The route selected for the march was along the emigrant road across
the Plains, first defined fifty years ago by trappers and _voyageurs_
following the trail by which the buffalo crossed the mountains,
described by Lieutenant-Colonel Fremont, in the reports of his earlier
explorations, and subsequently adopted by all the overland emigration
across the continent. It is, perhaps, the most remarkable natural road
in the world. The hand of man could hardly add an improvement to the
highway along which, from the Missouri to the Great Basin, Nature has
presented not a single obstacle to the progress of the heaviest loaded
teams. From the frontier, at Fort Leavenworth, it sweeps over a broad
rolling prairie to the Platte, a river shallow, but of great width,
whose course is as straight as an arrow. Pursuing the river-bottom more
than three hundred miles, to the Black Hills, steep mounds dotted with
dark pines and cedars, it enters the broad belt of mountainous country
which terminates in the rim of the Basin. Following thence the North
Fork of the Platte, and its tributary, the Sweetwater,--so named by an
old French trapper, who had the misfortune to upset a load of sugar into
the stream,--it emerges from the Black Hills into scenery of a different
character.
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