Fremont Arrives

Fremont Arrives. . , Summer Lake and Winter Ridge were both named in 1843 by Captain John C. Fremont, leader of a US Army Topographical Corps expedition whose ambitious goal was to explore and map the Great Basin lands of eastern Oregon, Nevada, and Utah., On December 16, 1843, Fremont and his party stood shivering and windblown atop the steep ridge just southwest of here. Peering down, through the cold air to the sunny lake below, the explorers were instantly inspired:, "...we found ourselves on the verge of a vertical and rocky wall of the mountain. At our feet… more than a thousand feet below… we looked into a grass prairie country, in which a beautiful lake, some twenty miles in length, was spread along the foot of the mountain… Shivering on snow three feet deep, and stiffening in a cold north wind, we exclaimed at once that the names of summer lake and winter ridge should be applied to these proximate places of such sudden and violent contrast." , Captain John C. Fremont, December 16, 1843, Propelled to the national stage by his achievements at western exploration, Fremont was nominated as the Republican candidate for President in 1856; later, he served in the Civil War, advancing to the rank of major-general., Fremont died in 1890, but the many names that he applied to the local landscape – Abert Rim, Winter Ridge, Summer Lake – persist. Indeed, the term "Great Basin" itself was coined by Fremont, who noticed that the rivers of this basin-and-range country converged in lakes, but did not empty into the sea.