John Frémont's Report on an Exploration of the Country Lying between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains, on the Line of the Kansas and Great Platte Rivers (1843) chronicles the daily events of an Army Corps of Topographical Engineers expedition which struck out from the mouth of the Kansas River on 10 June 1842, moved northwest to Grand Island, Nebraska, followed the south fork of the Platte west to Colorado, turned north to Fort Laramie in Wyoming, west again to Independence Rock, South Pass, and the Wind River Range, and then more or less retraced its steps, returning to the mouth of the Kansas exactly four months later.Footnote ¹ Submitted to Congress midway between the year that John O'Sullivan called America the “great nation of futurity” and the year that he claimed it was the nation's “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent,” the Report appeared at a particularly auspicious moment in the nation's history. Among other things, it contained the first accurate map and description of the Oregon Trail as far as South Pass.

Still, as Frémont sat down to compose the Report, he was aware that virtually every inch of territory he had explored was known as the Great American Desert. This was not a negligible obstacle, since a nation which had long sought its identity in “the Laws of Nature, and of Nature's God,” needed to demonstrate that nature itself granted the right of manifest destiny. With everyone from Washington Irving to Daniel Webster arguing that the vast, essentially treeless region was a natural barrier to the nation, Frémont had to show that it was not – and mainly by showing that it was not a desert at all. Exhibiting an acute awareness of means as well as ends, he eventually created an engaging and artfully empirical document that combined the scientific travel narrative with the scenic guide. Frémont himself considered the Report a “guide-book in atlas form,” and it can be seen as the single most important reason for the sudden spike in western emigration which occurred a little more than two months after it was published.

The Great American Desert was always a rhetorical horizon. It first emerged in Zebulon Pike's Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi, and through the Western Parts of Louisiana (1810) – though not all at once. The opening pages of Pike's report actually reveal a curious and somewhat attentive eye, willing to confront the landscape on its own terms. Making his way through the broken country of eastern Kansas, for instance, Pike is moved enough to write, “The prospect from the dividing ridge to the east and southeast is sublime. The prairie rising and falling in regular swells, as far as the sight can extend, produces a very beautiful appearance.” But as he moves ever closer to the Rockies, the arid conditions seem to flatten and bleach Pike's perspective, and his entries become increasingly sere:

By the end of the report, his sentiments have become even bleaker and more sweeping:

Whatever the specificity of certain observations, Pike basically perceived the prairies and plains as an extremely large-scale system, with a few iconic features magnified and presumed to look about the same at every scale. Today we would call this a rather morose version of self-similarity. Unfortunately, Edwin James's far more famous Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains (1823) would confirm this sullen point of view – concluding that the area now comprising Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma was “little less tiresome to the eye, and fatiguing to the spirit, than the dreary solitude of the ocean.” Like many others raised on the Atlantic seaboard, both Pike and James found it easy to imagine the prairies and plains as a great ocean desert – and it was as easterners writing for an eastern audience that they so readily resorted to this metaphor. The same perspective induced them to depict the prairies and plains as sublime. Edmund Burke had associated the sublime with uniformity, vastness, infinity, and magnitude, and this became a useful shorthand for the landscape that emerged in their accounts. Yet what this shorthand stood for was a vast and uniform sterility. Thus James's dour and often-quoted conclusion:

Frémont began to challenge this rhetorical horizon with an account that was far truer and wilder than anything in Pike or James. Convinced that he should start with the terrain itself, Frémont chose to frame the Report as a narrative of verification – offering the following comment as the expedition gets under way:

Frémont knew that easterners found the image of a great ocean of prairie easy to grasp, but he also knew that this image had become so authoritative because it seemed so factual. To exaggerate the scientific credentials of his own expedition, he responded with a clever strategy: he made it clear that a widely accepted fact was going to be treated as a hypothesis which needed to be proven by the facts. With the casualness of a passing remark, the Report suddenly implied that the entire nature of the prairie was now in question – not only as a double view of scenery and science, but as a section of the continent, a place. It was a crucial disclaimer – a crucial shift in scale. For after exacting this interval of doubt, Frémont began to step back from the landscape of Pike and James by moving closer to the prairie itself.

The first extensive description of the prairie occurs in the entry dated Friday, 17 June. It takes place over several days, in exactly the same area of eastern Kansas where Pike had described the prairie “rising and falling in regular swells, as far as the sight can extend”:

How different this is from the prairie that emerges in the reports of Pike and James. How different it is from Washington Irving's popular narrative, A Tour of the Prairies (1835). There, a similarly “toilsome march of some distance through a country cut up by ravines and brooks” suddenly reveals “one of the characteristic scenes of the Far West”: “an immense extent of grassy undulating, or as it is termed, rolling country with here and there a clump of trees, dimly seen in the distance like a ship at sea.”Footnote ⁶ But it is almost as if Frémont decides to redefine the prairie as a whole by focussing on that foreground “cut up by ravines and brooks.” Easily the most unconventional aspect of his description is the way he fractures the landscape – not only by recounting a journey that wends its way through split and scattered terrain, but by deliberately constructing a style that seems to register every sloping ridge, every pool of water, every plant in bloom, and every passing shadow or breeze. What emerges is a four-dimensional space – irregular, fleeting, full of contrast – as Frémont abandons an aesthetic of the sublime for a fairly radical version of the picturesque in which scenery and science exist as off-setting elements within a sphere of “topographic geology.”Footnote ⁷

Quitting the banks of a Kansas tributary to ride along the “uplands,” Frémont begins to observe “a considerable rise in the country”; the next day he notes that the country is “rather more broken,” and is “rising still”; and soon there seem to be ridges, ravines, and “summits” everywhere. Throughout the passage, he works his way up from dry creek bed to level prairie and then down again from high ridge to river bottom, almost never keeping to a single plane because the terrain does not allow it. On the few occasions the terrain remains flat, new obstacles and disparities force him from one side of a creek or river to the other. Gradually he discovers that these topographic irregularities create certain environmental interruptions. After noting that the barometer indicates rising ground, Frémont announces that “the increased elevation appeared already to have some slight influence upon the vegetation.” Later he writes, “In these exposed situations grew but few plants; though, whenever the soil was good and protected from the winds, in the creek bottoms and ravines, and on the slopes, they flourished abundantly.” Even the amorpha, so ubiquitous in the area, seemed “to love best the sunny slopes, with a dark soil and southern exposure.” Contrasts of this sort structure the entire passage, with virtually every element doubled in one way or another. Upland “rolling” country gives way to even higher “broken” country; large sandstone boulders are replaced by limestone fragments; red sandstone and purple flowers “enliven” the green prairie; temperatures of 45° rise precipitously to 90°; a “pleasant southerly breeze” becomes a “gale,” and then a “hot wind”; men “suffer for want of water” on the high dry ridges, while “dark lines of timber indicate the heads of streams in the plains below”; and even as they search for water, “everywhere the rose is met with,” reminding the men “of cultivated gardens and civilization.”

Nowhere, in all of this, is there any image of the prairie as a uniform large-scale system. It is notable, for instance, that Frémont refers to “a rolling country” – a temporary or local terrain – which instantly shatters into the sandstone boulders “scattered along the hills” and the limestone fragments “thickly strewed as pebbles on the shore of the sea.” Not only does this image transform the prairie into something rocky and brittle rather than fluid and billowing, but it begins to look like a series of broken summits rather than an endlessly undulating plain. With his reference to the elevation of the country being “about fourteen hundred feet above the sea,” Frémont goes even further – using the notion of sea level to turn the usual metaphor of oceanic vastness into a means of measuring the land more precisely. Although he speaks of the amorpha being “characteristic,” and of it “still retaining its characteristic place,” this, too, breaks down, as the abundance of its bloom becomes “variable” – “in some places, bending beneath the weight of the purple clusters; in others, without a flower.”

In short, the Report lacks that horizon of sameness that so mesmerized everyone from Pike to Irving. Where earlier descriptions of the prairie forced us to look up and into the distance, insisting on a single focus, Frémont's spry and discriminating eye never rests. His descriptions range back and forth in scale from limestone fragments, “small, and thickly strewed as pebbles”; to large boulders, “some of them four or five tons in weight”; to the “rich bottom” of the Big Vermillion, “about one mile in breadth”; to a “view of the Kansas, from eight to twelve miles distant.” Nor does this perspective change on the ridges and summits of this erratic country, since he tends to look down, not away, constantly drawing our attention to the creek bottoms and ravines where, “protected from the winds,” so many plants “flourished abundantly.” In fact, it is not until the entry for 9 July – when the expedition catches its “first faint glimpse of the Rocky mountains, about sixty miles distant” – that Frémont really begins to draw our attention to the horizon.Footnote ⁸

So it is that a brief but complex description of eastern Kansas morphs into a dramatic new view of the Great American Desert. Eager to multiply the novelty, variety, and arability of the prairie and the plains, and always alert to the effects of such things as flooding, upheaval, erosion, extreme heat, rising elevation, dry air, seasonal rain, and protective shade, Frémont begins to visualize a landscape shaped by the shifting boundaries and arrant contrasts of topographic geology. More than any other document of the day, the Report helped to popularize such rugged landmarks as Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff, Independence Rock, and Devil's Gate. More subtly, it steadily draws our attention to the “desert road” and the “dreary barrenness” of the region, but only to sharpen the contrasts of a route that “the next morning lay up the valley, which, bordered by hills with graceful slopes, looked uncommonly green and beautiful.” Significantly, Frémont's attention to contrast seems to accelerate the farther he moves into the Great Desert. A little west of where Pike had found the road suffused with crystallized salt, he remarks that “our road lay down the valley of the Platte, which resembled a garden in the splendor of fields of varied flowers, which filled the air with fragrance.” Later, he finds himself riding along a ridge composed of “soft earthy limestone and marls,” beholding a region whose “leading figure” is “one of remarkable aridity,” when “a little before sundown we came suddenly upon a beautiful creek, which revived us with a feeling of delighted surprise by the pleasant contrast of the deep verdure of its banks with the parched desert we had passed.” This oscillating alertness to scenery and science becomes a shapely and coherent pattern. Almost every instance of desolation (“the barren and arid country seemed as if it had been swept by fires”) is immediately followed by something more delightful (“and the fifty or sixty feet which formed the bottom land of the little stream were clothed with very luxuriant grass, among which I remarked willow and cherry”). Nothing could be more contrary to the monotonous aridity of Pike and Long.Footnote ⁹

Contemporary readers of the Report made little or no distinction between Frémont's ardent regard for scenery and his rigorous empiricism. They did not treat his aesthetic views as a separate or more “literary” element of the Report, or as anything that might identify him with a unique style. Hailed as a lively, “unpretending pamphlet” – a “daily narrative of facts, uncolored by opinions” – it was almost as if the Report lacked a style of any kind.Footnote ¹⁰ Whatever beauty or romanticism it evoked seemed to derive from the terrain itself – from the sheer specificity of what Frémont called “the flower and the rock” – fully and accurately described.

Geneva M. Gano has suggested that this presumption of objectivity can be traced to Frémont's use of the picturesque. By the time Frémont set out for South Pass, Gano argues, the picturesque was so strongly associated with natural philosophy that it had become “the lingua franca of scientific exploration.” Indeed, she believes that Frémont was inherently forced to use this rhetoric “to exhibit his training” in a “Humboldtian science” which had long emphasized “personal and experiential involvement with nature.” Not to affirm “this particular training and experience in nature” was to risk being perceived as an unreliable observer.Footnote ¹¹

But Frémont clearly helped to create the nexus between scientific exploration and the picturesque, rather than taking it for granted. After all, Humboldt's wonderfully synthetic view of nature – both experiential and devoted to discovering its large-scale patterns and laws – was inspired by the transcendental philosophy of Emmanuel Kant, not by the picturesque. Moreover, Humboldt did not become a defining figure in American exploration until the second volume of Cosmos was translated and published in 1846, and an updated edition of Aspects of Nature (which actually credits Frémont with several important discoveries) was translated and published in 1849. For decades, the prototype for American expedition reports had been Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and the journals of Lewis and Clark – and in an obvious rejoinder to Gano, their apparent accuracy and credibility was as inseparable from the sublime as James's account. The Notes contain two of the most influential descriptions of the American landscape ever written – the view from the Blue Ridge of the Shenandoah meeting the Potomac, and the view of the Natural Bridge – and both are a perfect combination of scientific observation and sublime sentiments. The extraordinary inclusiveness of Jefferson's instructions to Lewis and Clark on the eve of their expedition can be seen as a kind of sublime inventory, and many of Lewis's entries, in particular, seem to emulate the Notes by turning a quantitative obsession with data and events into an aesthetic stereotype that reduces the landscape to a single characteristic or feeling. All of this reaches an apotheosis of sorts in James's account – where a detailed, and even captivating, analysis of the terrain so readily jumps to a large-scale view of “monotonous plains” and “interminable prairies.”

Still, the very fact that James's account became so authoritative – its apparent confirmation of Pike's report lending credence to an even more dispiriting image of the prairie – suggests that even as late as the 1840s, fieldwork did not have to be associated with the picturesque to be considered scientific. Like Lewis and Clark, both Pike and James emphasized their “personal and experiential involvement with nature.” Yet each seemed to write with the desire to be a kind of camera obscura (or as Lewis's quixotic spelling would have it, a “crimee obscura”). Relying on much the same optics, Francis Bacon had defined the ideal observer as someone with “unimpaired senses” and a “well-purged mind” – and it implied that the explorer's “personal and experiential involvement with nature” was itself a measure of truth.Footnote ¹² If a “well-purged mind” was, as Henry Tuckerman put it in “The Philosophy of Travel,” “moved within by impressions from without,” those impressions were expected to be received and reflected accurately, without distortion.Footnote ¹³ It is worth noting that after declaring himself “disgusted” with his “imperfect description” of the Great Falls of the Missouri – a description in which his frustrated devotion to Burke's aesthetic categories compelled him to label the first fall “sublimely grand” and the second “pleasingly beautifull” – Lewis “determined to draw my pen across it and begin agin, but then reflected that I could not perhaps succeed better than pening the first impressions of the mind.”Footnote ¹⁴

All of this suggests that when Frémont turned to the picturesque to express his own “impressions of the mind,” he not only hoped to redefine the ideal observer, but assumed that art would be as important as science. Though Frémont undoubtedly needed to prove he was a reliable scientist, his greatest challenge was to prove that the great “ocean of prairie” was neither uniformly sterile nor utterly dreary to the eyes – and this was essentially an aesthetic enterprise. More than anything else, he is able to incorporate the data of James's report and accelerate or multiply its contrasts to create a completely different kind of geography – a geography where the beautiful and the sublime are perceived as boundaries and irregularities within the landscape, not as a means of reducing it to a single characteristic. Where Pike observes “a species of crystallization on the road” that gives “some authenticity to the report of the prairie being covered for leagues” with salt, Frémont discovers that “the ground was covered in many places with an efflorescence of salt, and the plants were not numerous. In the bottoms was frequently seen tradescantia, and on the dry lenches were carduus, cactus, and amorpha.”Footnote ¹⁵ It is a subtle, yet telling difference, with even the apparent sterility of salt morphing into the scenic “efflorescence” of amorpha. Evidently Frémont felt that the way to bring the Great Desert to life was by framing his “personal and experiential involvement with nature” as an act of verification – and then elaborating verification itself as a precise yet scenic tour of “the flower and the rock.” Greater art worked hand in hand with better science.

We might say that Frémont was the individual who finally led America out of the woods – extending the aesthetic of the picturesque to include the desiccated scenery of what Emerson would call the “nervous, rocky West.” Both Pike and James clearly felt that the “scarcity of wood and water” was the most prominent and cheerless feature of the prairie, and a similar bias encouraged everyone from James Fenimore Cooper to Irving to treat the sylvan reaches of the Northeast as a kind of national landscape. But once he introduced that sustained and irreverent view of eastern Kansas, Frémont began to redefine the landscape of America as a contrasting terrain of soil and rocks. Within the Report itself, flowers, and sometimes trees, help to multiply these contrasts, but the most important element is always the ground, whether it exists as a sandstone boulder, a limestone fragment, a dry ridge, or the eroded face of a massive butte. The farther west he moved, the more Frémont reduced the Report to a strict examination of the ground and an austere yet complex topographic geology. Once again, this was as much a matter of scenery as of science, but it was also a distinctly “western” notion of what counted as scenery and a harbinger of a new national landscape. Exactly three decades later, Yellowstone would become the first national park precisely because it offered such a stark and compressed view of bizarrely contrasting geological features.

Of course, part of what made the Report so effective was that Frémont avoided any semblance of that “elevation” which so noticeably identified writers such as Irving and Thoreau with the romantic, metaphorical style of nineteenth-century travel narratives. It was almost as if the descriptions in the Report composed themselves – appearing as the raw data recorded by an “unimpaired” eye and a receptively blank mind, transferred whole and unaltered to the blank page. Significantly, this could only be true if the landscape Frémont described was actually there. It could not be, as Gertrude Stein would say of Oakland, that there was no there there. Nor could it be, as Pike and James had said of the Great Desert, that there was nothing there at all except a dreary sameness. In fact, it was the Great Desert that was not there – suggesting that, in the end, Frémont's act of verification, his “personal and experiential involvement with nature,” was fundamentally an act of renaming.

Naming and renaming – that is to say, the nominal or arbitrary relationship between words and objects – is an important aspect of “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” a paper Bertrand Russell delivered in 1911. Although he would soon develop a less dualistic version of Locke's epistemology, Russell still relied on a separation of mind and matter in “Knowledge” that seems typical of nineteenth-century thought – evident, for instance, in that “meeting of the sky and the earth” that made the horizon such a fascinating figure to Emerson and Thoreau. As such, it seems a useful way to approach the Report.

Taking as his example the table he is writing on, Russell explains that

Actual “knowledge of the table as a physical object,” however, is “not direct knowledge”:

In fact,

Russell goes on to explain that “common words, even proper names, are usually really descriptions. That is to say, the thought in the mind of a person using a proper name correctly can generally only be expressed explicitly if we replace the proper name by a description.” The same thing is true of “all names of places” – which Russell defines as “descriptions which start from some one or more particulars with which were are acquainted,” and “otherwise consist wholly of concepts.”

If we substitute the word “prairie” for “table,” this becomes a cogent analysis of the Report. Frémont may have framed the Report as an act of verification, but it was clearly no less descriptive than any prior account of the prairie and it brought us no closer than did Pike or James to any real acquaintance with the physical space defined by the word “prairie.” Literally, the prairie was as absent, or unseen, as ever. What Frémont began to modify, however, was the rigid set of “sense-data” (a term Russell coined) which defined the prairie as “oceanic” and “arid.” By drawing our attention to such things as the cool morning air, the uplands “rather more broken” and “rising still,” the large boulders “of various shades of red,” the “thickly strewed” fragments of siliceous limestone, the “variable bloom” of purple amorpha, and the water standing “in deep pools,” he significantly multiplied both the number and nature of the sense-data associated with the word “prairie.” Where Pike and James had treated “colour, shape, hardness, smoothness, etc.” as a meager inventory of particulars, Frémont introduced one variable after another – a virtual explosion of visual information – which suddenly forced “the physical object which causes such-and-such sense-data” to include a much larger and more chaotic set of “particulars with which we are acquainted.” The very multiplicity of these particulars implied that Frémont had developed a mode of description, a style, lucid enough for us to “know a description” of the “prairie” far more complex than anything which had appeared in Pike or James – and to know that the singular “object to which this description applied” could only be the indirect “prairie” of the Report. Of course, the variety and contrast of these sense-data also implied that any descriptive style which lacked multiplicity was probably less accurate than one which accounted for it. Not only that, but the way this multiplicity gradually revealed a complex, yet coherent, landscape seemed to parallel the way the mind, “moved within by impressions from without,” gradually formed itself from matter. Since the Great Desert seemed to be a desert because it left the mind blank – either too vast or too uniform to provoke anything other than a sensation of sameness – this may have been the most radical element of Frémont's description for those who first read his account. In any case, there is no question that the broken and blossom-strewn “prairie” which emerged in the Report began to replace the great “ocean of prairie” on which “not a speck of vegetable matter existed.”

Like many ideas about to become obsolete, the Great American Desert reached a rhetorical peak of sorts in the decade after the Report – and then quickly disappeared as Frémont's influence took hold. Just how decisively this came about is suggested by an oddly anachronistic moment in Herman Melville's Israel Potter (1854–55). It occurs when Potter meets Benjamin Franklin for the first time in Paris. Describing Franklin's study, Potter notes that the walls are covered with

The transformation began with the diaries, memoirs, and letters of those who took the overland trails west. Emigrants and travelers such as Edwin Bryant and Sarah Royce not only looked to the Report as a “guide-book in atlas form,” but either mimicked or paraphrased its descriptions of the landscape. Soon, C. W. Dana would cite the facts and statistics of the Report to prove that the great West was the “garden of the world,” while William Gilpin, a member of Frémont's second expedition to the far West, would declare that because the “Basin of the Mississippi” was such “a sublime amphitheatre of gorgeous fertility and transcendent proportions,” the nation was “predestined to expand and fit itself to the continent.”Footnote ¹⁷ Later, Walt Whitman would joyously echo these large-scale sentiments – calling the plains and prairies “North America's characteristic landscape,” and saying of the Mississippi, in particular, that “its valley, or reach, is rapidly concentrating the political power of the American Union.”Footnote ¹⁸

By the time Mark Twain published Roughing It in 1872, and John Wesley Powell (who served under Frémont in the Civil War) published Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries in 1875, the Great American Desert had actually migrated to a real location – in this case, the stretch of territory west of the Great Salt Lake and the Colorado Plateau. From there, it was but a short step to the western novels of Zane Grey, Wallace Stegner, and Cormac McCarthy, the Hollywood westerns of John Ford, and the eco-criticism of John Muir, Bernard DeVoto, and Edward Abbey. And it is there, and in the many cities, counties, and geographical features which still bear his name, that Frémont's Report is shown to exceed its historical origins and live on in the American imagination.