John C. Fremont, with Kit Carson and Thomas Fitzpatrick as his guides, first came into Carbon County, Wyoming, in early August of 1843, traveling west camping on the principal fork of the Medicine Bow River near “an isolated mountain called the Medicine Butte.”—This of course, was Elk Mountain.
On August 3, in 1843, Fremont continued west, seeing “bands of buffalo.” That evening Carson “brought into the camp a cow which had fat on the fleece two inches thick,” which Fremont said, “was the first good buffalo meat we had obtained.”
His men had traveled twenty-six miles that day and the following day hunters brought in “pack animals loaded with fine meat” as the party continued toward the North Platte, reaching the river after nightfall. “We were obliged to feel our way, and clear a road in the darkness.” They had carriages with them that became hung up in the deep sagebrush but about 10 o’clock Fremont halted.
He would write: “Our animals were turned down towards the river while the men camped in a ravine, lighting fires of sagebrush, eventually eating dinner about midnight” noting the meal was “a supper which we were hungry enough to find delightful—although the buffalo meat was crusted with sand, and the coffee was bitter with the wormwood taste of the artemisia leaves.”
Fremont noted the presence of coal in the rocky strata and “thin layers of a very fine white salts, in powder”—no doubt alkali. But with a fresh supply of meat, he held up at the North Platte, in the vicinity of what would become the site of Fort Steele.
“Determined to make … a provision of dried meat, which would be necessary for our subsistence in the region we were about entering, which was said to be nearly destitute of game” the men built scaffolds, started fires, and cut the meat into thin strips that could be easily dried. Thus occupied they were “thrown into sudden tumult, by a charge of about 70 mounted Indians” who had come over the low hills.
The attack came to an abrupt halt when the charging Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians saw the small cannon Fremont had with him. As the two sides faced off and eventually spoke through interpreters—possibly Thomas Fitzpatrick or Kit Carson—the tribesmen informed Fremont they had believed the troops to be a party of hostile Indians.
Fremont didn’t quite believe them though, writing that the “display of our little howitzer, and our favorable position in the grove certainly saved our horses, and probably ourselves, from their maurading intentions.”
Leaving the North Platte on August 6, Fremont traveled “over an extremely rugged country, barren and uninteresting—nothing to be seen but Artemisia bushes.” They had now turned toward the north and would soon reach the Sweetwater River, which they followed over South Pass taking “the road to Oregon.”
Fremont continued west across portions of Utah, Nevada, and California, leaving the small cannon in the rugged Sierra Nevada—at a location never found. The following summer he turned back toward the east.
On June 11, 1844, his party returned to Carbon County, traveling into the Little Snake River valley. He described the country as “sandy and poor, scantily wooded with cedars, but the river bottoms afforded good pasture.”
The men killed three antelope in the afternoon and camped downstream from the point where Henry Fraeb, had engaged in a fight with Indians two years earlier. In his report Fremont noted, “We passed during the day a place where [earlier] Carson had been fired upon so close that one of the men had five bullets through his body.” This was the site of the fight along the Little Snake River with the Arapaho and Lakota Indians that gave such places as Battle Mountain and Battle Pass their names.
Upon leaving the river the following day, Fremont’s entourage “took our way across the hills, where every hollow had a spring of running water, with good grass.” Ahead of them were the “high mountains which divide the Pacific from the Mississippi water,” as he put it.
“Entering here along the lower spurs, or foot hills of the range, the face of the country began to improve with a magical rapidity.” That morning they had their “first glad view” of buffalo and “welcomed the appearance of two old bulls with as much joy as if they had been messengers from home.”
Seeing “fresh entrails” in the river, they knew Indians were having a successful hunt somewhere upstream. Considering it unsafe to camp along the river bottom, they moved to higher ground and “forted strongly” in a small aspen grove near which they found a spring of fresh water. During the day hunters killed two cow buffalo and later they saw elk and antelope as well as dust boiling up from a herd of buffalo moving across the river plain.
“The country here appeared more variously stocked with game than any part of the Rocky mountains we had visited; and its abundance is owing to the excellent pasturage, and its dangerous character as a war ground,” Fremont wrote.
On June 13, 1844, Fremont moved deeper into the Sierra Madre range crossing the divide at midday where he noted, “With joy and exultation we saw ourselves once more on the top of the Rocky mountains, and beheld a little stream taking its course towards the rising sun.” He called that stream “Pullam’s fork,” named, he said, for a trapper who had been killed in the area some years before by Gros Ventre Indians—again this is probably a story he heard from Carson.
Dropping down the east face of the Sierra Madre the Fremont party “saw spread out before us the valley of the Platte, with the pass of the Medicine Butte beyond, and some of the Sweet Water mountains; but a smoky haziness in the area entirely obscured the Wind River chain.”
Although Fremont could have continued traveling east, doing so would have taken him over ground he had already seen—as he knew from the obvious marker that was Medicine Butte. Instead, he turned south toward “objects worthy to be explored” namely the three parks of Colorado—North, Middle, and South. He knew of their existence, no doubt, from information provided by Carson, who had trapped the whole region. That night Fremont’s men again built a fortified camp in a grove of trees where they found plenty of water, grass, and game.
On June 14 Fremont tramped southeast along the foot of the mountains. “The country is beautifully watered,” he wrote, adding, “In almost every hollow ran a clear, cool mountain stream; and in the course of the morning we crossed seventeen, several of them being large creeks, forty to fifty feet wide, with a swift current, and tolerably deep.” Antelope, elk, and buffalo abounded.
“We halted at noon on Potter’s fork—[the Encampment River near Riverside and Encampment]—a clear swift stream, forty yards wide, and in many places deep enough to swim our animals,” Fremont said.
That night they camped ten miles southeast of present Encampment, where Fremont wrote, “there were several beaver dams, and many trees recently cut down by the beaver. We gave to this the name of Beaver Dam creek, as now they are becoming sufficiently rare to distinguish by their name the streams on which they are found.”
Moving on south the following day, perhaps near Bear Creek, the men “had an animated chase after a grizzly bear..., which we tried to lasso. [Andreas] Fuentes threw the lasso upon his neck, but it slipped and he escaped into the dense thickets of the creek, into which we did not like to venture.”
Fremont’s party continued south through the area the Arapahos called “The Door” because it was an opening they took when traveling to the Colorado parks, particularly the area around Estes Park. Fremont and his men crossed the Platte River and, as he put it, went “through a gate” in the mountains finding themselves in New Park, known to the Indians as “Cow Lodge” and which is today’s North Park.
Fremont would then continue across Colorado, striking the Arkansas River and following it—and the Santa Fe Trail—east to return to St. Louis on August 6, 1844, concluding a fourteen-month reconnaissance of the West, that earned him recognition as “the Pathfinder,” even though he was guided by Kit Carson and other trappers.
Candy Moulton can be reached at: Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
