and 1844 Fremont started a movement which was the material complement of Transcendentalism by his series of bold expeditions to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon, and California. Fremont's account of these explorations Hulings Miller borrowed from an Indian agent and read in the evenings to his assembled family. "I was never so fascinated," says Joaquin, "I never grew so fast in my life. Every scene and circumstance in the narrative was painted in my mind to last, and to last forever." The hide of the "woolly white horse" celebrated in Fremont's presidential campaign is exhibited to this day in Miller's home in California; and it may be mentioned here that Fremont's guide, the hunter and Indian fighter Kit Carson, is the hero of one of Miller's most readable poems. In 1845 Texas was admitted to the Union, and Sam Houston, another of the poet's western heroes, was elected to the United States Senate. At about this time the Mormons, whom he was to commemorate in The Danites, were drifting westward through Illinois and Missouri; and in 1847 Brigham Young led the faithful into the valley of the Great Salt Lake. In 1849 the cry—"Gold is discovered in California!"—ran like prairie fire among our middleborderers, and doubled the attraction of the full section of land offered to each settler in Oregon, in a bill introduced by Senator Linn of Missouri. By 1850, still another of Miller's heroes, the enigmatic William Walker, was in California, soon to be pre-
