Fremont Peak 
135 
of course, the paths he followed had often before been travelled 
by the redoubtable trapper, whose knowledge, like that of the 
native, was personal only. Indeed, he was guided in his jour¬ 
neys by several men now quite as famous as himself—Kit 
Carson, Fitzpatrick, Walker, and Godey. But the field was 
still new to the world and to science. Quite appropriately, 
one of the highest peaks from which the Colorado draws its 
first waters, is now distinguished by the name of the earliest 
scientific observer to enter its basin. Fremont came up the 
North Platte and the Sweetwater branch, crossing (1842) from 
that stream by the South Pass thirty-four years after Andrew 
Henry had first traversed it, over to the headwaters of the 
Colorado. The ascent to South Pass is very gradual, and there 
is no gorge or defile. The total width is about twenty miles. 
A day or two later Fremont climbed out of the valley on the 
flank of the Wind River Mountains. “We had reached a very 
elevated point,” he says; “and in the valley below and among 
the hills were a number of lakes at different levels; some two 
or three hundred feet above others, with which they communi¬ 
cated by foaming torrents. Even to our great height the roar 
of the cataracts came up, and we could see them leaping down 
in lines of snowy foam.” Thus are the rills and the rivulets 
from the summits collected in these beautiful alpine lakes to 
give birth to the Colorado in white cascades, typical, at the very 
fountainhead, of the turbulence of the waters which have rent 
for themselves a trough of rock to the gulf.* Springing from 
these clear pools and seething falls, shadowed by sombre pines 
and granite crags, its course is run through plunging rapids to 
the final assault on the sea, where wide sand-barrens and desola¬ 
tion prevail. Fremont understood this from his guides and 
says: “Lower down, from Brown’s Hole to the southward, the 
river runs through lofty chasms, walled in by precipices of red 
rock.” The descent 
“of the Colorado is but little known, and that little derived from 
vague report. Three hundred miles of its lower part, as it ap- 
^ These mountains, as the glacial accumulations began to permanently dimin¬ 
ish, must have annually sent a long-continued huge flood of water down the 
rivers heading there. 
