It was on the Santa Fé Trail in 1831 that the famous Jedediah Smith finally lost his life. With his partners, Jackson and Sublette, he had gone into the Santa Fé trade and was on his way to that capital. In his remarkable career he had escaped many dangers, and he was still a very young man, but his hour was approaching. He started for Santa Fé over the general route, but after leaving the Arkansas became lost among the multitudinous buffalo trails. Gregg says: "He was one of the most undaunted spirits that ever traversed the Rocky Mountains, and if one half of what has been told of him be true ... he would surely be entitled to one of the most exalted seats in the Olympus of Prairie Mythology." There was something highly dramatic in the lonely simplicity of this dauntless trapper's death amidst a wide barren waste, at the hands of the race he had so often successfully opposed and eluded. He set off alone to find water for his party in the dreary expanse of the Cimarron desert, when on mounting a hill he perceived what appeared to be a small river. It was the sandy bed of the deceptive Cimarron. Smith scooped out a basin in the moist sand and waited for the water to fill it, unconscious of a band of Comanches lurking near. As he stooped to drink, an arrow pierced him. With the indomitable tenacity and power that so often had carried him through danger, he returned the fire and two or three of the enemy paid with their lives the penalty of bringing the gallant knight in buckskin to the ground. The picture was exactly the composition one would expect to find surrounding the last hour of this eminent and characteristic breaker of the Wilderness. His task was done. Beside the treacherous Cimarron his bones are forgotten, but his splendid fearlessness, his even justice, and his bold enterprise in cleaving the silent mysteries have consecrated the sands that drank his blood and dedicated the Wilderness to a lofty future.
The Heart of the Sierra.
Photograph by Watkins.
He had a brother, Thomas L. Smith, equally energetic and fearless, but who lacked the refined moral tone of Jedediah. He was widely known in the Wilderness, though more after the manner of Rose and Beckwourth. "Pegleg" Smith was his ordinary title because one leg had been cut off below the knee. It had been so badly hurt in a battle that under Pegleg's direction an Amerind companion amputated it with a hunting knife and a keyhole saw. A wooden leg was then substituted. This did not materially interfere with Pegleg's peculiar business, stealing horses from the Mexicans and Californians, and trading horses, for he was in the saddle a great deal and that was home to him. His operations had a wide range. On one raid he succeeded with the aid of Beckwourth and a band of Amerinds in getting out of California by the southern route with about three thousand head; but, after the United States acquired the Mexican territories, he gave up his raids as he would not operate against his own countrymen.
The frontiersmen—trappers, hunters, and traders—had little respect for the Mexicans, and the treatment which the cupidity of the officials led them to bestow on trappers who came into their power tended to widen the breach. All along the line, therefore, fires of resentment were smouldering which before long were to break into flame and consume the Mexican power in this quarter.
Gregg, who was nine years among them, said of the Mexicans[93]:
"They have no stability except in artifice; no profundity except for intrigue; qualities for which they have acquired an unenviable celebrity. Systematically cringing and subservient while out of power, as soon as the august mantle of authority falls upon their shoulders, there are but little bounds to their arrogance and vindictiveness of spirit."
The Wilderness breaker had no fear whatever of these people, but much contempt for them. A few trappers were generally a match for half an army of Mexicans. Milton Sublette, a well-known trapper, brother of William Sublette, while in New Mexico with Ewing Young, had his furs, which he had concealed, seized and confiscated. The packs being damp were spread out to dry, and Sublette recognised some unquestionably belonging to him. Before the eyes of the whole garrison he carried these away,