of our continent were brought to light--the Great Salt Lake, the Utah
Lake, the Little Salt Lake; at all which places, then deserts, the
Mormons now are; the Sierra Nevada, then solitary in the snow, now
crowded with Americans, digging gold from its flanks: the beautiful
valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin, then alive with wild
horses, elk, deer, and wild fowls, now smiling with American
cultivation; the Great Basin itself and its contents; the Three Parks;
the approximation of the great rivers which, rising together in the
central region of the Rocky Mountains, go off east and west, towards
the rising and the setting sun--all these, and other strange features
of a new region, more Asiatic than American, were brought to light and
revealed to public view in the results of this exploration.

"Eleven months he was never out of sight of snow; and sometimes,
freezing with cold, would look down upon a sunny valley, warm with
genial heat;--sometimes panting with the summer's heat, would look up
at the eternal snows which crowned the neighboring mountain. But it
was not then that California was secured to the Union--to the greatest
power of the New World--to which it of right belonged; but it was the
first step towards the acquisition, and the one that led to it. The
second expedition led to a third, just in time to snatch the golden
California from the hands of the British, ready to clutch it. But of
this hereafter. Fremont's second expedition was now over. He had left
the United States a fugitive from his government, and returned with a
name that went over Europe and America, and with discoveries bearing
fruit which the civilized world is now enjoying."

On their homeward-bound journey, the party followed up the valley of
the San Joaquin crossing over the Sierra Nevada and coast range of
mountains at a point where they join and form a beautiful low pass.