About the word frontiersman there is a pretty air of romance. The very mention of it conjures up a vision of lean, sinewy, brown-faced men, in fur caps and moccasins and fringed buckskin, slipping through virgin forests or pushing across sun-scorched prairies—advance-guards of civilization. Hardy, resolute, taciturn figures, they have passed silently across the pages of our history and we shall see their like no more. To them we owe a debt that we can never repay—nor, indeed, have we even publicly acknowledged it. We followed by the trails which they had blazed for us; we built our towns in those rich valleys and pastured our herds on those fertile hillsides which theirs were the first white men's eyes to see. The American frontiersman was never a self-seeker. His discoveries he left as a heritage to those who followed him. In almost every case he died poor and, more often than not, with his boots on. David Livingstone and Henry M. Stanley, the two Englishmen who did more than any other men for the opening up of Africa, lie in Westminster Abbey, and thousands of their countrymen each year stand reverently beside their tombs. To Cecil Rhodes, another Anglo-African pioneer, a great national memorial has been erected on the slopes of Table Mountain. Far, far greater parts in the conquest of a wilderness, the winning of a continent, were played by Daniel Boone, William Bowie, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett; yet how many of those who to-day enjoy the fruits of the perils they faced, the hardships they endured, know much more of them than as characters in dime novels, can tell where they are buried, can point to any statues or monuments which have been erected to their memories?
There are two million four hundred thousand people in the State of California, and most of them boast of it as "God's own country." They have more State pride than any people that I know, yet I would be willing to wager almost anything you please that you can pick a hundred native sons of California, and put to each of them the question, "Who was Jedediah Smith?" and not one of them would be able to answer it correctly. The public parks of San Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego and Sacramento have innumerable statues of one kind and another, but you will find none of this man with the stern old Puritan name; they are starting a hall of fame in California, but no one has proposed Jedediah Smith as deserving a place in it. Yet to him, perhaps more than to any other man, is due the fact that California is American: he was the greatest of the pathfinders; he was the real founder of the Overland Trail; he was the man who led the way across the ranges. Had it not been for the trail he blazed and the thousands who followed in his footsteps the Sierra Nevadas, instead of the Rio Grande, might still mark the line of our frontier.
The westward advance of population which took place during the first quarter of the nineteenth century far exceeded the limits of any of the great migrations of mankind upon the older continents. The story of the American onset to the beckoning West is one of the wonder-tales of history. Over the natural waterway of the great northern lakes, down the road to Pittsburg, along the trail which skirted the Potomac, and then down the Ohio, over the passes of the Cumberland into Tennessee, round the end of the Alleghanies into the Gulf States, up the Missouri, and so across the Rockies to the head waters of the Columbia, or south-westward from St. Louis to the Spanish settlements of Santa Fé, the hardy pioneers poured in an ever-increasing stream, carrying with them little but axe, spade, and rifle, some scanty household effects, a small store of provisions, a liberal supply of ammunition, and unlimited faith, courage, and enterprise.
During that brief period the people of the United States extended their occupation over the whole of that vast region lying between the Alleghanies and the Rockies—a territory larger than all of Europe, without Russia—annexed it from the wilderness, conquered, subdued, improved, cultivated, civilized it, and all without one jot of governmental assistance. Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they continued to fret and strain against the Spanish boundaries. The Spanish authorities, and after them the Mexican, soon became seriously alarmed at this silent but resistless American advance, and from the City of Mexico orders went out to the provincial governors that Americans venturing within their jurisdiction should be treated, whenever an excuse offered, with the utmost severity. But, notwithstanding the menace of Mexican prisons, of Indian tortures, of savage animals, of thirst and starvation in the wilderness, the pioneers pushed westward and ever westward, until at last their further progress was abruptly halted by the great range of the Sierra Nevada, snow-crested, and presumably impassable, which rose like a titanic wall before them, barring their further march.
It was at about the time of this halt in our westward progress that Captain Jedediah Smith came riding onto the scene. You must picture him as a gaunt-faced, lean-flanked, wiry man, with nerves of iron, sinews of rawhide, a skin like oak-tanned leather, and quick on his feet as a catamount. He was bearded to the ears, of course, for razors formed no part of the scanty equipment of the frontiersman, and above the beard shone a pair of very keen, bright eyes, with the concentrated wrinkles about their corners that come of staring across the prairies under a blazing sun. He was sparing of his words, as are most men who dwell in the great solitudes, and, like them, he was, in an unorthodox way, devout, his stern and rugged features as well as his uncompromising scriptural name betraying the grim old Puritan stock from which he sprang. His hair was long and black, and would have covered his shoulders had it not been tied at the back of the neck by a leather thong. His dress was that of the Indian adapted to meet the requirements of the adventuring white man: a hunting-shirt and trousers of fringed buckskin, embroidered moccasins of elkhide, and a cap made from the glossy skin of a beaver, with the tail hanging down behind. On hot desert marches, and in camp, he took off the beaver-skin cap and twisted about his head a bright bandanna, which, when taken with his gaunt, unshaven face, made him look uncommonly like a pirate. These garments were by no means fresh and gaudy, like those affected by the near-frontiersmen who take part in the production of Wild West shows; instead they were very soiled and much worn and greasy, and gave evidence of having done twenty-four hours' duty a day for many months at a stretch. Hanging on his chest was a capacious powder-horn, and in his belt was a long, straight knife, very broad and heavy in the blade—a first cousin of that deadly weapon to which William Bowie was in after years to give his name; in addition he carried a rifle, with an altogether extraordinary length of barrel, which brought death to any living thing within a thousand yards on which its foresight rested. His mount was a plains-bred pony, as wiry and unkempt and enduring as himself. Everything considered, Smith could have been no gentle-looking figure, and I rather imagine that, if he were alive and ventured into a Western town to-day, he would probably be arrested by the local constable as an undesirable character. I have now sketched for you, in brief, bold outline, as good a likeness of Smith as I am able with the somewhat scanty materials at hand, for he lived and did his pioneering in the days when frontiersmen were as common as traffic policemen are now, added to which the men who were familiar with his exploits were of a sort more ready with their pistols than with their pens.
The dates of Smith's birth and death are not vital to this story, and perhaps it is just as well that they are not, for I can find no record of when he came into the world, and only the Indian warrior who wore his scalp-lock at his waist could have told the exact date on which he went out of it. It is enough to know that, just as the nineteenth century was passing the quarter mark, Smith was the head of a firm of fur-traders, Smith, Jackson & Soublette, which had obtained from President John Quincy Adams permission to hunt and trade to their hearts' content in the region lying beyond the Rocky Mountains. It would have been much more to the point to have obtained the permission of the Mexican governor-general of the Californias, or of the great chief of the Comanches, for they held practically all of the territory in question between them. Those were the days whose like we shall never know again, when the streams were alive with beaver, when there were more elk and antelope on the prairies than there are cattle now, and when the noise made by the moving buffalo herds sounded like the roll of distant thunder. They were the days when a fortune, as fortunes were then reckoned, awaited the man with unlimited ammunition, a sure eye, and a body inured to hardships. What the founder of the Astor fortune was doing in the Puget Sound country, Smith and his companions purposed to do in the Rockies; and, with this end in view, established their base camp on the eastern shores of the Great Salt Lake, not far from where Ogden now stands. This little band of pioneers formed the westernmost outpost of American civilization, for between them and the nearest settlement, at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, stretched thirteen hundred miles of savage wilderness. Livingstone, on his greatest journey, did not penetrate half as far into unknown Africa as Smith did into unknown America, and while the English explorer was at the head of a large and well-equipped expedition, the American was accompanied by a mere handful of men.
In August, 1826, Smith and a small party of his hunters found themselves in the terrible Painted Desert, that God-forsaken expanse of sand and lava where the present States of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada meet. Water there was none, for the streams had run dry, and the horses and pack-mules were dying of thirst and exhaustion; the game had entirely disappeared; the supplies were all but finished—and five hundred miles of the most inhospitable country in the world lay between them and their camp on Great Salt Lake. The situation was perilous, indeed, and a decision had to be made quickly if any of them were to get out alive.
"What few supplies we have left will be used up before we get a quarter way back to the camp," said Smith. "Our only chance—and I might as well tell you it's a mighty slim one, boys—is in pushing on to California."
"But California's a good four hundred miles away," expostulated his companions, "and the Sierras lie between, and no one has ever crossed them."
"Then I'll be the first man to do it," said Smith. "Besides, I've always had a hankering to learn what lies on the other side of those ranges. Now's my chance to find out."