A storm in the mountains is a frightful thing in winter and more than one was encountered by General Fremont and his party. A number of the men sacrificed their lives through the mistaken judgment of a leader, who ordered them forward to breast the fury of those icy blasts of snow and sleet. Oh! The terror of such a death! The awe of those cold, bleak, snow-capped pinnacles; how cruelly they look down upon the lost and helpless victim, prostrate at their feet, snow-bound, hopeless and in despair! How subtly and menacingly the sharp wind moans; how it shrieks and roars through the gulches, and how the giant pines creak, and writhe, and groan, as they bend before the gale! How the blinding, biting, swirling snow falls through the freezing air, burying the trail and filling the icy gorges with ever deepening drifts! And at last, the shivering sufferer meets his doom as he sinks in utter exhaustion on his bed of snow, and drifts away into the stupor of death. The inanimate form is buried deeper and deeper under its white shroud, and heedless of the tempest raging above, sleeps the sound, dreamless sleep of death. Fremont tells little of his last three trips; some being on secret missions for the Government; one was for his own benefit and that of Senator Benton of Missouri, whose daughter, Jessie Benton, he had married--a lady of many fine womanly qualities and personal charms. On one of his trips, William Gilpin was along, on a visit to the settlements of Oregon. Gilpin later became Colorado's first Governor. One expedition took him up the Rio Grande to Salt Lake and on to the Coast. [Illustration: Indians Watching Fremont's Force Fording the Platte.] When representing the Government, Fremont's work was along military lines principally, his operations leading up to the conquest of California in 1847. The name California appears in an old Spanish romance as an Island, where innumerable precious stones were found, and Cortez applied the name to the Bay and to the country that is now California which he thought was an Island. Fremont's work, however, was not all military, for at the same time he was mapping streams, taking altitudes, and making reports that would assist in ascertaining facts about a country then little known or understood. Colorado has a County named for him, of which Canon City is the County Seat. There are Counties in Wyoming, Idaho and Iowa, similarly named. Eighteen states of the union have towns bearing his name. "Fremont Basin" covers the western part of Utah, all of Nevada, and a part of the southeastern portion of California--in all, a region about four hundred and fifty miles square. "Fremont Pass" in the Rocky Mountains has an elevation of eleven thousand three hundred and thirteen feet and is in the Gore Range, about ten miles northwest of Leadville.