Kit Carson and the 1844 Fremont Expedition at Carson Pass

On February fourteenth, eighteen forty-four, John C. Fremont and Kit Carson, nearing a pass that would later take Carson's name, caught their first glimpse of Lake Tahoe. They crossed the Sierra summit about a week later and reached California in early March. Theirs was among the first American parties on record to make a winter crossing at this latitude. They nearly did not make it.

The crossing required killing horses for food. Several men came close to death from cold. Fremont's official account, published in Washington in eighteen forty-five, described the moment from the summit when the party glimpsed Lake Tahoe, or a lake they believed was the same lake, below them in the basin before the descent. That glimpse, filtered through a government report and distributed to Congress and the reading public, was the first widely circulated American description of what was down there in the Sierra Nevada.

Reports like Fremont's functioned as advertisements. They told Americans that the Sierra could be crossed, that there were routes, that there was something on the other side worth reaching. The Oregon Trail and the emigrant movements of the eighteen forties accelerated in part on the basis of official exploration reports. The Donner Party, two years later, was among the emigrants whose route planning drew on that information.

Kit Carson went on to become one of the most famous figures in American frontier mythology. His name is on the pass, on the town at the base of the pass, and on cities across the Southwest. Fremont went on to run for president. The men who died on the crossing have no monuments here either.