Carvings by white men on a cliff two miles south of St. George (below). Message below plant reads: Jacob Peart Jr. I was sent here to raise cotten March 1858. Photo by U. S. National Park Service.
Smith called the Virgin the Adams River in compliment to President John Quincy Adams, although it was in territory then claimed by Mexico. At the mouth of Santa Clara Creek, he fell in with a group of Paiute Indians (his printed word is Pa Ulches, probably a misprint for Pa Utches), who wore rabbit skin robes and raised a little corn and pumpkins. He called the Santa Clara, Corn Creek.
On his first trip of 1826, he followed the Virgin River down through the narrows below the mouth of the Santa Clara, a hazardous undertaking since most of the channel is barely wide enough to accommodate the stream. This would have involved much wading of the stream over shifting quicksand, through deep holes and around giant rocks and boulders. On his second trip, a year later, he avoided these narrows by going up Corn Creek (Santa Clara) about twenty five miles, crossing over a pass to the drainage into Beaver Dam Wash which he followed down to the Virgin, rejoining his old route about ten miles below the narrows.[11]
These pioneering trips of Smith’s not only opened two new routes to the Pacific, westward and southwestward, but his reports of his travels and stories of adventure undoubtedly incited others to follow. One of these was George C. Yount, who was in the mountains with Smith for several months. Smith’s stories inflamed in him a desire to visit California. In the fall of 1830, Yount joined a party organized by William Wolfskill at Santa Fe for the purpose of reaching the coast. Coming up through the corner of Colorado and eastern Utah, they reached the Sevier River, probably through Salina Canyon, arrived at the Virgin River and followed it down to the Colorado. The story of this trip was told by Yount in his old age and the details of the route are not precise, but it appears that his party must have attempted to follow Smith’s trail.[12] It is probable that these explorations had a great deal to do with the development of the Old Spanish Trail, then in its formative stages.[13]
Subsequently, the Old Spanish Trail became a regular overland route, following the Sevier River nearly to Panguitch, then over the Bear Valley pass to Paragonah, across the desert to the Mountain Meadows, down the Santa Clara past Gunlock, over the divide to Beaver Dam Wash, paralleling the Virgin River, across desert hills to the Muddy River and thence across toward Los Angeles via Las Vegas.
By 1844, when Captain John C. Fremont of the U. S. Army came over the route from the coast to Paragonah, this was a well defined trail, over which annual caravans traveled back and forth from Santa Fe to the coast.[14] Untold numbers of Spaniards may have traveled the route that Escalante had tried vainly to find, leaving their impress along the way in the Spanish names given to many of the important places, several of which have persisted to this day. The names, Rio Virgen (River of Virgins), Santa Clara Creek and La Verkin Creek, all probably originated with the Spaniards, between the time of Jedediah S. Smith and John C. Fremont.[15]
Fremont followed the route from the coast past Las Vegas and encamped on the Muddy River after a fifty to sixty mile jaunt across the parched desert, sixteen hours of uninterrupted traveling without water. The Indians were numerous and insulting, evidently intent upon raiding the camp and stealing anything they could. Horses fatigued and left behind the night before were found butchered the next morning. The party remained in camp all day on May 5, 1844, to let their animals recuperate from the hard trip of the day before. They remained constantly armed and on watch. Fremont called the natives Digger Indians. They fed largely upon lizards and other small animals of the desert. Many of them carried long sticks, hooked at the end for extracting lizards from the rocks.
As Fremont traveled up the Virgin River, the Indians followed stealthily in the rear and quickly cut off any animals that were left behind. While encamped near the present site of Littlefield, Arizona, one of the men, Tabeau, was killed by the Indians when he went back alone a short distance to look for a lost mule. The party that went in search of him found where he had been dragged by the Indians to the edge of the river and thrown in. His horse, saddle, clothing, arms, and the mule had all been taken by the Indians.
The two thousand-foot mountain gorge above Littlefield forced Fremont to leave the Virgin and turn off to the north where he regained the Old Spanish Trail which he had lost in the sands of the desert. Surmounting a pass, he reached the Santa Clara and followed it up to the Mountain Meadows where, he states:
We found an extensive mountain meadow, rich in bunch grass, and fresh with numerous springs of clear water, all refreshing and delightful to look upon. It was, in fact, that las Vegas de Santa Clara, which had been so long represented to us as the terminating point of the desert, and where the annual caravan from California to New Mexico halted and recruited for some weeks. It was a very suitable place to recover from the fatigue and exhaustion of a month’s suffering in the hot and sterile desert. The meadow was about a mile wide and some ten miles long, bordered by grassy hills and mountains.... In passing before the great caravan, we had the advantage of finding more grass, but the disadvantage of finding also the marauding savages, who had gathered down upon the trail, waiting the approach of their prey.... At this place we had complete relief from the heat and privations of the desert and some relaxation from the severity of camp duty.[16]