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Show 22 an important immigrant trail to California. The decade of the 1840s saw the commencement of the surveying of the Great Basin by the government of the United States. These explorations threw considerable new light on the geography of the Great Basin. As yet, the interior of the Basin had been seen only by the Jedediah Smith company in 1827. Because of Smith's poor appraisal of the deep interior as a source of fur, the trappers shied away from the lands west of the Wasatch, especially south of the Humboldt. In 1843 John C. Fremont began his famous journey around the perimeter of the Great Basin and laid to rest the secret of the land of interior drainage. Fremont, a brevet captain in the U.S. Topographical Engineers, proposed the exploration of the far west to the government in 1841. At the time, the greater part of the Basin was situated in the Republic of Mexico, but to a nation embracing the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, such boundries were considered temporary at best. Fremont's second expedition to the far west in 1843 brought him into the Great Basin. This expedition differed from previous expeditions in the Basin in that its purpose was not to locate a highway across it nor find a rich fur supply in it; it was a scientific expedition and was accompanied by an experienced cartographer in the person of Charles Pruess. Fremont entered the Great Basin by way of the Bear River like his trapper counterparts of two decades before. But Fremont was soon out of the Basin and on his way to Fort Hall and the Columbia River where he linked up with the explorations of Commander Charles Wilkes who led a United States naval expedition to the Columbia Basin two years earlier. Continuing his explorations southward, Fremont reentered the Great Basin in present south central Oregon and proceeded down the western flank of the Basin to Pyramid Lake which Fremont is credited |