This discovery of Baron La Hontan excited, even at that early day, the spirit of enterprise and speculation which has proved so marked a feature in the national character. In a work published in 1772, and entitled “A description of the Province of Carolina, by the Spaniards called Florida, and by the French La Louisiane, by Daniel Cox,” the then proprietary, the first part of the fifth chapter is devoted to “A new and curious discovery and relation of an easy communication between the river Meschacebe (Mississippi) and the South Sea, which separates America from China, by means of several large rivers and lakes.”
The existence of the Great Salt Lake of Utah was known to the early Spanish voyageurs under the intrepid Coronado, through stories told them by the Indians, but there is no trustworthy account of any of them having seen it. To Jim Bridger, the famous mountaineer and scout, must be accorded the honour of having been the first white man to look upon its brackish waters. He discovered it in the winter of 1824-25, accidentally, in deciding a bet. The story of this visit to the Great Salt Lake comes down to us by the most reliable testimony. It appears that a party of trappers, under the command of William H. Ashley, one day found themselves on Bear River, in what is known as Willow Valley, and while lying in camp a discussion arose in relation to the probable course of the river. A wager was made, and Bridger sent out to determine the question. He paddled a long distance and came out on the Great Salt Lake, whose water he tasted and found it salt. Having made the discovery as to where the Bear River emptied, he retraced his lonely journey and reported the result to his companions.
Upon his report of the vast dimensions of the strange inland body of salt water, they all became anxious to learn whether other streams did not flow into the lake, and if so, there were new fields in which to try their luck in trapping beaver. To learn the fact four of them constructed boats of skins, and paddling into the lake, explored it.
Of course, it cannot be clearly proven that Old Jim Bridger was the first white man who saw the Great Salt Lake, but all others who have made claim to its discovery have not satisfied the demands of truth in their particulars, so the honour must and does rest upon Bridger; for no more authentic account of its discovery can be found. His statement is corroborated by such men as Robert Campbell, of St. Louis, and other famous mountaineers of the time.
There is a pretty piece of fiction connected with one of the claimants
to its discovery, by the celebrated Jim Beckwourth, that famous
Afro-American, who was chief of the Crow Nation. It says:
One day in June, 1822, a beautiful Indian maiden offered him
a pair of moccasins if he would procure for her an antelope
skin, and bring the animal's brains with it, in order that
she might dress a deerskin. Beckwourth started out in his
mission, but failed to see any antelope. He did see an
Indian coming toward him, whose brains he proposed to himself
to take to the savage maiden after he had killed the buck,
believing that she would never discover the difference, and
had pulled up his rifle to fire when he happily saw that his
supposed savage was William H. Ashley, of the American Fur
Company, and who told him that he had sailed through Green
River into the Great Salt Lake.
It may be true that Ashley did sail upon the Great Salt Lake before Bridger; but the story lacks confirmation; it has not that reliable endorsement which Bridger's claim possesses.
Jedediah Smith, another of the famous coterie of old trappers, called the lake Utah, and the river which flows into it from the south after the celebrated Ashley.
Much has been given to the world in relation to the vicinity of the
Great Salt Lake and the contiguous part of Utah by the famous author,
Washington Irving, in his adventures of Captain Bonneville, but it
should be taken cum grano salis; for, as Bancroft truthfully observes:
Irving humoured the captain, whose vanity prompted him to give
his own name to the lake, although he had not a shadow of
title to that distinction. Yet on Bonneville's map of the
region, the lake is plainly lettered “Bonneville's Lake.”
Many old maps, dating from 1795 to 1826, have laid down upon them an inland sea, or lake, together with many other strange rivers and creeks, which never had any existence except in the minds of their progenitors, taken from the legendary tales of the old trappers, who in turn got them from the savages.
The early emigrants to Oregon and California did not travel within many miles of the Great Salt Lake, so but very scanty reports are to be found in relation to the country. General Fremont, too, like a great many explorers, got puffed up with his own importance, and when, on the 6th of September, 1846, he saw for the first time the Great Salt Lake, he compares himself to Balboa, when that famous Spaniard gazed upon the Pacific. Fremont, too, says that he was the first to sail upon its saline waters, but again, as in many of his statements, he commits an unpardonable error; for Bridger's truthful story of the old trappers who explored it in search of streams flowing into it, in the hopes of enlarging their field of beaver trapping, antedates Fremont's many years.[41]