It was in this way. Bonneville had with him an old Santa Fé trail man named J. R. Walker; for we must remember that in 1832 the Santa Fé trail had really seen its best days. Walker wanted to go to California, and Bonneville was eager to have him do so, for the worthy captain was far more concerned about beaver than about geography; and there was, as we shall presently discover, a very good reason to foresee an abundance of beaver in California. Bonneville and his lieutenant, when these plans first matured, were still on the Green River, this being the year after they had first reached the Rockies. The fur trade was not prosperous; even thus early they found competition in the Rocky Mountains. The country was not new enough. The West, as viewed from the headwaters of the Green River, lay still farther forward in the course of the setting sun. Walker must go to California and bring back from it its beaver peltry. Walker, therefore, on July twenty-seventh, 1833, left Bonneville on the Green River and started on the tremendous journey toward the Pacific Ocean. He took with him forty men, and perhaps later picked up a dozen wandering trappers or so, who desired to join the California venture. Here, then, was a discoverer who started for California more than a decade before Frémont did; more than sixteen years before any one suspected California to be a land of gold. The trapping of beaver, and not the digging of gold, was the first cause of Californian exploration by the Americans of the upper West. The beaver was a fateful animal. Walker dropped down the Green River into the valley of the Great Salt Lake, which was at that time a perfectly well known country, though it had not been described in any official reports. Thence he headed westward across the Great Basin, whose terrors had so long held back even the hardy trappers of the mountain region. He gave the name Barren River to the stream now called the Humboldt. He gave his own name to another stream. After some fashion he won across the great desert, and crossed also the Sierra range, accomplishing this latter feat about October twenty-fifth. He was, perhaps, the first man to see the Yosemite valley, though as to that we can not be certain. By the end of November, 1833, he was within view of the Pacific Ocean. After all, then, it did not seem to be so hard to get across the country in those early times. Nor was it so difficult to return. Walker had fifty-two men and three hundred and sixty-five horses when he started eastward in February, 1834. He had, of course, met that Spanish civilization which first explored the Colorado River and first settled the Pacific slope. Walker now had guides, Indians of the land, who led him eastward across the Sierras, somewhat south of the place where he crossed going west.