Jedediah Strong Smith

With a butcher's knife in his belt and a Bible in his bedroll, 23 year old Jed Smith entered the Rocky Mountain trade in 1822.  He was a devout Yankee, a son of a New Hampshire Methodist family who like to sing Methodist hymns on the trail.  Jed was clean shaven and the gentleman of the wilderness.

By age 25, he had survived an Arikara massacre, being mauled by a grizzly bear (and went back on
the trail within 10 days), and led an expedition to the Wind River.  He traveled through the South Pass, opening the mountains to later settlers traveling to Oregon and California.

At age 26, Smith held the single season record for beaver pelts with 688.  In the next year he partnered with two other mountain men, Jackson and Sublette.  They were to explore the Snake River to the north, while Smith would go south to find the fabled Buenaventura River which was said to flow westward through mountains to the coast.

Jedediah wandered through the wilderness for three years, never found "Buenaventura River" but left a legacy of "firsts" unmatched by any other except Joseph Walker...

* first white man overland from Rockies to California
* first white man to cross the Great Salt Lake Desert
* first white man to cross the Sierra Nevada from west to east
* first white man overland from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest

Smith returned to St. Louis in 1830.  City life was not for him and in 1831 he saddled up for Santa Fe - and rode to his death at 32 by an ambush by Comanche Indians.  His gutted body was eaten by prairie wolves, and where his bones were left no one ever found along the Santa Fe Trail. 

Jedediah along with the next mountain man stood in history as responsible for opening the west to America...

Next time...Joseph Reddeford Walker
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On this Day in Pioneer History:  On April 4, 1843, William Jackson is born in Keeseville, New York. His powerful photographs of Yellowstone helped make it the first national park. Jackson received no formal training in photography. As a young man, he began experimenting with simple cameras, and he gradually mastered the arcane skills needed to capture images on chemically prepared glass plates. In 1866, Jackson joined a wagon train and traveled west to California, lugging along his heavy camera equipment. The awesome size and ruggedness of the western landscape sparked his imagination, and he began to focus his efforts on what would later be termed “nature photography.”

Jedediah Smith

Jedediah Smith ventured west as a business man working for the fur trading companies.  His goal was to trap beaver and otter, and make trading contacts with the Native Americans.

His first expedition in 1822 provided information of Western geography and potential trails available to future homesteaders.  In 1824 he rediscovered the South Pass - an easy route across the Rockies in modern day Wyoming (fur traders actually discovered it, but never publicized the fact).

In 1831 Smith left St. Louis bound for Santa Fe, NM without adequate supplies, the why we will probably never know since he was well-acquainted with the arid territory and the need to carry water.  Eventually his party had to split up in search of adequate water or perish, and Smith was attacked alone and killed by Comanche Indians, thus ending the life of an important trader and trail blazer in our Western history.

People have debated what happened to Jedediah to make him so careless to venture out alone in such hostile territory and to come so ill prepared.  Popular historic opinion is that he became too confident in his abilities and his experience and thought he could survive just about anything...that day he was wrong.

We will meet Jedediah again on our journey with Joseph Walker...