Only familiarity with one of like character, by actually seeing it, can give a just idea of the country through which they were traveling. Livingston's descriptions of localities in Central Africa might be transferred to our pages _verbatim_, to give a word-painting of the desiccated deserts of what is now New Mexico and Arizona. Carson's curiosity, as well as care to preserve the knowledge for future use, led him to note in memory, every feature of the wild landscape, its mountain chains, its desert prairies, with only clumps of the poor artemisia for vegetation, its rivers, and the oases upon their banks, where there were bottom-lands--nor were beaver found elsewhere--with its river beds whose streams had found a passage beneath the surface of the earth, and each other general feature that would attract the eye of the natural, rather than the scientific observer. In our day, the note book of the pioneer furnishing the data, the traveler carries a guide-book to direct his course from point to point, upon a well trodden road, to those places where grass and water will furnish refreshment for his animals, while he regales himself, not upon the spare-rib of a starved mule, killed because it could go no longer, but upon a variety of good things from the well stocked larder of the pouches of the saddle-bags his pack mule carries, or the provision box of his wagon. Or, instead of the meat-diet of the trapper, when he has been in luck in a fertile locality, the traveler--not trapper--of to-day, perhaps has shot a prairie chicken, and prepares his dinner by making a stew of it, which he consumes with hard bread he has purchased at a station not ten miles away. Familiarity with the features of the country does not restore the experience of the pioneer of these wilds. The Indian, now, is advised by authority he seldom dares defy, to keep off the roads of the emigrants; and seldom does a party leave the road for any great distance; nor are these roads infrequent, but the country is intersected with them, and the guide-books protect against mistake in taking the wrong direction. The test of character, however, with the trappers, was their ability to endure hardships when they had to be encountered; and to guard against them, when they could be avoided, by a wise foresight in taking advantage of every favor of fortune, and turning each freak or whim of the wily dame to best account. Carson was delighted with California from the first, and realizing intense satisfaction in his position, yet a youth, on terms of easy familiarity with the other seventeen old trappers, especially selected for this expedition, circumstances conspired to call into play all the activities of his nature, and nothing intruded to prevent his resigning himself to the impulses of the time, and making the most of every occasion that offered.