DID ASTORIANS USE SOUTH PASS/ 49
fourth and twenty-fifth. The next day, the twenty-sixth, how- ever, brought them to the Sweetwater on the Atlantic side of the continental divide.
Elliott Coues in his edition of the Henry-Thompson journals concluded that "the pass they made can be no other than the famous South Pass of the Rocky Mountains." 12 The same year, however, in reviewing a new edition of Irving's Astoria, he concluded that they followed a course "very near South Pass perhaps within twelve or fifteen miles of it, where they wandered off the Indian trail which would have taken them through the pass, and kept about southeast till they had headed the Sweetwater entirely. They then struck east, south of that river, and finally fell on it lower down." 18 In the light of this, the evidence of Ramsay Crooks, one of the leaders of the expedition, is poignant.
In 1856 the newly formed Republican party nominated John Charles Fremont for President and among the many qualifica- tions for this high office which his supporters urged was his alleged discovery of the South Pass. Ramsay Crooks was an old man at the time, residing in New York City. Vigorously hostile to Fremont politically and sickened by this fatuous distinction of which the Republican papers were boasting, he was moved to write the following letter to Anthony Dudgeon of Detroit. 14 The value of the letter lies not in the proof that the returning Astorians came through the South Pass, for in all probability Elliott Coues was quite right in concluding that they missed the actual pass, but rather in the firm conviction of one of the leaders and the last of the party that the return- ing Astorians were the first to discover this famous gap in the continental divide.
12 Elliott Coues, New Light on the Early History of the Great Northwest, New York, 1897, II, 884, note.
13 The Nation, LXV, 499*-, New York, 1897. This change of view he was induced to make after a discussion of the problem with Major Chittenden, Coues, Forty Years a Fur Trader, New York, 1898, 29, note.
14 This letter was published in the Detroit Free Press, copied by the Detroit Advertiser, and recopied from that paper by the Deseret News of November 5, 1856, from which I take it. H. C. D.
