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Show 24 In spite of his earlier delusions, Fremont was the first to completely reject the idea of the Buenaventura River and declare the area to be a great basin, and so it was named." Ironically, while exploding the myth of the Buenaventura and correctly interpreting the hydrographic nature of the Basin, Fremont became responsible for the creation of a new myth which was to have a profound impact on the exploration of the Great Basin in the years to come. This was the myth of a great east-west mountain range extending from the southern tip of the Wasatch to the Sierra Nevada Range. Operating under an apparent misconception, Fremont believed that for the streams of the Great Basin to be isolated from the sea, the Basin must be encircled by a chain of mountains on all sides. Having thus convinced himself, he apparently imagined seeing the hypothetical range on the northern horizon while in the Las Vegas area: And in returning from Califolnia along the Spanish trail, as far as the head of the Santa Clara fork of the Rio Virgen, I crossed only small streams making their way south to the Colorado, or lost in the sand-as the Mo-hah-ve; while to the left, lofty mountains, their summits white with snow, were often visible, and which must have turned water to the north as well as to the south, and thus constituted.*.the southern rim of the Basin.' (Italics mine) Fremont's reports of his first two expeditions were widely circulated and read by an American public anxious to move west.8 Because of the credibility given to the "Pathfinder," many readers would eventually be lured into the central Great Basin. It was Fremont's misconception of the mountain structure of the the Great Basin's interior (which he had never visited) that for well over a decade enticed pioneers, gold-seekers, and explorers into the region. Fremont's map of 1848, which illustrated the legendary mountain |