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Enos had guided Fremont through Wyoming. It is rather too bad that Palmer could not have accompanied Fremont and Kit Carson when, in February, 1844, they crossed the snowy summit of the Sierras and descended through the deep drifts to Sutter's Fort and safety. That was four years before the discovery of gold in El Dorado County. Palmer was not crazy for gold.
When he had made a hole of sufficient width and depth, he buried the abandoned nuggets and gold dust. Granger watched him to the end. Then, with a touch of bitterness in his tones, he asked, "And what's that for?" "In case I should ever be able to come back," said Spurling, "and so that no one else may find it." "Don't you worry yourself, you'll be in El Dorado before that time, or else hanged.
"Anything that lies in our power, sir; though if you come for gold" The favorite laughed again. "I've come for a thing a deal more precious, Sir Governor, a thing worth more to me than all the treasure of the Indies with Manoa and El Dorado thrown in, to wit, the thing upon which I've set my mind.
His fabulous descriptions of an imaginary El Dorado, whose capital with its dazzling treasures he pretended to have seen, inflamed other explorers, and prompted to new enterprises. The cupidity of the Spaniards, and their eagerness for knightly warfare, made the New World, with its floral beauty and mineral riches, a most enticing field for adventure.
When the padres attempted to tell the story of the Christ, the natives exclaimed 'El Dorado' the golden. The ignorant sailors and adventurers seized upon the literal meaning, instead of the spiritual one. The time, being that of Don Quixote and of the Inquisition, accounts for the childish credulity on one side and the unparalleled ferocity on the other.
He was too exalted by his present happy fate penniless, jobless, family in mourning, but healthy, safe, and full-stomached, not to omit an ebullience of spirits incited by the continuing wonder of each new listener and the praise for his deeds and by the conviviality of his admirers. Alex was sure of one point, and that was that the El Dorado was overloaded.
So near the sources of the Orinoco we heard of nothing in these mountains but the proximity of El Dorado, the lake Parima, and the ruins of the great city of Manoa.
The natives catch it with unbaited hooks. The fisherman selects a point of rock jutting over the stream, and having secured three polished hooks, back to back, attached to a line, throws it as far from him as possible into the water, giving it several strong jerks to make it look like small fry darting about. The dorado makes a dash at them, and gets hooked generally through the back.
The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some prints which had once been the chief ornament of my great-grandfather's study, but which the growth of taste or luxury had banished from story to story till they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther.
On the evening of the fourth day, when his strength was almost spent and he was ready to sink with faintness, he came to an island and saw in the distance, in the light of the setting sun, golden spires and the roofs of houses many miles away, which he knew to be El Dorado.
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