PREFACE BY ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT.

Relations of reciprocal good will, and a certain similarity of endeavour in important and serious undertakings, could alone have induced me to overcome the objection I have always felt -- perhaps without sufficient reason -- to introductory prefaces by any other hand but that of the author.

During the whole course of my life I have written such prefaces only four times; namely, for the French translation of the Voyage to the North Cape of our great geologist, Leopold von Buch; for the English narrative of Sir Robert Schomburgh's dangerous enterprise of five years' duration, undertaken to connect the coasts of Guiana, at Essequibo, astronomically with the eastern point of the Upper Orinoco, which I had reached from the west; thirdly, for the original edition of the complete works of my ever-memorable friend, Francois Arago; and lastly, for the Travels in the East Indies and Thibet of the late amiable and lamented Prince Waldemar of Prussia.

In the present instance I have voluntarily undertaken the task, from esteem for the untiring energy and activity manifested by the author in an important undertaking, as well as for the modest integrity of his vigorous and honourable character, and the remarkable artistic talent which he has developed, almost wholly by the study of Nature.

The present volumes make no pretension to the character of a scientific work, although they contain much valuable information on the physical geography of the regions investigated -- sometimes from the author's own observation, sometimes communicated by other members of the party specially skilled in those departments.

Mr. Möllhausen was appointed to accompany, as topographer and draughtsman, the Expedition sent by the Government of the United States to determine the direction of a line of railroad from the coasts of the Pacific; and he here offers the diary which he kept as a kind of commentary on his pictorial sketches of the country and the people, and in which he has reflected back, with the freshness with which they were received, his impressions of life and Nature.

When a traveller's descriptions are the result of accurate and conscientious observation, and especially when they concern the condition of natives standing at various grades of uncivilised life, they must always interest the student of humanity.

A melancholy experience has taught us that, in almost all climates, the vicinity of European or North American settlers has always tended to the destruction of the uncivilised races.

Crowded together within narrow limits, and where the near contact affords opportunity for plunder, often sinking into a lower moral state than they occupied before, they gradually waste away in unequal conflicts.

If, at the commencement of the Empire of the Incas of Peru, in the Cordilleras of Quito, and the elevated plains of New Granada (the ancient Cundinamarca), and in the Mexican Anahuac, south of the 28th parallel, the ancient population has maintained itself, and at some points even considerably increased, the cause must be sought in the fact that, many hundred years before the Spanish conquest, the population consisted of peaceful agricultural tribes.

The report concerning the ethnography, and of the physical and moral condition of the scarce, coppercoloured, or rather brown-red, natives of the regions between the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, is interesting in a twofold point of view, either with reference to generalisations concerning the sometimes progressive and sometimes stationary character of civilisation, or to particular local and historical circumstances.

In general views of the manifold grades of intelligence manifested by those whom we so vaguely, and often so improperly, denominate savages, the Indios bravos, the imagination is carried beyond the narrow limits of the present to a mysterious past, in which the greater part of the human race -- of those who have now attained to so high a point of civilisation, art, and science -- lived in the same rude condition.

How often have such thoughts occurred to me during a river navigation of fifteen hundred miles in the wildernesses of the Orinoco, south of the cataracts of the Atures, on the Atabapo-Cassiquiare and Rio Negro.

But even in the savage state you are struck occasionally by signs of spontaneously awakening intellectual power in the knowledge of several languages, by which the intercourse between neighbouring tribes is so much facilitated -- in the anticipation of a future existence of joy or sorrow, and in traditions that boldly rise to the origin of the human race, and its abode.

The hordes which occupy the country between New Mexico and the river Gila specially attract our attention, because they are scattered about the line of march along which, in the period from the sixth to the twelfth centuries, the various nations known as Tolteks, Chichimekis, Nahuatlakes, and Aztecs proceeded when they traversed and partly peopled southern tropical Mexico.

Memorials remain of the architectural and industrial skill of these nations, who had evidently attained to a high degree of culture.

The various stations or abiding places of the Aztecs on the river Gila, and at several points south-south-east of it, can still be pointed out by means of historical paintings and ancient traditions.

They are laid down in my Mexican atlas.

And the large, many-storied, family houses (casas grandes) seen in 1846 by the engineer, Lieutenant W. Abert, and subsequently by Möllhausen, -- houses which are entered by means of ladders, drawn up at night, -- offer analogies to the mode of building in use among some of those tribes.

The gigantic sculptures and religious and historical paintings left by the Tolteks or Aztecs, who built pyramids, and kept the record of cycles of years, show a striking agreement in their representations of the human form and face, the physiognomical character of which, especially in the structure of the forehead, and of the very large and prominent aquiline nose, differs much from that of the present many millions of agricultural native inhabitants of Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua; and the solution of the problem discussed by the acute Catlin, whether these forms, and the physiognomical structure can still be found among the northern tribes, -- not merely in individuals, but races, and where, -- becomes of great ethnographical importance.

In the case of the American migration of nations from north to south (as in that of the Asiatic nations from east to west), to which the attack of the Huingnu on the fair Yueti and Usün gave the earliest impulse, might not single tribes have remained behind northward of the Gila, as others in the Caucasus of the Pontic isthmus.

All the conjectures connected with the bold hypothesis concerning the sources of a certain amount of civilisation evident in the original seats of the wandering nations (Huehuetlapallan, Aztlan, and Quivira), have hitherto fallen into the abyss of historic myths.

Want of faith in the possibility of finding a satisfactory solution of the problem, in the absence of more sufficient materials for judgment, must, nevertheless, not be allowed to lessen our diligence, or set limits to our inquiries.

The question concerning the remains of these wandering nations of the north will find much satisfaction in Catlin's oil pictures (preserved in the Berlin Museum), as well as in Möllhausen's drawings.

It has also given rise to a valuable work in the philological field, in which the traces of the Aztec idiom (Nahuatl) are followed along the western side of North America.

Professor Buschmann, my talented friend of many years' standing, has therein confirmed some opinions that I expressed on the subject half a century ago; and in works undertaken in conjunction with my brother, Wilhelm von Humboldt, has turned his profound knowledge of the ancient Aztec language to historical account.

In addition to the historical and ethnological interest connected with a part of the earth so little known, and the exact description of which is the object of the following pages, its political importance, with relation to the commerce of the world and its cultivation, which must stand in immediate connection with that commerce, becomes a no less suggestive subject of reflection.

The rich Atlantic States on the Ohio and Mississippi find themselves compelled, by the course of events, to seek the best route to the newly acquired countries on the Pacific coast, which have now been received into the mighty American Union.

These countries are richer than the sea-board lying opposite to Europe in safe and beautiful harbours, in timber for ship building, and in the mineral productions most in demand.

This new territory, so long under the strict, though peaceful, rule of the monks, and engaged only in the productive chase of the sea-otter, is now, with all its physical advantages, in the hands of a restlessly active, enterprising and intelligent population, destined to play an important part in the commerce with China and Japan, as well as in the slowly rising trade of East Siberia.

At the time of the second discovery of America by Columbus, there were found along the western part of the new continent, from the Mexican Anahuac to Chili, regular, social, and political institutions, widely diffused a common form of religious worship, monumental sculptures, great architectural works, temples, pyramids, palaces, and fortifications.

The far more extensive and flatter eastern region, though covered with a perfect net-work of rivers, was inhabited only by savage tribes, isolated, and scarcely capable of any co-operation even for a warlike undertaking, and maintaining themselves only by hunting and fishing.

This singular contrast between civilisation and uncivilisation, thus geographically marked out, began to disappear when the great oceanic valley was crossed from the most northern and the most southern part of Europe, at periods separated by an interval of five hundred years.

The first Scandinavian island settlement, originated by Leif, the son of Erik the Red, was feeble and transitory, and in a moral sense fruitless; it remained without effect on the condition of the natives, although the American coasts of the frigid and temperate zones, from the seventy-third degree (namely, from the small group of "Women's Islands" in West Greenland) to the forty-first, were visited by bold Christian navigators.

It was not till the second discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, a discovery that took place within the torrid zone, that the one half of the earth began to be really revealed to the other, and the old promise of the astronomer and physician Toscanelli -- buscar el levante por el poniente, to find the golden East, by sailing to the west -- became fulfilled.

If we go back in imagination to those ages of the world in which the civilised nations who dwell round the basin of the Mediterranean saw its gates opened to them by the founding of Tartessus, and the important, though erroneous, voyage of Colaus of Samos, we shall recognise the same impulse to move from east to west which carried the Atlantic navigators across the vast ocean.

The historical events, in which a great part of the human race appears animated by a similar tendency, lead to great results, slowly, indeed, and gradually, but so much the more certainly, developing themselves according to eternal laws, like those which reign in organic nature.

Although the Pacific was first seen seven years after the death of Columbus, by Vasco Nundez de Balboa, from the summit of the Sierra de Quarequa, on the Isthmus of Panama, and a few days afterwards navigated in a canoe by Alonzo Martin de Don Benito, Columbus had obtained precise information of its existence eleven years before, in the year 1502, during his fourth voyage, the one in which he most displayed the vigour of his genius.

He gained the information at Puerto de Retrete, on the east coast of Veragua, and he points out, in his carta rarissima of the 7th of July, 1503, in the letter wherein he so poetically describes his magnificent dreams in the clearest manner, the two opposite lying oceans, or, as his son says in the biography of his father, the contraction (estrecho) of the continent at that part. The ocean, whose existence had been revealed to him by the natives of the country, must lead, he thought, to the gold Chersonesus of Ptolemy, and the East Asiatic land of Spices; whither, some day, North American fleets, built in San Francisco, will sail under the guidance of the chronometer.

The distance, in a straight line, from the Atlantic coast to that of San Francisco, in California, is about 2200 miles, and there is a kind of pleasure in looking back to the small beginnings of our knowledge of the Pacific, to all that even Columbus could know of it on his death-bed, at a time when such gigantic projects are entertained of railways and oceanic canals through the Narpi and Cupica; through the Atrato and the Rio Truando; the Huasacualco and the Chimalapa; through the Rio San Juan and Lake Nicaragua.

That great Columbus, half forgotten, as I have elsewhere shown, even by his contemporaries, died (at Valladolid, 20th of May, 1506) in the firm belief, shared also by Amerigo Vespucci until his death at Seville (Feb. 22nd, 1522), that they had discovered only the coasts of the continent of Asia, and no new part of the world.

Columbus considered the sea that washes the western part of Veragua so near the gold Chersonesus, that he compares the relative positions of the province of Ciguare, in West Veragua, and Puerto Retrete (Puerto Escrivanos), to those of Venice and Pisa, or from Tortosa, at the mouth of the Ebro, to Fuenterabia on the Bidassoa, in Biscay; and he reckoned from Ciguare to the Ganges (Gangues) only nine days' journey.

It appears to me worthy of consideration, too, that at the present day the gold fields (las minas de la Aurea), which the carta ravissima of Columbus points out as lying in the most eastern part of Asia, are really to be found on the western side of the new continent.

To give a descriptive survey of the contrast between the former and the present time, and the great benefit which an intelligent investigation of the terra incognita of the far West, within the territory of the United States, will afford to our geographical knowledge for many years to come, has been the chief purpose of this preface.

It remains for me, in conclusion, to fulfil the agreeable duty of reminding the reader that the author of the following narrative of a Journey from the Mississippi and Arkansas to the shores of the Pacific, had the advantage, in a former journey to the Nebraska river, of familiarising himself with the life of the Indian tribes by a long stay among them. He is the son of a Prussian artillery officer, and at twenty-four years of age left the service and his country, with the most honourable testimonials from his superior officers, to proceed to the western part of the United States.

He was independent and alone, but irresistibly urged onwards, as is most frequently the case with active and energetic characters, by a thirst for the aspect of wild, free nature, and vast untrodden regions.

When near the banks of the Mississippi he happened to hear of the proposed grand and promising scientific Expedition of H. R. H. Duke Paul William of Wurtemberg to the Rocky Mountains.

He asked permission to join it, which was accorded in the most gratifying manner, and the Expedition proceeded without accident as far as Fort Laramie, on the Flat River, but there the unpracticable character of the ground, a terrible and general affection of the eyes from a fall of snow, the repeated attacks of the Indians, and the deaths of a great number of horses, indispensable for the journey, compelled the duke for the time to give up his intention.

Having been separated from the party, M. Möllhausen joined a passing band of Ottoe Indians, who provided him with a horse; after which he turned northwards to Bellevue, at that time the seat of an agency and depot of the fur company.

After a residence of three months among the Omahas, during which he was an active associate of their hunting parties, he embarked on board a steamer going down the Mississippi, and had the pleasure of again meeting Duke Paul of Wurtemberg, accompanying him in several excursions, and assisting him in adding to his important geological collection.

In 1852 he embarked at New Orleans for Europe, having been commissioned by M. Angelrodt, the estimable Prussian consul at St. Louis, at the mouth of the Missouri, to take charge of a number of interesting animals, destined for the Berlin Zoological Gardens.

With increased knowledge, and improved artistic culture, although with very limited resources, M. Möllhausen had taken the bold resolution of making another journey to the West of the United States, and through the intervention of my old and valued friend, Professor Lichtenstein, I became acquainted with the enterprising young traveller.

Although now, perhaps, the oldest traveller of the age, I remembered too well the enthusiastic feelings of my early life not to be interested in a young man of such congenial tastes, and who had been so warmly recommended to me; and the kindness of a monarch, who has always so gladly extended his protection to rising talent, permitted M. Möllhausen to lay before him in person his remarkably clear and accurate Sketches of Indian Life.

The increasing favour with which my labours and exertions have been regarded in the United States, and the generous sacrifices made by many of the particular governments there for the encouragement of intellectual progress, especially in all departments of astronomical and geographical science, and of natural history, led me to hope that recommendations from me, joined to those of my dear friend the Prussian ambassador, M. von Gerolt, would, on his return to the United States, have some weight with the authorities and with the admirable Smithsonian institution; and my hopes were speedily fulfilled. M. Möllhausen has himself, in the commencement of his narrative, mentioned his appointment as topographical draughtsman in the very completely equipped Expedition under Lieutenant Whipple.

M. Möllhausen frequently speaks of himself as the "German Naturalist" of the Expedition, and appears to have acted also in that capacity.

Notwithstanding the fatigue inseparable from a land journey of eleven months' duration, the traveller several times sent papers, two of which were of remarkable interest, to the Geographical Society of Berlin.

One related to the manners and physical conformation of some little known Indian tribes on the great Colorado and in the neighbouring mountains -- Mohaves, Cutchanas, and Cosninos; the other to the so-called petrified forest, between the "Old Town" (Pueblo de Zundi), and the Little Colorado.

This remarkable phenomenon, in which coniferoe were found united with tree ferns, was also examined by M. Marcou, the geologist of the Expedition, now professor at the Federal Polytechnic School of Zurich, and it has been described in his extremely instructive work, entitled "General Orography of Canada and the United States."

The following narrative of travel has been enriched by some scientific notes from the learned works of Professor Marcou, now printed.

The purpose of the Expedition under Lieutenant Whipple was happily attained on the 23rd of March, 1854, by its arrival on the Pacific coast, at the sea-port of San Pedro, to the north of the Californian mission of San Diego.

The return was by a rapid journey across the Isthmus of Panama to New York; and after an absence of a year and five months, M. Möllhausen returned to Berlin with his collections, and a great number of interesting pictorial studies from nature in the Far West, which met with the most encouraging approval from his sovereign.

His Majesty has since been graciously pleased to take the young traveller into his own service, by appointing him to be the keeper of the libraries in the castles of Potsdam and the environs.

His fresh and animated descriptions of wild nature in all the manifold variety of her forms, of the uncivilised state of the native tribes, and of the habits of various species of animals, evince a keen sensibility that naturally finds adequate expression in language.

What Baldwin Möllhausen has learned of Nature through so many vicissitudes and privations, though with many compensatory pleasures, has not been lost to his intellectual culture; as Schiller says, with beautiful simplicity, "Man himself grows with his aims."

Berlin.