It can not accurately be told who first made this trail, crossing the valley of the Colorado, whose flood drains two hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles of mountain and desert. In 1781 Father Garcés built a mission on the Colorado near the mouth of the Gila. But he was not the first. Cardenas, a fellow-soldier with Coronado, is perhaps the first man to write of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado; but he was not the first to discover it nor the first to see that stream. Alarcon, a member of the party of the sea captain Uloa, was the first man to reach the Colorado. This was in the year 1540, the ship of Uloa reaching the Gulf of California in 1539. This was a small matter of three hundred years before Frémont saw the South Pass, some three hundred years before Jedediah Smith crossed the desert to California, and something like three hundred years before the upper sources of the Mississippi River were known! So thus we may leave this portion of the West to await the Gadsden Purchase, and the addition of the land won by Houston and Crockett and Fannin and Travis and other hero friends to the south and east of the purchased territory. As for the transportation employed during these early times, we may repeat a few facts by way of insistence. The Santa Fé trade began with pack trains, but saw wagons used in 1822. In 1826 General Ashley took his little wheeled cannon through the South Pass to his fort on Utah Lake. In 1830 Smith, Sublette and Jackson made the journey from the Missouri River with mule teams and wagons as far as the Wind River; and they said they could have gone on over the South Pass with their wagons had they wished to do so. Poor Bonneville! His distinction of taking the first wagon through the South Pass is as empty as that of Frémont in climbing his mountain peak near that same South Pass. Both accomplishments had been left undone by earlier visitors simply because they did not want to do these things. We see that, before Carson or Walker or Smith, the courses and headwaters of the Yellowstone and the Missouri and the Columbia rivers were all very well known. We have noted that Smith knew of the Columbia settlements. This he knew because he had learned it at the rendezvous. How came these settlements on the Columbia? We shall have to go to New York to find the answer to that question. Everybody knows the story of Astoria and the beginning of the American Fur Company. John Jacob Astor of New York secured a New York charter for that company April sixth, 1808, very soon after hearing the results of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He had a great purpose in his mind. He had fought out and bought out competitors in the fur trade all along the Great Lakes; had met and gaged the resources of the Northwest Company, then beginning to rival the ancient Hudson Bay Company in the wild race across the continent.