being regarded, if regarded at all, as one of the incidents of the tremendous collision of Europe with Africa. When, early in March, 1844, John C. Fremont, with thirty or forty followers, astonished Captain Sutter by dropping down from the Sierra Nevada upon his _ranche_ on the Sacramento, the old Switzer could not have been more completely dumbfounded had he been told that his visitors had just descended from the clouds, than he was by the truthful assurance that they were an exploring party, who had left the United States only ten months before, and had since made their way across the continent. To pass the Sierra in winter had hitherto been deemed an impossibility, and, indeed, the condition of Fremont's surviving beasts of burden--thirty-three out of the sixty-seven with which he started--proved the presumption not far out of the way. To traverse the continent at all, even in summer, on a line stretching due west from the Hudson, the Delaware, or the Potomac, to the Pacific Ocean, was an unattempted feat, whereof the hardships, the dangers, were certain, and the success exceedingly doubtful. A very few parties of daring adventurers had, during several of the six or eight preceding summers, pushed up the Platte from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains, followed the Sweetwater from the point where the North Platte emerges from the heart of those mountains, running to the northward, and having thus passed through the great central chain of North America (for the Sweetwater heads on the west side of the mountain range, and the South Pass, through which it seeks the Platte, is a broad elevated gap, wherein the face of the country is but moderately rolling, and the trail better than almost any where else), turned abruptly to the north-west, crossed the Green River source of the Colorado, which leads a hundred miles farther north, and soon struck across a mountainous water-shed to the Lewis or Snake branch of the Columbia, which they followed down to the great river of the west, and thus reached the coveted shore of the Pacific,--that Oregon which they had chosen as their future home, mainly because it was, of all possible Eldorados, the farthest and the least accessible. Trappers, hunters, and Indian traders, few in numbers, and generally men of desperate fortunes, who realized that 'The world was not their friend, nor the world's law,'