Notes From a Once and Future Wilderness

Notes From a Once and Future Wilderness

John C. Frémont’s ‘Narratives of Exploration and Adventure’ document the West in a seamless blend of scientific rigor and literary color.

By Andy Rieber in the Wall Street Journal

On an unseasonably warm Christmas Eve in 1844, 25 men led by Lt. John C. Frémont trekked their way south and east from Lake Abert across a vast, undulating plain of sagebrush and into the Warner Valley, in present day Lake County, Ore. They encamped along the marshy shores of a shallow body of water now known as Hart Lake. The lake shelters at the foot of Hart Mountain, which forms the apex of a massive fault block looming high above the scrub and sage like a dark and mighty prow, cleaving the desert.

There, in Hart Mountain’s stern shadow, Frémont’s men roused the camp on Christmas morning with celebratory rifle fire and a salvo from their howitzer, while Frémont distributed small quantities of brandy, coffee and sugar to mark the first Christmas ever celebrated in this remote, uncharted district. “The country has a very forbidding appearance,” wrote Frémont in his journal, “presenting to the eye nothing but sage and barren ridges.”

These reflections are drawn from Frémont’s “Narratives of Exploration and Adventure,” a literary confection richly deserving of rediscovery. Frémont was an important character in the era of American expansion and exploration in the first half of the 19th century. The three expeditions he led as an officer of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers were set in motion by the nation’s appetite for westward expansion and belief in Manifest Destiny, with the mission to provide scientific descriptions of the continent’s western regions and their suitability for settlement, and to establish immigrant travel routes to (then Mexican) Alta California, and to the Oregon Territory—claimed by both the U.S. and Britain. As judiciously edited by Allan Nevins, the “Narratives,” first published in 1956, comprise journals and accounts from Frémont’s first, second and third expeditions, undertaken between 1842 and 1846, as well as excerpts from Frémont’s “Geographical Memoir” (1848) and “Memoirs of My Life” (1887).

Born out of wedlock in 1813 to a French immigrant father and a young woman from a prominent Virginia family, Frémont was fortunate to secure an education that cultivated his considerable mathematical talents, and leavened them with study of the Greek and Latin classics. As a novice in the Topographical Corps, Frémont’s scientific proclivities were further nurtured by an elite group of European scientists with expertise in geology, astronomical observation, cartography and botany.

In his journal entries, Fremont kept a detailed record as he and his company (including frontiersman Kit Carson) crossed the Great Plains, the Rockies, marched into the Columbia Basin, and penetrated south into the uncharted regions that now make up the Oregon High Desert and northern Nevada. We find Frémont reporting on the position of mountain passes, the altitude of peaks, the temperatures of hot springs, the culture and disposition of Indian tribes, and the diminution of buffalo herds.

A seamless intermingling of scientific rigor and literary color is the hallmark of Frémont’s exquisite writing. In the “Narratives,” detailed mineral analyses and reports of astronomical occultations blend effortlessly into descriptions of exhilarating beauty, allowing the reader to view the unsettled West as though for the first time. Crossing the Sierra Nevada, Frémont writes, “The tall red columns standing closely on the clear ground, the filtered, flickering sunshine from their summits far overhead, gave the dim religious light of cathedral aisles, opening out on every side, one after the other, as we advanced. . . . The pines of the European forests would hide their diminished heads amongst the great columns of the Sierra.”

The “Narratives” dwell considerably on the geographic feature that is Frémont’s signal contribution to Western geography and testimony to his scope of imagination. As Frémont made his way through southern Oregon, he hypothesized (and later confirmed) that his course was taking him through the westernmost reach of the Great Basin, a geographic feature that Frémont himself was the first to identify and name. This vast region of ancient lakebeds—covering large stretches of Utah, Nevada and eastern Oregon, with small sections extending into California and Idaho—is dominated by an untold number of north-south mountain ranges running in parallel and separated by broad, arid valleys. But its distinguishing feature is hydrological: No water escapes from within its boundaries. It is a geographical peculiarity, an enormous and mysterious sink that sequesters its waters within the ground, defying the tidy east-west logic of the Continental Divide. Frémont, Mr. Nevins reports in his introduction, was haunted by the idea of it.

The eeriness of this vast geographical oddity was personified in the Great Salt Lake—the Great Basin’s largest body of water—which Frémont was the first to navigate and scientifically describe. Among the trappers thinly scattered throughout the region, the lake was the subject of dark superstition and myth, leading Frémont to call it a “lake of almost fabulous reputation.” Frémont’s and his men were captivated by reports of the lake’s lurking dangers—including rumor that “somewhere on its surface was a terrible whirlpool, through which its waters found their way to the ocean by some subterranean communication.” Frémont’s account of the strangeness of the lake and the trepidation with which he and four of his men paddle forth in an inflatable boat of India rubber—“our frail bateau of gumcloth and distended air”—are delightful to the modern reader, who is treated to witnessing even the redoubtable Carson suffering a case of nerves.

Any reader with a relish for stories of true adventure, beautifully told, will take great pleasure in the “Narratives.” But for a Great Basin dweller like myself, they have a more intimate significance. I was raised in Salt Lake City, where the dull mirror of the Great Salt Lake—still eerie and prehistoric in appearance—was in constant view from our windows. My front yard in Adel, Ore. (population 70 or so), where I live today, is within sight of the route Frémont’s party took on their second expedition. The West I call home is littered with names plucked from Frémont’s imagination: Summer Lake, Winter Rim, Lake Abert, Christmas Valley, and—further afield—the “Golden Gate” that forms the mouth of San Francisco Bay.

A hundred and seventy years on, some of the landscapes Frémont describes—like the Salt Lake Valley and San Francisco—have been altered almost beyond reckoning. But in the western reaches of the Great Basin, the landscape that struck Frémont as so desolate is very much as he found it: vast, strange and still. With Lake County boasting a population density of one person per square mile, it is no wonder that some locals call this stretch of Oregon and Nevada desert the “Big Empty.”

Remote then, remote now, Fremont’s Great Basin represents one of the last, truly vacant spaces left on the American landscape. And although it has been explored, mapped, described and measured, the Great Basin—thank heavens—retains the character of terra incognita within the geography of the American mind.

—Ms. Rieber is a writer in Oregon covering ranching and rural Americana.