In 1833, Joseph R. Walker led a party sent by Captain Benjamin Bonneville, to find a route from the Great Salt Lake to California via the Humboldt River, the Humboldt Sink, the Carson Sink, and then up into the Sierra Nevada by either the Carson River or the Walker River to near the headwaters of the Merced River and thence down to the San Joaquin River. John Charles Fremont named Walker Lake after the trapper and the United States Geographic Board named the river after Walker in its Fifth Report.