No diary of that remarkable journey was kept by Dr. Whitman, but most of its incidents are known. Terribly severe weather was encountered almost at the start, for ten days they were snowed up in the mountains, and long before the journey ended, were reduced to rations of dog and mule meat. But they struggled on, more than once losing the way and giving themselves up for lost, and on March 3, 1843, just five months from Walla-Walla, Whitman entered Washington. His spectacular ride rivetted public attention upon the far western country, and the information which he gave concerning it opened the Nation's eyes to its value. When he returned, later in the year, to the banks of the Columbia, he took back with him a train of two hundred wagons and a thousand settlers--a veritable army of occupation which the British could not match. Three years later, so steadily did the tide continue which Whitman had started, the American population had risen to over ten thousand, there was never any further real uncertainty as to whom Oregon belonged, and the treaty of 1846 settled the question for all time. The new territory was soon to be the scene of a terrible tragedy. The white man had brought new diseases into it, measles, fevers, and even, smallpox; they spread rapidly among the Indians, aggravated by their imprudence and ignorance of proper treatment, and many died. The Indians became convinced that the missionaries were to blame, and it is claimed, too, that the emissaries of the Hudson Bay Company urged them on. However that may have been, on the twenty-ninth of November, 1847, the Indians fell upon the missionaries and killed fifteen, of them, among the dead being Marcus Whitman and his wife. So ended the life of the man who saved Oregon, and of the woman who was the first of her sex to cross the continent. Meanwhile, far to the south, a drama scarcely less thrilling was enacting, its chief personage being John Augustus Sutter. Sutter was a Swiss and had received a military education and served in the Swiss Guard before coming to America in 1834. He settled first at St. Louis and then at Santa Fe, where he gained considerable experience as a trader. Finally, in 1838, he decided to cross the Rockies, and after trading for a time in a little schooner up and down the coast, was wrecked in San Francisco Bay. He made his way inland, and founded the first white settlement in the country on the site of what is now Sacramento. Here, in 1841, he built a fort, having secured a large grant of land from the Mexican Government, and set up what was really a little empire in the wilderness, over which he reigned supreme. And here, three years later, down from the snow-filled and tempest-swept passes of the Rockies, came a party of starving and frost-bitten scarecrows, the exploring expedition headed by John Charles Fremont, of whom we shall speak presently.