e commander of the military department (Colonel, afterward General
Kearney). Mr. Fremont had left St. Louis, and was at the frontier,
Mrs. Fremont being requested to examine the letters that came after
him, and forward those which he ought to receive. She read the
countermanding orders and detained them! and Fremont knew nothing
of their existence, until after he had returned from one of the most
marvellous and eventful expeditions of modern times--one to which
the United States are indebted (among other things) for the present
ownership of California, instead of seeing it a British possession.
The writer of this View, who was then in St. Louis, approved of the
course which his daughter had taken (for she had stopped the orders
before he knew it); and he wrote a letter to the department condemning
the recall, repulsing the reprimand which had been lavished upon
Fremont, and demanding a court-martial for him when he should
return. The Secretary of War was then Mr. James Madison Porter, of
Pennsylvania; the chief of the topographical corps the same as now
(Colonel Abert), himself an office man, surrounded by West Point
officers, to whose pursuit of easy service, Fremont's adventurous
expeditions was a reproach; and in conformity to whose opinions the
secretary seemed to have acted. On Fremont's return, upwards of a year
afterwards, Mr. William Wilkins, of Pennsylvania, was Secretary of
War, and received the young explorer with all honor and friendship,
and obtained for him the brevet of captain from President Tyler. And
such is the inside view of this piece of history--very different from
what documentary evidence would make it.

"To complete his survey across the continent, on the line of travel
between the State of Missouri and the tide-water region of the
Columbia, was Fremont's object in this expedition; and it was all that
he had obtained orders for doing; but only a small part, and to his
mind an insignificant part, of what he proposed doing. People had been
to the mouth of the Columbia before, and his ambition was not limited
to making tracks where others had made them before him. There was a
vast region beyond the Rocky Mountains--the whole western slope of our
continent--of which but little was known; and of that little, nothing
with the accuracy of science. All that vast region, more than seven
hundred miles square--equal to a great kingdom in Europe--was an
unknown land--a sealed book, which he longed to open,