southern segment cut by a line from San Gabriel to Mojave, by other than aboriginal feet.[1]
Meanwhile a grand advance movement from the Atlantic westward to the Mississippi, to the plains, to the Rocky Mountains, and into the Great Basin had been gradually made by the fur-hunting pioneers of the broad interior — struggling onward from year to year against obstacles incomparably greater than those presented by the gales and scurvy of the Pacific. If I were writing the history of California alone, it would be appropriate and probably necessary to present here, en résumé at least, the general movement to which I have alluded, embodying the annals of the various fur companies. But the centre of the fur trade was much farther north, and its annals cannot be profitably separated from the history of the North-west. For this reason – bearing in mind also those portions of my work relating locally to Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona – I feel justified in referring the reader for the general exploration westward to other chapters of other volumes, and in confining my record here to such expeditions as directly affect Californian territory.
These began in 1826, when the inland barrier of mountain and desert was first passed, and from that date the influx of foreigners by overland routes becomes a topic of ever growing importance. It is well, however, to understand at the outset, that respecting the movements of the trappers no record of even tolerable completeness exists, or could be expected to exist. After 1826 an army of hunters, increasing from hundreds to thousands, frequented the fur-producing
- ↑ A few English and American deserters, leaving their vessels at Todos Santos or thereabouts, had on two or three occasions been sent across the frontier to S. Diego, forming an exception of little importance to my general statement. Another exception of somewhat greater weight rests in the possibility that trappers may have crossed the northern frontier before 1826. It is not improbable that Hudson's Bay Company men may have done so from the Willamette Valley on one or more occasions, though there is no more definite record than the rumor of 1820-1, that foreign hunters were present in the north, and the newspaper report of McKay's presence in Siskiyou in 1825.
