John C. Freemont, known as 'The Pathfinder', was guided on his adventures in the West by Thomas Fitzpatrick and Kit Carson.
The legendary bombastic
senator from Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton, convinced Congress to
finance an adventure of exploration led by his son-in-law, John
Fremont, from Independence, Missouri, to South Pass, in the
mountains of present-day Wyoming…the first half of the Oregon
Trail.
Watershed of the North Platte river
Fremont was led by the diminutive guide, Kit Carson, and returned
five months later with tales to tell. "Fremont made a
flamboyant report about the trail west in his A Report on an
Exploration of the Country Lying Between the Missouri River and the
Rocky Mountains on the Line of the Kansas and Great Platte
Rivers. The report was reprinted in newspapers up and
down the East Coast, and the news struck a nerve with tens of
thousands. Fremont reported on picturesque Indian customs, a
hospitable prairie and desert that was paved with wild
flowers. "Fremont has touched my imagination," wrote poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. "What a wild life, and what a
fresh kind of existence."
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