Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California
An official government report on the 1842 expeditions, written up with his wife, that became a bestseller and a practical trail guide for emigrants heading west.
Fremont surveyed the route west across two expeditions between 1842 and 1844, and the account he produced with Jessie Benton Fremont sold in enormous numbers. Emigrants carried it as a manual, reading it for water sources and grazing rather than for its prose. Government writing turned into landscape writing almost by accident, and shaped how a generation pictured the country.
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Maria Popova
Frémont spent a decade recounting the fourteen-month adventure in his Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California (public domain), replete with lyrical renderings of nature and its feeling-tones that no photograph could ever capture. (This is why Instagram will never make poets obsolete.)
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