The Frémont party arrived at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas July second, 1844. They had traveled somewhere between thirty-five hundred and four thousand miles, had circumnavigated the mysterious "Great Desert," and for eight months had never been out of sight of ice and snow. Frémont was able to report upon the great Columbia River, and he and his contemporaries did not hesitate to extol the value of Oregon as a gateway of the Asiatic trade--a line of commerce which for half a century did little to establish the truth of their prophecy.
This, then, was the end of the first exploration of the Rockies accompanied by thermometer and barometer rather than by trap sack and "possible bag." It was of value. If we were asked what was the most valuable result of this second expedition of Frémont, we should be obliged to answer that it was his mention of the great value of the Western grasses. Frémont was an observer, a chronicler, a writer. It was he that first began to bring back accurate story of the resources of the West.
The mineral wealth of the West, over which the trappers had tramped for a quarter of a century, was as yet unsought and unsuspected by Frémont or any one else. It was to be first the fur trade, then the mining trade, then the cattle trade in the trans-Mississippi West; and after that the agricultural life, followed by the days of swift transportation, of change, of transition and expansion and gourd-like growth in all visible ways.
We are now well forward in the third era of Kit Carson's career. If at first he was a trapper and hunter in order that he might become fit guide, during the third stage of his life he was to be accepted as the authorized guide of the most important preliminaries for the west-bound movement of the trans-Mississippi population. After the close of the second Frémont expedition, and during the year 1845, Carson tried to be a ranchman or farmer, pitching his tents for the time about fifty miles east of Taos. It was of no avail. Frémont called for him once more. The farm was sold for half its value, and once more Carson set his face toward the West, in company with a Frémont now older, better seasoned and of better judgment. A more direct trail across the Great Basin and into California was desired than that taken either in going or returning on the second expedition.