a momentous period in the development of 

 the Western United States. For several years there had been a 

 Nation-wide demand for a railroad to connect the growing settlements 

 of the Pacific slope with the eastern States. However, strong rivalry 

 existed in the East regarding the location of the route, and the choice 

 of its eastern terminus. In 1853 Congress authorized the War Depart- 

 ment "to ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a 

 railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean." Three 

 surveying expeditions were organized to explore a northern, a central, 

 and a southern route. Governor Isaac I. Stevens of Washington Ter- 

 ritory was placed in charge of the project to explore the northern 

 route between the forty-seventh and forty -ninth parallels from the 

 Mississippi River to Puget Sound. 



Governor Stevens left St. Paul in early June, 1853, at the head 

 of an exploring and surveying party moving westward across the 

 plains to meet a second party, surveying eastward from the Pacific 

 under his assistant, Capt. George B. McClellan. Stevens also ordered 

 Lt. Rufus Saxton, Jr., acting assistant quartermaster and commissary 

 of the expedition, to proceed eastward from the Pacific side and es- 

 tablish a depot of provisions at the Flathead Indian village of St. 

 Mary's west of the Rockies. Lieutenant Saxton, with an escort of 

 18 soldiers from the Fourth Infantry, left Fort Dalles with the supply 

 train on July 18, 1853. Gustavus Sohon was one of the enlisted men 

 assigned to duty with this party. They traveled eastward via the 

 Columbia River, Lewis' Fork, Clark's Fork, Flathead Lake, and up 

 the Bitterroot Valley to St. Mary's village on the Bitterroot, then 

 known as the St. Mary's River. En route this caravan met a partv 

 of about 100 Pend d'Oreille Indians returning from a bufifalo hunt 

 on the plains east of the Rockies with a large supply of buffalo robes 

 and dried meat, which they planned to trade to the Indians nearer 

 the west coast. It was Sohon's first glimpse of some of the mountain 

 Indians whom he was later to know well. 



Saxton's party also met the two Messrs. Owen, who had purchased 

 the property of the Jesuit Mission of St. Mary's in 1850 and estab- 



