In the spring of 1843, Frémont started upon a second and more extended governmental exploration to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail along the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St. Vrain's, whence he made a detour south to Boiling Spring and Bent's trading-post on the Arkansas River. Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided his company, sending part of it over his course of 1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while he led his own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the Medicine Bow Range, and across North Park, where rises the North Platte. Before reaching Fort Hall, where he was to reunite his party, he made another detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like Balboa as he looked upon the inland sea. From Fort Hall, which he reached on September 18, he followed the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the Dalles of the Columbia. Whether the ocean could be reached by any river between the Columbia and Colorado was a matter of much interest to persons concerned with the control of the Pacific. The facts, well enough known to the trappers, had not yet received scientific record when Frémont started south from the Dalles in November, 1843, to ascertain them. His march across the Nevada desert was made in the dead of winter under difficulties that would have brought a less resolute explorer to a stop. It ended in March, 1844, at Sutter's ranch in the Sacramento Valley, with half his horses left upon the road. His homeward march carried him into southern California and around the sources of the Colorado, proving by recorded observation the difficult character of the country between the mountains and the Pacific. In following years the Pathfinder revisited the scenes of these two expeditions upon which his reputation is chiefly based. A man of resolution and moderate ability, the glory attendant upon his work turned his head. His later failures in the face of military problems far beyond his comprehension tended to belittle the significance of his earlier career, but history may well agree with the eminent English traveller, Burton, who admits that: "Every foot of ground passed over by Colonel Frémont was perfectly well known to the old trappers and traders, as the interior of Africa to the Arab and Portuguese pombeiros. But this fact takes nothing away from the honors of the man who first surveyed and scientifically observed the country." Through these two journeys the Pacific West rose in clear definition above the American intellectual horizon. "The American Eagle," quoth the _Platte (Missouri) Eagle_ in 1843, "is flapping his wings, the precurser [_sic_] of the end of the British lion, on the shores of the Pacific. Destiny has willed it."