Fremont’s Official Reports as well as the maps by Charles Preuss that accompanied them are widely available online, including at the Library of Congress, the HathiTrust Digital Library and the Internet Archive. No formal report of Fremont’s Fifth Expedition was ever published, though he obviously intended to include it in his Memoirs of My Life and Times.
The book is a strange hybrid of autobiography and prospectus. Originally printed by Bedford, Clark & Company of Chicago and — per Bob Graham of the estimable Longcamp.com website — sold in 10 parts “issued semi-monthly; 50 cents per part., it only covers Fremont’s life up to his Third Expedition and the Mexican-American War that ended it. Since this period of his life would conclude with his being brought back to Washington in manacles for a court martial, it is understandable why Fremont ended Volume One before that point, but the book did not sell well and Volume Two never appeared. While it has occasionally been reported that its manuscript is held by the Library of Congress, Jessie herself said John never got around to writing it and a careful perusal of the LOC’s “John Charles Frémont and Jessie Benton Frémont papers, 1828-1980” does not reveal it.
Nonetheless, the Fifth Expedition’s key events were bullet-pointed in Volume One’s introductory Synopsis. Moreover, in Jessie Benton Fremont’s Some Account of the Plates, which follows the Synopsis, she discusses at length the conversion of Carvalho’s daguerreotypes into photographs (by Matthew Brady) and then into paintings, engravings and india-ink drawings by various artists. Fortunately, many were anachronistically included in Volume One. Also fortunately, John Gunnison traveled much of the same route just four months before Fremont and we have the maps of his survey… produced by Uncharted”s Baron (Friedrich Wilhelm von Egloffstein)!
I have included here first a hand-drawn map by one of the Bent brothers (William or Charles) of their fort on the Arkansas River, which was the sort of thing early travelers had to rely on;
and then a map drawn by the Baron of the same route. (Clicking on any of the maps allows them to be viewed in more detail).
The difference between them indicates more eloquently than I ever could how the topographers of the mid-19th century elevated mapmaking to an art form and also provided far more specific directions for the wagon trains that would follow them.
The Baron of course was still with Fremont when Gunnison passed by Bent’s Fort, but the topographer on that survey, Richard Kern, was killed with Gunnison and six others in the massacre referred to in Uncharted. In its wake, E.G. Beckwith took over command of the survey and the Baron took over Kern’s work after parting company with Fremont and joining Beckwith at Salt Lake City.
Because the Cochetopa Pass figures so importantly in Uncharted, I am also including a Kern-Egloffstein map of that region.
I probably should admit that none of the Kern brothers were relatives of mine though I sort of wish they were. Richard’s brother Edward was the cartographer on Fremont’s Third Expedition; and gave his name to the Kern River and Kern County, California. Richard and another brother Benjamin joined him for Fremont’s Fourth on which Benjamin died.