Note 57 — Chapter III

This description regarding the California route shows the indefiniteness of the knowledge then current. No one is known to have passed this way save Jedediah S. Smith (1827) and Joseph Walker, sent by Captain Bonneville (1833). When Bidwell and Bartleson went out in 1841, they found no one who could give them detailed information of the route from Fort Hall to California, and they stumbled through the wilderness in great confusion. See John Bidwell, "First Emigrant Train to California," in Century Magazine, xix (new series), pp. 106-129. Mary River is that now known as the Humboldt, which rises a hundred miles west of Great Salt Lake and after a course of nearly three hundred miles west and south-west flows into Humboldt Lake or Sink. This river was originally named Ogden for Peter Skeen Ogden, a Hudson Bay factor, whose Indian wife was known as Mary. The name Humboldt was assigned by Lieutenant Frémont (1845), who does not appear to have connected it with Mary River, which he sought the preceding year. This explorer also proved (1844) that the San Joaquin and other affluents of San Francisco Bay do not "form a natural and easy passage" through the California or Sierra Nevada Mountains.—Ed.