The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson

by Emerson Hough

McLaughlin gives Smith a draft on London for twenty thousand dollars, it is said, in payment for these furs! Strange contrast to the treatment Ashley and his men accorded the Hudson Bay trapper, Ogden, some years earlier, when the latter was in adversity in the Rockies! Strange story indeed, this of the adventures of Jedediah Smith! Survivor of thirty of his men, escaped from a Spanish prison, robbed, nearly killed, after one of the most perilous journeys ever undertaken in the West, Smith emerges from this desperate trip across an unmapped country with twenty thousand dollars, and none of his men left to share it!

In March, 1829, Smith started east from Fort Vancouver to find his partners, Sublette and Jackson. When he reached the Flathead country he was much at home, for he had been there before. Thence he headed to the Snake River, where he met Jackson, “who,” says our historian, naïvely, “was looking for him!” The ways of that time were, after all, of a certain sufficiency. Sublette he finds on the Henry Fork on August fifth, also much as a matter of course. Strange lands, strange calling, strange restoration after unusual and wild experiences—so strange that we find nothing in the life of Crockett to parallel it in valor and initiative, nothing in Boone’s to surpass it, nothing in Carson’s to equal it, and nothing in the story of any adventurer’s life to cast it in the shade.

This was indeed authentic traveling, authentic discovering, and upon this was based the first map of a vast region in what was really the West. After all this was done, the knowledge spread rapidly, we may suppose. This was how Carson’s friends learned of the Sacramento. This is how the discoveries of Frémont were forerun; for the latter, under Carson’s guidance, simply circumnavigated the vast region which Smith both circumnavigated and crossed direct. Readers would not receive the plain story of Jedediah Smith as fit for fiction. It would be too impossible.

We might pause to tell the end of so great a man as this. At last Smith and his historic partners found the fur trade too much divided to be longer profitable. In 1830 the three went to St. Louis to take a venture in the Santa Fé trade, this being two years before Captain Bonneville sallied out into the West. Contemptuous of the dangers of the prairies, after facing so long those of the mountains, these three hardy Westerners started across the plains with a small outfit of their own. Far out on the Arkansas they were beset by the Comanches. Fighting like a man and destroying a certain number of his enemies before he himself fell, Jedediah Smith was killed. He met thus the logical though long deferred end of a life that had always been careless of danger.

Gregg, in his “Scenes and Incidents in the Western Prairies” (the book later known as “The Commerce of the Prairies”), mentions the death of Smith, but of his life and character he seemed to have had but little knowledge. The historian of the Santa Fé trade was just starting West when Smith closed his own career. Smith was dead before Bonneville saw the Rockies. We see that he antedated Walker and Carson and Frémont. The fatal prairie expedition of these great fur traders, Smith, Sublette and Jackson, went on westward up the Arkansas with the mountain trader, Fitzpatrick, who was bound for a rendezvous far to the north of Bent’s Fort—the same Fitzpatrick whom Carson met above Bent’s Fort in one of his own expeditions. Now we may begin to see the trails of our trappers and adventurers interlacing and crossing, and can understand who were the real adventurers, who the actual explorers.

Great and satisfying a figure as Jedediah Smith makes, we may not pause with him too long, and may not believe him to have been at the very first of things. He was the first to cross over the Rockies and the Sierras in mid-America, yet he was not the first white man to stand on the soil of the dry Southwest. Examine the older maps and you shall see along the Virgin and the Colorado the line of the old Spanish trail from California to the mission settlements of New Mexico.

It can not accurately be told who first made this trail, crossing the valley of the Colorado, whose flood drains two hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles of mountain and desert. In 1781 Father Garcés built a mission on the Colorado near the mouth of the Gila. But he was not the first. Cardenas, a fellow-soldier with Coronado, is perhaps the first man to write of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado; but he was not the first to discover it nor the first to see that stream. Alarcon, a member of the party of the sea captain Uloa, was the first man to reach the Colorado. This was in the year 1540, the ship of Uloa reaching the Gulf of California in 1539.

This was a small matter of three hundred years before Frémont saw the South Pass, some three hundred years before Jedediah Smith crossed the desert to California, and something like three hundred years before the upper sources of the Mississippi River were known! So thus we may leave this portion of the West to await the Gadsden Purchase, and the addition of the land won by Houston and Crockett and Fannin and Travis and other hero friends to the south and east of the purchased territory.

As for the transportation employed during these early times, we may repeat a few facts by way of insistence. The Santa Fé trade began with pack trains, but saw wagons used in 1822. In 1826 General Ashley took his little wheeled cannon through the South Pass to his fort on Utah Lake. In 1830 Smith, Sublette and Jackson made the journey from the Missouri River with mule teams and wagons as far as the Wind River; and they said they could have gone on over the South Pass with their wagons had they wished to do so. Poor Bonneville! His distinction of taking the first wagon through the South Pass is as empty as that of Frémont in climbing his mountain peak near that same South Pass. Both accomplishments had been left undone by earlier visitors simply because they did not want to do these things. We see that, before Carson or Walker or Smith, the courses and headwaters of the Yellowstone and the Missouri and the Columbia rivers were all very well known. We have noted that Smith knew of the Columbia settlements. This he knew because he had learned it at the rendezvous. How came these settlements on the Columbia? We shall have to go to New York to find the answer to that question.

Everybody knows the story of Astoria and the beginning of the American Fur Company. John Jacob Astor of New York secured a New York charter for that company April sixth, 1808, very soon after hearing the results of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He had a great purpose in his mind. He had fought out and bought out competitors in the fur trade all along the Great Lakes; had met and gaged the resources of the Northwest Company, then beginning to rival the ancient Hudson Bay Company in the wild race across the continent.