If we go by dates alone we shall find ourselves presently concerned with Captain Bonneville, sometime famous as an “explorer” of the Rocky Mountains. Him we may class as one of the pseudo-discoverers. He was an army officer, who discovered nothing, but who obtained a great reputation through the chronicling of his deeds in the Rocky Mountains; so great that, having grossly exceeded his leave of absence, he was eventually reinstated in the Army after he had lost his commission, the president of the United States remarking that he “could not fail so to reward one who had contributed so much to the welfare of his country”! Bonneville was a lucky man. He lost but few mules and but few men. He brought back a map on which was founded the greater part of his reputation, maps and scientific nomenclature having been ever, in the estimation of some, held to surpass any original discoveries in geography and natural history.
Bonneville’s map had a certain value at the time, yet it held little actual first hand information, because it was built upon knowledge derived from Gallatin, from that big man, General Ashley, the fur trader, and from the latter’s gallant associate, Jedediah Smith.[[44]] As to Bonneville himself, he was, unless we shall except Frémont, the first great example of the class later to be known as “tenderfoot.” A certain glory attaches to him, because he was the first man to take a wagon train through the South Pass, which he did ten years before Frémont “discovered” that country.
Bonneville went West in 1832, two years before Kit Carson stopped trapping beaver for the reason that it no longer paid him. The lucky captain traveled up the Platte valley to Fort Laramie, then broke across on the old mountain road of the West, up the Sweetwater, to the South Pass, thence getting upon the Pacific waters, the headwaters of the Green River; one of the two great arms of the Colorado, and an important stream in fur trading days. Obviously, Bonneville wanted to grow rich quickly in the fur trade, being more intent on that than on exploration for geographical purposes. He discovered that there was already a West beyond him, even then a distinct region, with ways of its own and men of its own. He continued to move about in the mountains for a couple of years more, the South Pass serving as the center of his operations; but really it is of little concern what Bonneville did during the remainder of his long stay in the West. We may, none the less, after a fashion, call Bonneville one of the predecessors of Carson, if we shall date Carson’s earthly existence only from his connection with Frémont. How, then, did the lucky captain indirectly serve as predecessor of quiet and valid Kit Carson?
It was in this way. Bonneville had with him an old Santa Fé trail man named J. R. Walker; for we must remember that in 1832 the Santa Fé trail had really seen its best days. Walker wanted to go to California, and Bonneville was eager to have him do so, for the worthy captain was far more concerned about beaver than about geography; and there was, as we shall presently discover, a very good reason to foresee an abundance of beaver in California. Bonneville and his lieutenant, when these plans first matured, were still on the Green River, this being the year after they had first reached the Rockies. The fur trade was not prosperous; even thus early they found competition in the Rocky Mountains. The country was not new enough. The West, as viewed from the headwaters of the Green River, lay still farther forward in the course of the setting sun. Walker must go to California and bring back from it its beaver peltry.
Walker, therefore, on July twenty-seventh, 1833, left Bonneville on the Green River and started on the tremendous journey toward the Pacific Ocean. He took with him forty men, and perhaps later picked up a dozen wandering trappers or so, who desired to join the California venture. Here, then, was a discoverer who started for California more than a decade before Frémont did; more than sixteen years before any one suspected California to be a land of gold. The trapping of beaver, and not the digging of gold, was the first cause of Californian exploration by the Americans of the upper West. The beaver was a fateful animal.
Walker dropped down the Green River into the valley of the Great Salt Lake, which was at that time a perfectly well known country, though it had not been described in any official reports. Thence he headed westward across the Great Basin, whose terrors had so long held back even the hardy trappers of the mountain region. He gave the name Barren River to the stream now called the Humboldt. He gave his own name to another stream. After some fashion he won across the great desert, and crossed also the Sierra range, accomplishing this latter feat about October twenty-fifth. He was, perhaps, the first man to see the Yosemite valley, though as to that we can not be certain. By the end of November, 1833, he was within view of the Pacific Ocean.
After all, then, it did not seem to be so hard to get across the country in those early times. Nor was it so difficult to return. Walker had fifty-two men and three hundred and sixty-five horses when he started eastward in February, 1834. He had, of course, met that Spanish civilization which first explored the Colorado River and first settled the Pacific slope. Walker now had guides, Indians of the land, who led him eastward across the Sierras, somewhat south of the place where he crossed going west.
Once over the mountains, he headed northward along the eastern edge of the range, until he intercepted his own west-bound trail, which he followed back until he reached what is now known as the Humboldt River. Thence he went north to the Snake River, and so on back to the rendezvous on the Bear River. At the rendezvous he made public what information he could add to the general store. Thus it was, perhaps, that Carson and his confrères learned more than they had known before of the beaver country beyond the Sierras. That rendezvous of the old mountain men—ah! who will one day understand it and immortalize it? That was a great market, a great journal, a great college! There indeed maps were made! There indeed geography grew! That was where the West was really learned ab initio.
This mountain market, this map-making college of a primeval West, was first established in 1824; hence we may say that Walker, in 1834, had no license to be called an old-timer in the West. In 1834 the old West of the adventurers was done.[[45]] He was before Frémont, before Carson’s leadership of Frémont; but there was some one else before him, a man who had crossed the continent and had seen the western sea even before Kit Carson made his first journey thither with the men of Taos and Bent’s Fort neighborhood; even before Walker’s successful expedition was conceived.
Who was this earlier man, this first man to cross to the Pacific by the land trail? No less than one Smith, Jedediah Smith, a man of no rank nor title, and all too little station in American history. This was the man that first led the trappers from the Rockies west to California. This man, Jedediah Smith, is indeed a hero. Not a boaster but an adventurer; not a talker but a doer of deeds; the very man fit to be type of the Western man to come. Smith himself was the product of a generation of the American West, and though we search all the annals of that West, we shall find no more satisfying record, no more eye-filling picture, nor any greater figure than his own. He is worthy of a place by the side of that other Smith, the John Smith who explored Virginia, near the starting place of the American star of empire. What pity that Washington Irving did not find Jedediah Smith rather than the inconsequent Bonneville, and so immortalize the right man with his beautifying pen! There is a great hero story left untold!