Lost on the Dakota Prairie
• The Pathfinder was lost.
• A rolling sea of grass in what would become South Dakota stretched before John C. Frémont.
• The young lieutenant had assisted French explorer and mathema

tician Joseph Nicollet in surveying and mapping the land between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in 1838, and again in 1839. In 1839, soon after the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers expedition set out from Fort Pierre Chouteau, near what is now Fort Pierre, it encountered a herd of buffalo. When the hunt ended, Frémont looked around for his fellow hunters. None were in sight. Frémont dismounted from his tired horse and walked for hour after hour.
• "Toward midnight I reached the breaks of the river hills at a wooded ravine and just then I saw a rocket shoot up into the sky, far away to the south. That was camp, but apparently some 15 miles distant," Frémont wrote in his memoirs.
• A signal had been sent to the lost man. Frémont decided to wait for daybreak to find camp. Before going to sleep, Frémont placed his gun by his side in the direction from which the rocket had been fired.
• At dawn, he saddled his horse and began riding in the direction indicated by the

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