Trails of the Pathfinders

New Year’s Day found them travelling through the desert, over a rough, sandy road. The next day they reached a field of hot springs, the vapor from which was visible a long way...

At the close of the “late war with France,” when peace had been established by the treaty of Versailles, in the year 1763, Jonathan Carver, the captain of a company of provincia...

The fur trade, which occupied many worthy men during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, forms a romantic and interesting part of the early history of our c...

The French Government had established regulations governing the fur trade in Canada, and in 1765, when Henry made his second expedition, some features of the old system were sti...

Side by side in fact--though by no means in popular estimation--with the heroic explorers, Lewis and Clark, stands Zebulon M. Pike, the young soldier, who first reached the sour...

On October 10, 1792, Alexander Mackenzie left Fort Chipewyan to proceed up Peace River, his purpose being to go up the stream so far as the season would permit, and, wintering w...

On the 17th of October, 1811, the ship “Beaver,” Captain Cornelius Sowles, sailed from New York for the mouth of the Columbia River. She carried one partner, six clerks, and a n...

Among the north men who overran the country long known as the Hudson’s Bay Territory, Alexander Henry, the younger, was a commanding figure. He was a nephew of that other Alexan...

Of the early explorers of the north none is more celebrated than Alexander Mackenzie, the first man to penetrate from the interior to the Frozen Ocean, and the first in the fart...

The winter was spent chiefly in procuring food and in observing the natives and the geography of the neighboring country, and the expedition had not expected to leave their perm...

The next day the forests seemed to be on fire, since clouds of thick smoke rose from the wood with a strong odor of burning resin. On the afternoon of June 19 they saw smoke on...

In the year 1838 there was published in Ithaca, N. Y., by the author, the _Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains, Under the Direction of the A. B. C. F. M., Pe...

In August, 1801, Henry was on his way to a new post on the Pembina, the one which Langlois had established the year before. He intended to establish also a post at Grandes Fourc...

Most famous of all the pathfinders of the United States are Lewis and Clark, explorers of the Missouri River to its headwaters, and of the Columbia from the heads of some of its...

On November 22, as Pike and Dr. Robinson, and Vasquez, the interpreter, were riding ahead of the command, they met a party of sixty Pawnees returning from an unsuccessful war pa...

On July 28 they started on their return to the north, in constant fears and alarms lest the Assiniboines should steal their horses. A few days later the horses, troubled by mosq...

As they proceeded, they passed a number of ruined villages of the Mandans, the low mounds of earth showing where the sod houses had fallen in; but on October 24 they came to a l...

In 1839, after having been only a few months in the “States,” Gregg was unable to resist his longing for the free life of the prairies and began to make preparations for another...

Fremont’s second trip was on a scale somewhat more extensive than his first. His party consisted of thirty-two regular engagees, besides a negro, and two Delaware Indians, who w...

The inequality with which fame distributes her favors has always been a fertile subject for moralist and philosopher. One man may do great things, and yet through innate modesty...

On his return to St. Louis, after nearly nine months of the hardest possible work in the North, Pike was allowed but a short rest. Two months and a half later he set out on his...

By the end of August the explorers, having procured a number of horses, set to work to make saddles, cache their extra baggage, and set out for their journey north and west. The...

It was October 17, the anniversary of the sailing from New York of the “Beaver,” that Cox and Farnham set out on their trading expedition to the Flatheads, and on the 10th of No...

They were now in the country of the Utes, or rather, in the debatable land visited for hunting purposes by Utes, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Shoshoni, Blackfeet, and Crows. They there...

They had now passed Milk River, and the Dry Fork, and the journal says: “The game is now in great quantities, particularly the elk and buffalo, which last are so gentle that the...

At the end of the sixteenth and during the seventeenth century a line of Spanish settlements ran from Mexico northward along the Rocky Mountains, terminating in the important to...

At Fort Laramie, Fremont heard much about the hostilities of the Sioux and Cheyennes, who, the year before, had had a severe fight with a party of sixty men, under the command o...

Three centuries ago half a dozen tiny hamlets, peopled by white men, were scattered along the western shores of the North Atlantic Ocean. These little settlements owed allegianc...

A curious little book, the title-page of which bears the date 1841, is Thomas J. Farnham’s, _Travels in the Great Western Prairies, The Anahuac and Rocky Mountains, And in The O...

Keeping on down Snake River, sometimes in its valley, sometimes, to avoid bad travelling, marching back on the hills, the party went on. Before long the Grand Rond was passed; a...