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             Military Explorations of the Great West



                  ┌────────────────────────┐
                  │   F1 - Introduction    │
                  │   F2 - Wilkes          │
                  │   F3 - Fremont         │
                  │   F4 - Emory           │
                  │   F5 - Railroad Surveys│
                  │   F6 - Filling the Gaps│
                  │   F7 - Post Civil War  │
                  └────────────────────────┘

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~#1
             Introduction


         The West had clearly changed by 1838.  It was being thought
    of as a potential home - land to be cultivated rather than
    plundered.  A new kind of explorer was required.  The Army was
    largely unused since the War of 1812, its tasks minimal and
    unchallenging. This led to the development of the U.S. Corps of
    Topographical Engineers and the military explorer.  Officially
    formed in 1838, the topographical Corps was composed largely of
    the best of the West Point graduates who were specially trained
    in scientific skills, engineering, map-making and topographical
    drawing.  Though they worked on coastal fortifications, river
    surveys, and the mapping of the Great Lakes, in the 1840s and 50s
    they turned their attention to the West and became its dominant
    explorers.  Their model, however, was not a West Point graduate.
    He was the John C. Fremont, a product of the U.S. Coast Survey, a
    flawed protege of French scientist Jean Nicollet and Ferdinand
    Hassler of that Bureau.  He was also to reduce exploration (and
    public relations) to a science.  For the next two decades Fremont
    and others more competent than he brought the direction of
    government and the skills of science to the exploration of the
    West.  In so doing, they were agents of Manifest Destiny and
    servants of a rapidly-growing America whose citizens echoed the
    cry, "Westward the course of empire takes its way."

~#2
    CHARLES WILKES [1798-1877]:

         Going West in the early 1840s usually meant going to Oregon,
    which had become a focus of American aspirations.  Fremont's
    mission in 1842 was to map the South Pass, a key point on the
    Oregon Trail.  But even as he was carrying out that assignment,
    another expedition had returned to Washington with a report on
    the Oregon country.  Capt Charles Wilkes was born in New York
    city.  He entered the Merchant Service in 1815.  In 1838 after
    various experiences he was but in command of the U.S. Exploring
    Expedition, a naval enterprise, which made a thorough
    investigation of the Oregon country as part of his great global
    exploring expedition of the Pacific Ocean.  What he had to say
    about Oregon was important, but he was having trouble getting
    Congress's attention because of a flurry of courts-martial
    charges preferred against him upon his return from the world-
    circling voyage.

         Wilkes had departed from Hampton Roads, VA, on August 18,
    1838, as commander of a flotilla of 6 ships bound for the Pacific
    Ocean.  His expedition represented a concession to the eastern
    seaboard maritime interests who were concerned about the whaling
    and sealing industries and trade with the nations and peoples of
    the western Pacific.  In one of the epic events of 19th-century
    exploration, Wilkes took his fleet through the South Atlantic and
    around Cape Horn to Australia and the South Pacific islands.
    Turning south, he coasted the icy shores of the Antarctic for
    1500 miles (in the process proving that the Antarctic was a
    continent), then sailed north via the Pacific islands to the
    Oregon coast.  Here he divided his forces.  Wilkes led one group
    of ships in an exploration of Vancouver Island, the Straits of
    Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound.  He also examined Gray's Harbour
    at the base of the Olympic Peninsula while searching for a viable
    port on the Pacific.  The captain and his men found the beautiful
    coastline every bit as exotic as the South Pacific.  It was a
    land of fur-caped Indians who danced in hideous masks, sailed
    their carved 50-foot-long war canoes far out into the ocean, and
    studded their villages with mysterious totem poles.  Wilkes's
    scientists and ethnographers found the Northwest Coast a rich
    exotic region for study.

         The captain, however, was primarily interested in global
    policy and safe harbors on the Pacific shores, which is why he
    carefully searched the entire coast north of the Columbia.  He
    also sent exploring parties inland: one from Puget Sound south to
    the Columbia; one up the Columbia past the Dalles, or rapids, to
    the Hudson's Bay post at Fort Colvile near the junction of the
    Snake and the Columbia; and one south through the Willamette
    Valley to California's San Francisco Bay.  The latter expedition
    determined that there were no good harbors south of the Columbia
    and no large rivers flowing from the interior.

         Meanwhile, Capt William L. Hudson, in charge of the other
    half of Wilkes's fleet, came to grief of the mouth of the
    Columbia.  He lost his flagship Peacock to the treacherous
    currents and sand bars at the mouth of the river.  It thus became
    clear to both Hudson and Wilkes that the Columbia estuary was not
    a safe harbor.  The only such harbors lay far north of the
    Columbia in or around Puget Sound.  Thus Wilkes thought American
    diplomatic efforts should be aimed at securing territory at least
    that far north.  But he returned home [1842] under such a cloud
    of acrimony over the methods he used to discipline his seamen
    that Congress authorized only 100 copies of his report to be
    published, and a lengthy court debate ensued as to whether Wilkes
    and Hudson were covering up for bad seamanship when the described
    the mouth of the Columbia as an unsuitable harbor.  Neither
    Presidents John Tyler nor James Polk paid much attention to the
    valuable information he gave them.  Perhaps the outstanding
    positive result of his expedition was that his extensive
    scientific collections eventually came to form the nucleus of the
    Smithsonian Institution after it was created in 1846.  Wilkes
    spent 1844-61 preparing the final report which came out in 19
    volumes.

~#3
    JOHN CHARLES FREMONT [1813-1890]:

         John C. Fremont conducted 5 explorations between 1842-54.
    Called "the Pathfinder" in the public press he actually found few
    new paths himself.  Yet, through his published reports, he became
    a symbol of adventure and expansionism.  A slipshod explorer and
    scientist, he was glamorous and appealing, a man who always
    looked for the grand gesture that would promote his interests.

         Poinsett, Fremont's patron, helped to organize the Army
    Corps of Topographical Engineers while Secretary of War.  He then
    obtained a 2nd Lt commission for Fremont at the same time
    assigning him as a civilian to the Corps' first major western
    project: an expedition into the area between the upper
    Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.  The tour was under the
    direction of Joseph Nicollet the most competent and thorough
    topographer in America at that time.  Fremont spent two years
    under Nicollet's direction and instruction.

         Back in Washington, Fremont married the daughter of Thomas
    Hart Benton, the powerful expansionist Senator from Missouri.
    The Senator and other expansionist colleagues pushed through
    congress an appropriation of $30,000 to chart the area up to
    South Pass to map the whole area scientifically, covering ground
    poorly defined by trappers more interested in beaver than details
    of elevation and longitude.  With Nicollet ill, Fremont's name
    was pushed to the top by his father-in-law.  In 1842 Lt Fremont
    of the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers led the expedition
    of 39 men to South Pass, the Green River, and the Wind River
    range.

         When Fremont set out from Independence, MO, in May 1843, he
    was part of a cavalcade of emigrants heading west over the Oregon
    Trail.  Joseph B. Chiles's party had left for California ahead of
    him, as had Elijah White's caravan bound for Oregon.  Sir William
    Drummond Steward headed a large entourage bound for one last hunt
    on the Green River, while William Gilpin was traveling across the
    mountains with visions of a transcontinental railroad dancing in
    his head.  Fremont's party was guided by the veteran mountain man
    Tom "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick (he had shot his own left wrist
    during a wild escape from Blackfeet).  They were soon joined by 5
    foot 4 inch Kit Carson and Alexis Godey.  In an effort to locate
    a new trail, Fremont marched out along the Kansas rather than the
    Platte River, crossed over the Front Range of the Rockies at the
    head of the Cache de la Poudre River, then trekked over the
    barren Laramie Plain to the Sweetwater and South Pass.  From
    there, despite his orders,  he and his men crossed the Wasatch
    Mountains and gazed upon the Great Salt Lake.  "The Pathfinder",
    described the area in such glowing terms that Brigham Young and
    his Mormons may have been influenced to settle this area in years
    to come.

         Fremont pushed on, past the British outpost at Fort Hall in
    Idaho to the Columbia River where he paused at the Dalles
    November 8.  He sent a party on to the mouth of the Columbia and
    thus technically linked up with the Wilkes expedition, but his
    mind really was set on turning southward in search of the elusive
    east-west river route.  On November 23, 1843, he did just that.
    He and his men followed the Des Chutes River for two days, coming
    out on the northern edge of what Fremont was the first to
    recognize as the Great Basin.  (In fact he gave it that name.)
    The rest of the journey took them south along the Sierra.  In the
    middle of winter, almost in despair of their lives, he and his
    men crossed over the Sierra above Lake Tahoe Feb 6, 1844.  They
    finally struggled down from the peaks and followed the American
    River to Capt Johann Sutter's new 50,000 acre ranch, which
    Chiles' emigrant party had already reached over an easier route.
    In crossing the Sierra and descending the American River, Fremont
    and his men had, of course, walked right over California's main
    gold region, which in 6 years would be crowded with gold seekers
    of every description.  But the Pathfinder and his men were not
    exploring for gold; they were primarily interested in
    California's possibilities for agricultural settlement by
    Americans.  On this account Fremont wrote glowing reports about
    California as a pastoral paradise.

         His return march took him across Tehachapi Pass and over the
    Old Spanish Trail across the Great Basin desert to within sight
    of where the modern city of Las Vegas stands today.  There he was
    joined by ex-mountain man Joe Walker, who showed him a short cut
    across the Colorado River plateau.  Then he traveled along the
    White and Duchesne rivers just below the Uinta Mountains to the
    Bayou Salade or great South Park of Colorado.  This stretch
    included some of the wildest and least known parts of the western
    wilderness.

         From the parks of Colorado the return journey was over a
    familiar route via the head of the Arkansas River and Bent's Fort
    on the Arkansas near the junction of the Purgatory River.  On his
    expedition of 1843-44, Fremont had, in effect, circumnavigated
    the whole West.  Clearly, he had not been a pathfinder, but
    rather a political and scientific explorer.  He was searching out
    the possibilities for an American occupation of the West.  With
    this in mind, and with the substantial aid of Charles Preuss, his
    Prussian cartographer, he made the first overall map of the West
    based on accurate astronomical sightings.  He also refused to
    include portions of the West he had not seen, though he made an
    error in connecting Great Salt Lake with the freshwater Utah
    Lake.  He did, however, correctly define and label the immense
    Great Basin for the first time.  This was perhaps the greatest
    geographical achievement of the trip.  He also followed up his
    large comprehensive map with an emigrant map drawn in seven
    sections by Charles Preuss.  This became one of the most
    important of all maps of the Oregon and California trails because
    it gave precise distances and detailed information on landmarks,
    river crossings, grazing lands and Indian tribes.  In Washington,
    Fremont had difficulty writing his reported and ended up
    dictating it to his wife who added her own promotional prose.
    When Fremont submitted his report and maps to Congress they
    created a sensation and 10,000 copies were reprinted and widely
    distributed.  The impression given was that going west was easy
    and exciting.  He was the explorer-as-propagandist without equal.

         Fremont did not rest on his laurels, however.  In the spring
    of 1845 he headed west again (with Walker who had little regard
    for The Pathfinder), ostensibly to explore the US-Mexican border
    country at the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red Rivers.  After
    journeying to the Upper Arkansas, he sent his second-in command,
    Lt James W Abert, down the Canadian River with his report.  Then,
    with a tough crew of seasoned mountain men, he headed west across
    the mountains and the Salt Lake Desert to California.  Once in
    California he bid defiance to Mexican and American authorities
    alike and put his men to the service of the Bear Flag Revolution.

         For his part in the California Revolt, Fremont was court-
    martialed but pardoned by President Polk.  He returned to the
    field in 1848 looking for a route for a transcontinental
    railroad.  Despite his failure he claimed it was a successful
    enterprise.  Fortune smiled on him when gold was discovered his
    California land value soared and he became wealthy.  He served as
    one of the first Senators from California and in 1856 ran in a
    failed attempt for President.  Life after that went down hill.
    During the Civil War he was a bungling general.  He ended up in
    New York being supported by his wife.

         The war with Mexico introduced a greatly increased number of
    army explorers into the West.  Virtually all of these military
    explorers were commissioned officers in the Corps of
    Topographical Engineers, now commanded by Col John James Abert
    who had previously been Fremont's assistant.  Every main element
    of the invading armies under Generals Zachary Taylor, John E.
    Wool, Stephen Watts Kearny, and Winfield Scott carried a
    complement of Topographical Engineers who aspired to match
    Fremont's spectacular success.  The most competent was William H.
    Emory.

~#4
    WILLIAM H. EMORY [1811-1887]:

         The most important work to come out of the war was done by
    Maryland born Lt William H. Emory, who had accompanied General
    Kearny's command [1846] to Santa Fe and then west via the Gila
    River and the Mojave Desert to California.  Emory published a
    detailed report of the march, complete with the first accurate
    map of the Southwest.  In his report [1848] he made two
    observations that were to have major importance in western and
    American history.  First, he decided that much of the Southwest
    was too arid for individual settlement: no enterprise could
    survive without cooperation in the distribution of water.
    Secondly, he declared that "No one who has ever visited this
    country and who is acquainted with the character and value of
    slave labor in the U.S. would ever think of bringing slaves here
    with any view to profit...."  The latter sentiment, since Emory
    was a fellow Whig, undoubtedly influenced Daniel Webster's speech
    on the Compromise of 1850 concerning "the imaginary Negro in an
    impossible place."

         Emory's war experiences made him probably the country's
    leading expert on the Southwest, and this expertise was soon
    needed.  The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo [1848] ending the
    Mexican War had drawn a boundary based on geographical ideas that
    were vague at best, and in some places completely wrong.  To
    correct this, Emory, between 1848 and 1855, was called upon to
    supervise the demarcation of the 1500 mile US-Mexican Boundary
    line from Brownsville on the Rio Grande to San Diego on the
    Pacific.  This was a new kind of exploration - regional
    exploration on a vast scale.  It resulted in the actual laying
    down of the astronomically determined boundary upon the earth by
    a system of markers.  Most important, it resulted in maps and an
    extensive regional survey of geology, flora, fauna, archeology
    and Indian tribes.  It also pointed out the only reasonable route
    for a future railroad to Southern California.  When this land was
    given up by Congress Emory's protest led to the Gadsden Purchase
    in 1855 for $10 million.  His report provided a model for all
    future exploration.  Thus Emory was a pathfinder for the new age
    of locomotion and steam.

~#5
                            Railroad Surveys

         The most spectacular Army exploration of the period came in
    1853, when Secretary of War Jefferson Davis ordered the
    Topographical Corps into the field to conduct a series of
    explorations and surveys across the West to determine the most
    feasible route for a transcontinental railroad.  Isaac I.
    Stephens, seconded by Capt George B. McClellan, led a northern
    survey between the 47th and 49th parallels that sought to connect
    the Great Lakes with the Pacific Coast.  Lt John W. Gunnison led
    another party out along the 38th parallel below the Uinta
    Mountains and far south of the Great Salt Lake.  Lt Amiel Weeks
    Whipple traversed the 35th parallel west from Santa Fe.  And Lts.
    John G. Parke and John B. Pope each worked from each end of a
    southwestern or 32nd parallel route.  Park and Lt Henry L. Abbott
    also explored north and south along the Pacific Coast for a route
    that would link up the coastal ports with whatever railroads
    might be built.  There were also other parties in the field.
    Fremont, now resigned from the army, led a party along a line
    close to his march of 1845, and they almost perished in the deep
    snows of the southern Rockies.  (The great mountain man Bill
    Williams did perish trying to retrieve their gear.)  Also, the
    Texas engineer, Andrew B. Gray, led a State-sponsored survey out
    across the Pecos River that he hoped would connect up with any
    line moving west from El Paso del Norte.

         Only one great tragedy occurred on the surveys: Lt Gunnison
    and most of his men were massacred by the Ute Indians on the
    Sevier River in Utah.  Thereupon Lt Edward G. Beckwith assumed
    command and traced out a route from Great Salt Lake across to
    California.  He was aided by Capt Howard Stansbury's careful
    survey and map of Great Salt Lake in 1849-50.

         The result of the Pacific Railroad Surveys in immediate
    practical terms was nil.  Each of the expedition leaders
    proclaimed his route to the Pacific the "most practicable" one,
    which left the whole question deadlocked by sectional politics in
    Congress.  Secretary Davis clearly favored the southern route in
    his final report, but factions split the South as would-be
    terminal cities all up and down the Mississippi argued for the
    honor.  It was not until the summer of 1866 that James T. Evans,
    working under the command of Col. Grenville M. Dodge, discovered
    Lone Tree (now Evans) Pass over the Rocky Mountains and made the
    Union Pacific portion of a transcontinental railroad possible.  A
    Republican-Unionist Administration under Abraham Lincoln had long
    since decreed that the route would be a northern one, with its
    eastern terminus at Omaha across the Mississippi from Council
    Bluffs.  As early as 1860 Californians had determined the Donner
    Pass was suitable for a railroad over the Sierra, and by July 1,
    1862, when the Pacific Railroad Bill was signed into law,
    Sacramento had been chosen for the western or Central Pacific
    terminus.

         The transcontinental railroad was finally completed on May
    10, 1869, when construction crews and dignitaries of the Central
    Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met and joined track at
    Promontary, Utah.  Over a thousand miles long, and scaling two
    immense mountain ranges and the vast stretches of the Great
    Basin, it was the engineering wonder of the age.  It was also a
    significant achievement in the history of exploration - one that
    has often been overlooked because it was conducted by teams of
    surveyors and engineers rather than individual military heroes
    like Fremont.  It also brought the death of the buffalo and much
    of the Indian plains culture.

         In addition to the railroad surveys, throughout the 1840s
    and 50s army explorers conducted what amounted to a "great
    reconnaissance " of the American West.  Many expeditions crossed
    the Southwest, for example.  In 1849 Lt James Hervey Simpson led
    the first expedition since the days of the Spaniards into the
    Navajo stronghold at Canyon de Chelly.  High up on the canyon
    walls he and his men discovered the lost cliff dwelling of the
    Anasazi.  In 1851 Capt Lorenzo Sitgreaves trekked across the
    Southwest just below the Grand Canyon in an early search for a
    wagon or railroad route.  Six years later aboard a prefabricated
    steamboat Lt Joseph Christmas Ives chugged up the Colorado River
    to Black Canyon, then marched overland and down into the Grand
    Canyon at Diamond Creek.  He and his party were the first white
    man ever to reach the floor of the Canyon.  Along with his party
    was the geologist John Strong Newberry who saw the possibilities
    of such a deep descent into the earth and traced out the first
    important stratigraphic column in the West.  His description of
    the different layers of earth that he could observe from the
    canyon floor provided a measuring stick for all future geologists
    in the West.  Ives' report on the expedition was a masterpiece in
    both literary and scientific terms.  Not the least of its
    contributions, besides Newberry's column, was the first relief
    map of the West drawn by the Prussian, F.W. von Egloffsten.
    Hardly had Ives finished his expedition at the Hopi Villages of
    Oraibi and Moenkipi than Capt John N. Macomb discovered and
    described the junction of the Green and the Grand Rivers in
    western Colorado, thus fitting a key piece into the puzzle of
    western geography.  Macomb and his men also saw abundant remains
    of the lost Anasazi civilization as they marched along the San
    Juan River, though they missed the grandest ruin of them all -
    Mesa Verde.

         Farther north, Lt Simpson crossed the Great Basin once again
    in search of a railroad route while Capt William F. Raynolds
    explored the Dakota Badlands and the Upper Missouri.  Along with
    Raynolds were two paleontologists, Fielding Bradford Meek and
    Ferdinand V. Hayden.  Together they worked out the cretaceous
    geological horizon of the Dakota country and discovered great
    caches of extinct animal bones.  When they brought their
    collections back to Philadelphia they provided Dr. Joseph Leidy
    with the material for the first important book on Western
    American paleontology (The Ancient Fauna of Nebraska).  Leidy
    also found the remains of tiny primitive horses among the
    collections and published a paper showing how the horse had
    evolved though time.  (This came out just before Charles Darwin
    published his revolutionary work on evolution.)  And finally, as
    if to close out exploration in the continental U.S. just on the
    eve of the Civil War, Lt John G. Park, working with the British
    Royal Engineers, laid out through the Northwest wilderness the
    last boundary between the U.S. and Canada.

         All of these expeditions were described in lavishly
    illustrated reports published by Congress.  Taken together the
    reports represent the most comprehensive body of information
    about the West up to that time.  They included reports on
    geology, plants, animals, birds, ethnography and demonstrated the
    value of teamwork in exploration.  They also included ecological
    studies with the aim of populating the land.  And finally each
    expedition produced a detailed map of the country it traversed.
    All of these were published but in addition Lt Gov Kemble Warren
    compiled all the data from these maps and those of all the other
    Army expeditions into the first accurate comprehension map of the
    West.  After the pioneering work of Lewis and Clark it was
    perhaps the most important map of the West ever drawn.

~#6
                         Post Civil War Surveys

         While explorations remained, the period of great discovery
    was coming to a close.  Federal or state surveys dominate the
    post Civil War period.  California hired Josia Dwight Whitney as
    early as 1860 to lead a survey team that was to explore the whole
    State in search of mineral resources, completed in 1870.  In 1869
    and 1871 Maj John Wesley Powell set off down the Green River in
    an effort to explore the mighty Colorado.  One result of his
    efforts was a publication which called for restraint on the
    headlong settlement of the West. Clarence King explored the West
    (1867) from the Sierra to the Front Range of the Rockies along
    the 40th parallel (and took time off to expose The Great Diamond
    Hoax).  Still to come was the exploration of the Yellowstone by
    Langford, Washburn and others; Wheelers exploration of the
    deserts of the Great Basin and the Grand Canyon by boat up the
    Colorado River; Hayden who explored the Rockies for coal and
    other minerals (and promoted a Yellowstone Park bill - passed
    1872); Jackson and Holmes who discovered ancient cliff dwellings
    of the Anasazi in Mancos Canyon; and cowboys Wetherill and Mason
    who discovered the Cliff Dwellings of Mesa Verde in 1888.  These
    and others continued the exiting story of the explorer in America.
    *************************   The End  *************************