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Unidentified photographer/creator
The explorations of Fremont
1856
Book page
Google Books
LL/36160
C.W. Dana The Garden of the World, or, The Great West: its History, its Wealth, its Natural Advantages, and its Future. Also, comprising A Complete Guide to Emigrants with a Full Description of the Different Routes Westward. By an Old Settler (Boston: Wentworth and Company, 1856), p.384.
In this description of the country I have relied chiefly on Fremont, whose exploration, directed by no authority, connected with no company, swayed by no interest, wholly guided by himself, and solely directed to the public good, would be entitled to credit upon his own report, unsupported by subsidiary evidence; but he has not left the credit of his report to his word alone. He has done besides what no other explorer had done ; he has made the country report itself. Besides determining elevations barometrically, and fixing positions astronomically, and measuring objects with a practised eye; besides all that, he has applied the daguerreotype art to the face of the wild domain, and made it speak for itself. Three hundred of these views illustrate the path of his exploration, and compel every object to stand forth and show itself as it is, or was mountain, gap, plain, rock, forest, grass, snow, (where there is any,) and naked ground where there is not; all exhibit themselves as they are; for Daguerre has no power to conceal what is visible, or to exhibit what is unseen. If the "wart" is there, he needs no admonition to show it, and could not suppress it. He uses no pencil to substitute fiction for fact, or fancy for memory. He is a machine that works to a pattern, and that pattern the object before him; and in this way has Fremont reproduced the country from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and made it become the reflex of its own features, and the exhibiter of its own face, present and viewable to every beholder; and that nothing may be wanting to complete the information on a subject of such magnitude, he has now gone back to give the finishing look at the west end of the line, which 30,000 miles of wilderness explorations in the last twelve years (all at his own solicitation, and the last half at his own cost) authorize him to believe is the true and good route for the road which is to unite the Atlantic and the Pacific, and to give a new channel to the commerce of Asia.
[The same paragraph is included in John C. Van Tramp Prairie and Rocky Mountain Adventures: or, Life in the West. To Which will be added a View of the States and Territorial Regions of our Western Empire (Columbus, O.: Gilmore & Segner, 1866), p.308.]
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