Trail Blazer Of The Far West (June 1963 | Volume: 14, Issue: 4)

Trail Blazer Of The Far West

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Authors: Stephen W. Sears

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June 1963 | Volume 14, Issue 4

In December of the year 1826 Captain William Cunningham, master of the ship Courier out of Boston, recorded with unstinting admiration a singular event in the quiet California port of San Diego where the Courier had called to trade. “There has arrived at this place,” he wrote, “Capt. Jedediah Smith with a company of hunters, from St. Louis, on the Missouri… . Does it not seem incredible that a party of fourteen men, depending entirely upon their rifles and traps for subsistence, will explore this vast continent, and call themselves happy when they can obtain the tail of a beaver to dine upon?”

The Captain had witnessed the completion of the first overland journey to California from the distant American frontier, led by a fellow Yankee just twentyseven years old. This in itself was a solid achievement, but Jed Smith contributed much else worthy of note during his nine-year western odyssey. In addition to pioneering the way to California, he opened the historic gateway to the Far West—South Pass, in Wyoming; filled in an immense geographic void with the discovery of the arid vastness of the Great Basin; grasped the existence of the Sierra Nevada mountain barrier to California and made the initial crossing of that imposing range; and, finally, was the first white man to traverse virtually the entire length of America’s Pacific coast, from southern California to the Columbia River in Oregon. All of this he accomplished before he was thirty.

By almost any standard, Jedediah Smith, not John C. Frémont, ought to be remembered today as the West’s “Pathfinder.” Yet for some reason—perhaps the irony of history, or perhaps simply his incredibly bad luck—his name never quite became impressed upon the American consciousness. Only in the last few decades have the dedicated researches of western historians, particularly Maurice Sullivan and Dale Morgan, restored Jedediah Strong Smith to something like his rightful place: alone with Lewis and Clark in the first rank of America’s explorers.

Luck was with him at first. Arriving in St. Louis early in 1822 at the age of twenty-three, Jed Smith sought a career in the mountains at precisely the moment when the long-restrained American assautt on the western fur trade burst loose. As far back as 1807 Manuel Lisa had tried to tap the rich beaver country of the upper Missouri River, only to be driven out within a few years by the vicious Blackfeet Indians. Others had sought the prize, among them John Jacob Astor. “Our enterprise is grand, and deserves success,” Astor wrote, but Great Britain gobbled up his Pacific outpost, Astoria, in the War of 1812. Now, in the 1820’s, the postwar depression had subsided, venture capital was again available, and the Blackfeet showed signs of being amenable to trade.

If the time was ripe, the competition was also prepared. In 1821 the giants of the British fur trade, the North West Company and the