The Platte River Raft
Trip
Cré Dieu! said Basil, Je crois
bien que j'ai nagé un demi mile.
 Frémont,
August 24, 1842: We cleared rock after rock, and shot past
fall after fall, our little boat seeming to play with the
cataract. We became flush with success and familiar with the
danger; and yielding to the excitement of the occasion,
broke forth together into a Canadian boat song. Singing, or
rather shouting, as we dashed along; and were, I believe, in
the midst of the chorus, when the boat struck a concealed
rock immediately at the foot of a fall, which whirled her
over in an instant.
Well, the canyon doesn't look very formidable as a
white water rafting venue today.
First called the Firey Narrows by Robert Stuart
and his party in 1812, it is today called Frémont
Canyon. A century and a half of reclamation and
hydroelectric development on the North Platte River have
tamed it more than a little.
Note: In the summer 2000 edition of Harpers Magazine Tom
Chaffin (Pathfinder:
John C. Frémont and the course of American
Empire) wrote an article How
the West Was Lost--his story of a road trip following
Frémont 's 1st Expedition route, and how most had
disappeared under reclamation projects and other
developement.
The highly imaginary engraving of the boat in the rapids
is from Samuel Smucker's 1856 The
Life of Col. John Charles Frémont and His Narrative
of Explorations and Adventures in Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon
and California. It is depicted as a wooden boat,
a sort of a bateau, whereas the actual boat was a 20'
long 4' beam India rubber boat--rubberized canvas
with sewn and cemented seams.
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Voucher No. 24, New York, 5 May,
1842
U. S. to Horace H. Day
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1 air army boat or
floater
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$150.00
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2 pieces India rubber
cloth
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$39.98
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2 pots rubber
composition
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$1.00
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Jackson, Donald, and Mary Lee
Spence, The Expeditions of John Charles
Frémont: Vol. I, Travels from 1838 to
1844, University of Illinois Press,
1970.
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$190.98
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 This
is the portion of the 1843 Frémont/Preuss
map showing the raft trip. There are two routes
taken: Bernier's land party's route overland with
most of the expedition to a previous camp on Goat
Island; the rafters (Frémont, Preuss,
Lajeunesse, Lambert, Benoist, Descoteaux, and Ayot)
route following the Sweetwater to its juncture with
the North Fork of the Platte. That was the August
24, 1842 launch point for the raft trip.
Today that juncture, the mouth of the
Sweetwater, is covered by the waters of Pathfinder
Reservoir (1919) on the North Platte. At the point
that the Platte passed through Frémont
Canyon, the terminus of the trip (the wreck), the
waters are backed up from Alcova Reservoir--no
white water rapids today!
 At
right is the route from Independence Rock (left) to
the mouth of the Sweetwater (lower center) to Goat
Island (right).
Goat island was later called Frémont Island,
but, like the then nearby Hot Springs Gate, it was
another casualty of progress.
The upper dashed trace on the expedition map is
Bernier's overland contingent--approximately
today's route 220.
The original plan was to stop and breakfast at
Goat Island, well before the arrival of Bernier,
and then to continue on down the Platte. Provisions
for ten or twelve days were stowed away. Didn't
happen that way.
Things went pretty well for a few miles, and then
they entered the canyon!
Fortunately, Frémont had told Bernier to
wait at Goat Island if he found no note left for
him.
The Platte never did work out as a river
transportation route.
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Note on Tom
"Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick and
Frémont:
 In
the Report, Frémont tells us that
subsequent to his own raft misadventure,
Tom Fitzpatrick told him that in 1824 he
had lost a complete cargo of furs in the
same canyon.
Frémont, exploring an alternate
route, had reached Fort Laramie on July
15, 1842, two days behind his main party
which he had placed under the charge of
Clement Lambert. There he learned that Tom
Fitzpatrick and Jim Bridger had arrived at
the Fort on July 3, with disturbing news
of a great state of unrest among the
Indians--the Gros Ventres, Oglallas, and
Cheyenne had taken the field against the
Snakes and Crows. Tom Fitzpatrick had then
been engaged at the fort to guide the
missionary party of Dr. Elijah White to
Oregon, and had left shortly before the
arrival of the Frémont party.
Frémont 's first actual meeting
with Tom Fitzpatrick took place in
Washington, D.C. in January of 1843--at
the time the 1st Expedition Report was
being written. Senator Benton was at that
time attempting to find a place for Tom in
government service. One of the discovers
of South Pass in 1824, he would be one of
the guides on Frémont 's 2nd
Expedition, 1843-44. Later, he
was appointed Indian
Agent of all the tribes on the headwaters
of the Arkansas, Platte, and Kansas
Rivers, in which capacity he was
instrumental in obtaining important
treaties.
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 Here
is the raft trip on a modern map showing the North
Platte and Sweetwater as presently constituted
after a century of extensive reclamation projects.
The trip is from Pathfinder Reservoir to Alcova
Reservoir. I guess you can still raft it, but, as
the photo at the top shows, it won't be very
exciting.
Important positions determined by Frémont
in locating these places are below. Because the
longitude determinations are not very exact, the
latitudes only are used; the second line of
position is the relevant watercourse.
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August 22
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Rock Independence
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N32° 29' 36"
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August 23
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Mouth of the Sweetwater
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N42° 27' 18"
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July 30
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Goat Island
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N42° 33' 27"
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Taking the instruments and records on the raft
doesn't seem to have been a very smart move. They
would have been safer travelling overland with
Bernier. Many records of astronomical and
barometrical observations and botanical specimens
were lost.
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Tom Rea, author of Bone Wars, tells
this story as a chapter in his new book
Devil's
Gate: Owning the Land, Owning the
Story published by the
University of Oklahoma Press, 2006.
"In this eloquent and captivating
narrative, Tom Rea traces the history of
the Sweetwater River valley in central
Wyoming--a remote place including Devil's
Gate, Independence Rock, and other sites
along a stretch of the Oregon Trail--to
show how ownership of a place can
translate into owning its story." You can
find the book at your bookstore, or online
at Amazon.com.
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This was not the only trial of the rubber boat.
It had been used to ferry equipment across swollen
rivers, and there was a short attempt on August
23rd at descending the Sweetwater; it was too
shallow. On September 15, Frémont made one
last try at descending the Platte. They built an 8'
long buffalo hide bull boat which drew only
four inches of water, but after he and Charles
Preuss and two others had dragged it through the
sands for three or four miles they abandoned
it.
Another rubber boat was taken on
Frémont's 2nd expedition on 1843. It was
used to cross several miles of water to an island
in Great Salt Lake. Today called Frémont
Island.
Frémont was not the first explorer to
take along a packable boat. Lewis and Clark had had
a folding iron-frame for a boat fabricated at the
Harpers Ferry arsenal in Virginia in April 1803.
They planned to cover it with birch or leather. On
the upper reaches of the Missouri River in 1804
they gave it a trial. It sunk.
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