IN CALIFORNIA gl 



well as their leaders' live to-day in the botanical 

 appellations of many a familiar California plant 

 that they discovered. The discussion of them, how- 

 ever, would be in the main more appropriate to a 

 scientific monograph than the present work; but I 

 cannot refrain from reference to one picturesque 

 figure who, in the last days of Mexican supremacy, 

 dropped down from the Sierras into California and 

 was interested alike in her politics and her flora 

 John C. Fremont. 



In the spring of 1844, Fremont in command of a 

 motley exploring party made up of trappers, sol* 

 diers and Indians, arrived at Sutter's Fort on the 

 Sacramento River, and after a short stay for rest 

 and repairs, proceeded southward along the great 

 central valley of California, and crossing the 

 Tehachapi Mountains at the valley's southern end, 

 passed from the territory eastward across the Mo- 

 jave Desert. Fremont was no dry-as-dust ob- 

 server, and his journal is replete with vivacious 

 descriptions of a country that seemed an Eden to 

 those explorers, lately from the alkaline stretches of 

 a Nevada desert and from the snowdrifts of an un- 

 broken Sierra pass. In the canon of the American 

 River, before reaching Sutter's, he notes the pres- 

 ence of "a new and singular shrub. . . . The body 

 and branches had a naked appearance as if stripped 



