Author Topic: The Ill-Fated Expedition of a 19th-Century Scientist to Explore the California Wilderness  (Read 793 times)

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The Ill-Fated Expedition of a 19th-Century Scientist to Explore the California Wilderness
Even facing exposure and starvation, Josiah Gregg insisted on stopping to take measurements and observations, much to his companions’ distress
 
By Sharon Levy, Undark Magazine
 
December 17, 2018
 

This article was originally published on Undark, an online magazine covering the intersection of science and society.

In November 1849, eight men set out from their “gold diggings” on the North Fork Trinity River in Northern California into a range of forested mountains that had never been mapped. Their leader was Josiah Gregg, a math whiz, self-taught navigator, medical doctor, and obsessive botanist. The Indians they’d met along the North Fork had described a large, sheltered bay on the Pacific shore, an eight-day walk to the west. Such a bay could make them all rich — if they got there before other settlers, they could lay claim to property and exploit the inevitable flood of miners eager to follow a new route to the gold-rich Trinity.

Two Indians had offered to guide the party through the mountains, but by November 5, the date Gregg had set for the expedition to start, a steady snowfall had cloaked the mountain summits in deep drifts. The Indians refused to go and warned Gregg that snow made the route deadly. Of the 24 men who’d volunteered, all but seven turned away. Gregg and his seven die-hards began to climb west, up a trackless mountain.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ill-fated-expedition-19th-century-scientist-explore-california-wilderness-180971048/#YyIGrdBllEDe5PQv.99