Before this no attempt to climb the mountain had ever been successful, but as in many other similar matters, no serious effort seems ever before to have been made. The night of the 13th, James and his two companions spent in a most uncomfortable place, and on the next morning started early with the hope of making the round journey before dark. About noon, timber line, 11,720 feet, was reached, and by four o'clock they stood on the mighty summit, 14,108 feet above the sea, and 8000 above the plains, and could see on the east the prairie ocean melting into the limitless distance, while on the other hand spread away a broad chaos of peaks, canyons, valleys, fading into the depths of the unknown Wilderness. Vast clouds of grasshoppers were flying over the peak, sometimes so dense as almost to obscure the light. After about half an hour on the majestic summit, now reached by a prosaic railway, the descent began. Losing their course, they failed to reach the camp of the previous night, and were forced to sleep out with no food or shelter or comfort of any kind; not after all so awful as it sounds. As soon as light came in the morning they continued, and reached their camp only to find it ablaze; the fire had spread and consumed everything except a few scraps of food, on which they greedily breakfasted. A heavy bison and Amerind trail passed the Boiling Spring going into the mountains. This is now a road to South Park. Long rightly named this peak after James, and it should have retained the name of the man first to surmount it, but geographical names are sometimes singularly acquired, and so the peak which Pike saw from some miles away, and was not the first to see, received his name without his intention, or that of any one else. Indeed, no one can tell just how it came to be called after Pike, except that it simply grew; and Frémont finally put it on record. Leaving Boiling Spring Creek, as the Long party called it, translating the original French name, they struck south-west on July 16th, to the "Arkansa," thus properly pronouncing (Arkansaw), and also correctly writing it. The river takes its name from the Arkansa tribe, and how it came to be designated by the plural is another of the curiosities of geographic nomenclature. They looked for Pike's "blockhouse," but could not find a trace of anything resembling work of white men, which is not strange when we remember that what Pike built on or near the site of Pueblo, was an extremely rude affair and not a house at all. Some of the Long party went up the river to the deep canyon by which it cuts a passage through the mountains, where Pike had already been, and where to-day the railway follows the torrent out of the tangled rock masses to the plain.