From Diane Elder, July
2003
From Diane Elder, July
2003
Greetings...great web site!
I am trying to locate the diary of Theodore Talbot on-line. I cannot find it. Is it available to your knowledge?
Here in central Lake County, Fremont named several places. On this weekend our local festival is featuring history. I have all of Fremont and Preuss diary pertaining to this area, but was not aware that Talbot also had a diary. I am looking for his comments when they traveled through here in December 1843, if there are any.
This was the email I received from Diane Elder. I had to tell her that the Talbot journal ended at The Dalles, so would be of no help in her research. But I received further emails in response:
Paisley [near Summer Lake] has an annual Mosquito Festival. This year's theme is the local history. The information is going to be kept in city hall, and will be published in a book that the Lake County, Oregon historical society is going to publish in the spring.
I need to get ahold of a GPS and see if the locations Fremont gave for his locations are anywhere near our ranch. The closest paved road is Highway 31. Find White Hill creek. We are 3/4 mile off the highway to the south. White Hill Creek is feet from our house.
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"At our feet--more than a thousand feet below--we looked into a green prairie country, in which a beautiful lake, more than twenty miles in length, was spread along the foot of the mountains, its shores bordered with green grass. Just then the sun broke out among the clouds, and illuminated the country below, while around us the storm raged fiercely. Shivering in snow three feet deep, and stiffening in a cold north wind, we exclaimed at once that the names Summer Lake and Winter Ridge should be applied to these two proximate of such sudden and violent contrast." And they are still so called today. After a difficult descent on the 16th, the route over the next two days took them right past Diane Elder's ranch house. "...along the western shore of the lake, in the summer temperatures [52°f] we enjoyed today, justified the name we had given it" Something of geographical importance happened on the
top of Winter Ridge that day in 1843. |
"East of the Sierra Nevada, and between it and the Rocky Mountains, is that anomalous feature in our continent, the GREAT BASIN, the existance of which was advanced as a theory after the second expedition, and is now established as a geographical fact. It is a singular feature: a basin of some five hundred miles diameter every way, between four and five thousand feet above the level of the sea, shut in all around by mountains, with its own system of lakes and rivers, and having no connexion whatever with the sea."
Geographical Memoir Upon Upper California In Illustration of His Map of Oregon and California, 1848, by John Charles Frémont.Leaving Summer Lake on December 19, after a two hour ride they encountered the Chewaucan River near today's town of Paisley. It was winter, so he missed both the mosquitos and the Paisley Mosquito Festival.
home page Bob Graham
Diane
didn't need to go borrow a GPS receiver. We found her with
some software on the computer. We also located
Frémont's positions given in his report, and with
those, and his journal description, established the
route.
On
December 16, 1843, 2nd Lieutenant Frémont stood in a
snow storm on the verge of a vertical rocky wall.
