"During our stay in Monterey," says Mr. Walpole, "Captain Fremont and his party arrived. They naturally excited curiosity. Here were true trappers, the class that produced the heroes of Fennimore Cooper's best works. These men had passed years in the wilds, living upon their own resources; they were a curious set. A vast cloud of dust appeared first, and thence in long file emerged this wildest wild party. Fremont rode ahead, a spare, active-looking man, with such an eye! He was dressed in a blouse and leggings, and wore a felt hat. After him came five Delaware Indians, who were his body-guard, and have been with him through all his wanderings; they had charge of two baggage horses. The rest, many of them blacker than the Indians, rode two and two, the rifle held by one hand across the pommel of the saddle. Thirty-nine of them are his regular men, the rest are loafers picked up lately; his original men are principally backwoodsmen, from the State of Tennessee and the banks of the upper waters of the Missouri. He has one or two with him who enjoy a high reputation in the prairies. Kit Carson is as well known there as 'the Duke' is in Europe. The dress of these men was principally a long loose coat of deer skin, tied with thongs in front; trowsers of the same, of their own manufacture, which, when wet through, they take off, scrape well inside with a knife, and put on as soon as dry; the saddles were of various fashions, though these and a large drove of horses, and a brass field-gun, were things they had picked up about California. They are allowed no liquor, tea and sugar only; this, no doubt, has much to do with their good conduct; and the discipline, too, is very strict. They were marched up to an open space on the hills near the town, under some large fires, and there took up their quarters, in messes of six or seven, in the open air. The Indians lay beside their leader. One man, a doctor, six feet six high, was an odd-looking fellow. May I never come under his hands!" Commodore Stockton had arrived the same day with Fremont and Carson and their command, and under him Fremont had been appointed General in Chief of the California forces, with Carson for his first Lieutenant; Stockton assuming the civil office of Governor of the country. This had been deemed a measure of necessity, from the fact that the California Mexicans had not yet learned, from the Mexican authorities, the actual declaration of war between the United States and Mexico; and therefore looked upon the operations of the Americans as the acts of adventurers for their own aggrandizement; and yet, with all the intensity of feeling such ideas aroused, Fremont and Carson had won their admiration and their hearts, by the rapidity of their movements, their sudden and effective blows, and the effort by dispatch to avoid all cruelty and bloodshed as far as possible.