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E. Willard Smith visited the Fort in 1840 and found it still active; Smith had been given an <br />expedition to the west as a graduation present from his father and made his way to Brown's <br />Park via North Park and the Little Snake River. His party was alert to the dangers of Indians <br />and encountered Shoshone, Sioux, and Ute during his travels (Smith 1955). <br />As mentioned earlier, Thomas J. Farnham and a party of four, guided by the trapper <br />Kelly, came through the country in 1839, through the Gore Mountains via Red Dirt Creek, <br />Gore Peak, to Service Creek, the Yampa River, and on to Fort Davy Crockett, with no trails <br />to guide them. At least two accounts of this journey exist, the diary of Farnham himself <br />(Farnham 1841) and that of Obadiah Oakley (Oakley 1955), a member of the party. <br />Oakley's account is sketchy; Farnham's is more complete and replete with eloquent 19th <br />century prose. Both accounts suffer from lack of detail, but it seems possible that their route <br />might have taken them through Egeria Park to the Yampa River and thence downstream to <br />Steamboat Springs. Farnham's guide, Kelly, had first come to the country in 1827 with the <br />American Fur Co., and the party had stayed at a stockade Kelly had constructed to defend <br />against Utes while he nursed a trapper back to health. On his return visit, Kelly complained, <br />Now, the mountains are so poor that he would stand a right good chance of starving, <br />if he were obliged to hang up here for seven days. The game is all driven out. No <br />place for a white man now... More danger then, to be sure; but more beaver too; and <br />plenty of grease about the buffalo ribs. Ah! Those were the good times, but a white <br />man has no business here (Farnham 1841:100). <br />Farnham was particularly impressed with the country northwest of Craig. He wrote: <br />We had been traveling the last five days in a westerly course; and as the river <br />[Yampa] continued in that direction, we left it to see it no more, I would humbly <br />hope, till the dews of heaven shall cause this region of deserts to blossom and ripen <br />into something more nutritive than wild wormwood (sage) and gravel... This region <br />is doomed to perpetual sterility and thus it is said to be with the whole country lying <br />to the distance of hundreds of miles on each side of the whole course of the Colorado <br />to the west.... A vast plateau of desolation, yielding only the wild wormwood and <br />prickly pear (Farnham 1841:106-107). <br />It might be noted that by the time Farnham's party reached Fort Davy Crockett, they <br />had endured months of fear of hostile Indians and intermittent days of starvation, had lost <br />most of their horses, and finally had to eat their loyal greyhound, at which time Farnham <br />made the above remarks. <br />Colonel John C. Fremont returned from California in 1844, visited Fort Davy <br />Crockett, and found it abandoned (Fremont 1970:708). He again returned to Colorado in <br />1845 on a military exploration of the Arkansas, Grand [Colorado], White, and Green Rivers, <br />and subsequently wrote off western Colorado as being “worthless.” <br />By 1860, different motives were bringing men to the mountains of Colorado. <br />40