When he was quite beyond the reach of recall, for it was before the days of telegraphy, she wrote to the colonel of the Topographical Bureau, and confessed what she had done, at the same time giving ample reason for her action. To have obeyed the order, she explained, would have meant the ruin of the expedition. Together with the time it would have required to settle the party before he could leave it, the length of the trip to Washington, and the inevitable delays there, the early grass would be past its best, and the animals thus would be thrown underfed into the mountains for the winter. She then replied to the charge made against Frémont in the order of his recall. The expedition must cross the country of the Blackfeet and other unfriendly tribes of Indians, with no reverence whatever for the cause of science, but with a very wholesome regard for any rights that were backed up with a howitzer. Her father, who was absent from St. Louis at the time, endorsed her action, and wrote to Washington, assuming the responsibility for it, saying he would call for a court-martial on the point charged against Frémont. Nothing further was heard of it, however, and the precious time, that meant so much more to the scientific mind of the explorer than to his government, to which all seasons are the same, was saved. From an historical point of view this was the most important of all Frémont's expeditions. With the French territory which we had acquired by the Louisiana purchase we inherited also France's old feud with England, the underlying cause of which was the control of the markets in the East. When we took up the cudgels, their conflict, so far as the Western hemisphere was involved, had narrowed down to the ultimate possession of that portion of Mexico's territory which included the harbor of San Francisco. England had already made her survey of the ground, and her eye coveted that matchless port. She was the power we confronted in California when our war with Mexico ushered in the moment for decisive action. Two courageous, intensely American men, however, held the situation in their grasp,--in the Senate, at the climax of his powers, Benton, who had ever had a jealous eye upon England's encroachments on our boundary; in the field, Frémont, with all the gallantry and spirit that final coup demanded. The British admiral, moving with more deliberation than the American colonel, with characteristic love of sport and appreciation of success, gracefully accepted his defeat, and tendered his felicitations to the intrepid rival, whose flag he found already floating above the coveted territory.