Status Updates From The Year Of Decision, 1846

A good many of them had died in Indian country or on the way back, more had fallen sick. The job had to be done without preparation, with inadequate supplies, poor food, no shelter against the weather. [Doniphan's men] were baying their resentment—but with a difference now. They had always beefed and bellyached, but now their complaints had a new tone, the confidence of tested men.

[Parkman's] admiration grew but at the same time he fell out of love [with the Sioux], confessing disenchantment. They told such marvelous stories—and their minds were so pointless and absurd! They looked so magisterial, so antique Roman at the council fire—and they gabbled like old women, reasoning with an illogic it would have been kind to call infantile.

[Francis Parkman] was perplexed by "this strange migration" and wondered whether mere restlessness went into it, or "a desire of shaking off restraints of law and society," or "an insane hope of a better condition of life." But with that wonder his interest in [the pioneers] reached a full stop. Manifest Destiny was taking flesh under his eyes...

[Frémont] took a frustrated spirit with him. The attitudes of a romantic hero must succeed altogether or they will be merely funny....