Following Fremont

The Pathfinder's 1843 expedition across the West is still a grand route for adventurous travelers

- CANDY MOULTON

John C. Fremont, known as The Pathfinder, had a guide on every trip he made into the West. In 1842 Kit Carson led him west, and in 1843 Carson and Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick journeyed with Fremont. Carson and Fitzpatrick had long experience traveling in the West, earned during their years in the fur trade. The 1843 Fremont Expedition departed from St. Louis, crossing Kansas by following the Arkansas River to Bent’s Fort, an important trading post on the Santa Fe Trail that has been rebuilt and is now operating as a National Historic Site. From Bent’s Fort, present-day travelers should continue to Pueblo, Colorado, before turning north to the area of today’s Fort Collins, Colorado, and then travel north and west to the Medicine Bow Mountains of southern Wyoming.

Fremont’s exploration allowed members of his parties to collect plant specimens, make topographical sketches and undertake other scientific study. In early August of 1843, Fremont was in Carbon County, Wyoming, traveling west and camping on the principal fork of the Medicine Bow River near “an isolated mountain called the Medicine Butte” known today as Elk Mountain. On August 3, 1843, Fremont’s group saw “bands of buffalo,” and that evening Kit Carson “brought into the camp a cow which had the fat on the fleece two inches thick.” Fremont wrote that this “was the first good buffalo meat we had obtained.” Learn more about this region at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins.