Walker’s biographer, Douglas S. Watson, referring to Bonneville’s effort to blame the financial failure of his western enterprises upon a scapegoat, stated, “Whatever may have been Bonneville’s purpose in besmirching Walker in which Irving so willingly lent himself, he has hardly succeeded, for where one person today knows the name Bonneville, thousands regard Captain Joseph Reddeford Walker as one of the foremost of western explorers, worthy to be grouped with Jedediah Strong Smith and Ewing Young as the trilogy responsible for the march of this nation to the shores of the Pacific; the true pathfinders.” Walker’s perseverance in completing his California journey grew out of a solemn determination to make a personal contribution to the expansion of the United States westward to the Pacific. His cavalcade crossed the Great Basin west of Great Salt Lake via the valley of the Humboldt and, passing south by Carson Lake and the Bridgeport Valley, struck westward into the Sierra Nevada. The exact course they took across the Sierra has been a matter of conjecture; some students have attempted to identify it with the Truckee route, and others have maintained that no ascent was made until the party reached the stream now known as Walker River. It seems probable that they climbed the eastern flank of the Sierra by one of the southern tributaries of the East Walker River. Once over the crest of the range, they traveled west along the divide between the Tuolumne and the Merced rivers directly into the heart of the present Yosemite National Park. In Leonard’s narrative is found the following very significant comment regarding the crossing: We travelled a few miles every day, still on top of the mountain, and our course continually obstructed with snow hills and rocks. Here we began to encounter in our path many small streams which would shoot out from under these high snow-banks, and after running a short distance in deep chasms which they have through the ages cut in the rocks, precipitate themselves from one lofty precipice to another, until they are exhausted in rain below. Some of these precipices appeared to us to be more than a mile high. Some of the men thought that if we could succeed in descending one of these precipices to the bottom, we might thus work our way into the valley below—but on making several attempts we found it utterly impossible for a man to descend, to say nothing of our horses. We were then obliged to keep along the top of the dividing ridge between two of these chasms which seemed to lead pretty near in the direction we were going—which was west,—in passing over the mountain, supposing it to run north and south.