Our Smith was a member of that firm of young men, Smith, Sublette and Jackson, who bought out the business of that first great fur trader, General Ashley. It goes without saying that Smith knew all the upper country of the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the South Pass region, the Sweetwater, the Green, the Bear, long before he first resolved to gratify his love of initial adventure and to head out across that unknown country of the far Southwest.
We are getting close to the first of new-American things when we come to the story of his journey. There had been early Spaniards, there had been Indians perhaps, who knew the way across, but there was none to pilot Smith. He started of his own resolve and traveled under his own guidance. They had not told him, as they had told Kit Carson, of the excellent beaver country of the Sacramento. The vast country beyond the Great Salt Lake had been too forbidding for even that later hardy soul to undertake as yet; and the reaches of the Rockies above and below the eastern edge of that desert had contented all of Bridger’s hardy companions. The more reason, therefore, thought Smith, that he and his little party of fifteen men should cross the desert; and he did so, quite as though it were a matter of course.
Having no guide, he simply went west as well as he could, clinging to grass and water as he went. He left the rendezvous near Salt Lake in 1826, crossed the Sevier valley, struck the Virgin or Adams River, followed the Colorado for a time, and at length broke boldly away over the awful California desert, until, in such way as we can but imagine, he reached at length the Spanish settlements of San Diego. This was in the month of October. Smith crossed the Sierras near the point where runs to-day the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railroad. He was somewhat in advance of the engineers.
Although we do not learn that Smith had any guide or any advance information, it seems that the Spaniards did not appreciate the difficulties under which he had visited them. They bade him leave the country at once. Perhaps Smith was not quite candid with the Spaniards, for, though he promised compliance, instead of starting directly back to the eastward, he went north four hundred miles, put out his traps and wintered on the San Joaquin and Merced rivers. He found there a trapper’s El Dorado.
This information, of course, would be more valuable when imparted to his friends eastward in the Rockies. Hence we observe Smith leaving his party, and taking with him only two men, seven horses and two mules, calmly starting back again to the Rockies, which by this time must have seemed to him an old and well settled country. In the incredible time of twenty-eight days he was back again at the southwest corner of Salt Lake. We can not tell just how he made this journey. Perhaps he crossed the Sierras near the Sonora Pass, thence went east, far to the south of the Humboldt River, and south also of what is now called Walker Lake. We must remember that neither this river nor lake had any name when Smith was there. Jedediah Smith antedated all names, all maps, all geography! Yet all this was not so very long ago, if we reflect that it took three hundred years to find the source of the Mississippi River after its mouth had been discovered. It is not yet one hundred years back to Smith.
Jedediah Smith was no man to waste time. He told his friends what he had found beyond the snowy range. By July thirteenth, 1827, he was ready with eighteen men of a new party to start back for California. Now he began to meet the first of his extraordinarily bad luck, the first of a series of misfortunes that must have stopped any man but himself. The Spaniards seem to have had some notion of Smith’s intentions, and they set Indians to watch the trails down the Virgin and the Colorado. These met Smith near the Colorado River and killed ten of his men. Almost destitute, Smith reached the Spanish settlements of San Gabriel and San Diego only to meet with further misfortune. His native guides—for now he had learned how to secure Indian guides—were imprisoned, and he himself was thrown into jail at San José. He was released on condition that he leave the country; which he proceeded to do after a fashion peculiarly his own. He traveled three hundred miles to the north and wintered on a stream now called, from that fact, the American Fork.
All this time he was finding good beaver country, and the packs of the little party grew heavier and heavier. Why he did not now cross the Sierras and get back home again we do not know; but instead of going east, he struck northwest, until he nearly reached the Pacific Ocean. Thence he turned inland, and headed due north,—which meant Oregon. It is easy to-day, but Smith had no map, no trail, no transportation save that of the horse and mule train. All the time he and his party continued to pick up a greater store of beaver.
At last, on July twenty-fourth, 1828, somewhere near the Umpqua River, they established a temporary camp. On that day Smith left camp for a time, and as he returned he met Indians, who fired upon him. He got back to the bivouac, only to find it the scene of one of those horrible Indian butcheries with which the trapper of that day was all too familiar. Ten men out of his new party had been killed on the Colorado. Here, about the camp in Oregon, lay fifteen more of his men, dead, scalped and mutilated. The horses were gone. Three of his companions had escaped, but these had fled in a panic, each on his own account. The discoverer, Smith, was there alone in the mountains, without map, without guide, without counsel. There was a situation, simple, primeval, Titanic! There indeed was the West!
Smith was a religious man, a Christian. His was an inner and unfailing courage not surpassed by that of any known Western man. Perhaps he sought Divine counsel in this his extremity; at least he lost neither courage nor calmness. He knew, of course, that there was a Columbia River somewhere; for this was in 1828, and by that time the Columbia was an old story. He knew that this great river was north of him, and knew that there were settlements near its mouth, as we shall presently understand. He further knew that the North Star pointed out the north. Alone, with his rifle as reliance, he made that tremendous journey northward which Frémont, with his full party, made in an opposite direction, on a parallel line farther to the eastward, only after untold hardship, though Frémont had men and animals and supplies. Sustained by Providence, as he believed, Smith at length accomplished his journey and reached the Hudson Bay post at Fort Vancouver.
We may now see the strange commercial conditions of that time. We say that Jedediah Smith was the first to cross from the Rockies to the Pacific; but this, of course, means only that he was the first to cross at mid-continent. There had been others on the Columbia before Smith. The Hudson Bay factor, Doctor McLaughlin, a great and noble man, a gentleman of the wilderness, meets the wanderer as a friend, although he is in the employ of a rival company. He sends out a party to recover Smith’s lost packs of beaver at the abandoned camp far to the southward. Almost incredible to say, these men do find the furs.