d into the
Great Basin without knowing where to look for grass or water. They
are camped by a spring of alkaline water scarcely fit to drink;
their weary animals nibble at the scanty grass about the spring;
far ahead stretches the pathless desert which they must cross;
upon their choice of a route their very lives will depend.

Now it is all changed. The whole region is crossed and recrossed by
wagon roads and railways. Many mining towns are scattered through
the mountains which dot the seemingly boundless expanse of desert,
while in every place where water can be found there are gardens,
green fields of alfalfa, and herds of cattle.

Before the year 1840 some knowledge had been acquired of the borders
of the Great Basin. Trappers and explorers had crossed the Rocky
Mountains and had gone down the Columbia River. There were Spanish
settlements in New Mexico, Arizona, and along the coast of California.

Fremont's first expedition had taken him to the summit of the Rocky
Mountains in northwestern Wyoming. In 1843 he started upon the
second expedition. He was at that time commissioned to cross the
Rockies, descend the Columbia to Fort Vancouver, and return by
a route farther to the south, across the unknown region between
the Columbia and the Colorado rivers.

Let us follow the little band of explorers led by Captain Fremont
as day after day they made their way across what was then a trackless
waste, and see what troubles they encountered because of the inaccuracy
of the maps of that period.

Leaving Fort Vancouver, upon the lower Columbia, for the return
trip, the party ascended the river to The Dalles and then turned
southward along the eastern side of the Cascade Range. They soon
entered upon a region never before traversed by white men. At the
time when autumn was giving place to winter, without reliable guides
or maps, they were to cross the deserts lying between them and
the Rocky Mountains.

[Illustration: FIG. 47.--MAP OF A PORTION OF WESTERN NORTH AMERICA,
MADE IN 1826

Showing the Buenaventura River]

They met with no great difficulties until they had gone as far
south as Klamath Lake. "From this point," Fremont says, "our course
was intended to be about southeast to a reported lake called Mary's,
at some days' journey in the Great Basin, and thence, still on
southeast to the reputed Buenaventura (good chance) River, which
has had a place on so many maps, and countenanced the belief in
the existence o