Jedediah Strong Smith (January 6, 1799 – May 27, 1831) was an American clerk, transcontinental pioneer, frontiersman, hunter, trapper, author, cartographer, mountain man and explorer of the Rocky Mountains, the Western United States, and the Southwest during the early 19th century. After 75 years of obscurity following his death, Smith was rediscovered as the American whose explorations led to the use of the -wide South Pass as the dominant route across the Continental Divide for pioneers on the Oregon Trail.
Coming from a modest family background, Smith traveled to St. Louis and joined William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry's fur trading company in 1822. Smith led the first documented exploration from the Salt Lake frontier to the Colorado River. From there, Smith's party became the first United States citizens to cross the Mojave Desert into what is now the state of California but which at that time was part of Mexico. On the return journey, Smith and his companions were likewise the first U.S. citizens to explore and cross the Sierra Nevada and the treacherous Great Basin Desert. The following year, Smith and companions were the first U.S. explorers to travel north from California overland to the Oregon Country. Surviving three Native American massacres and one bear mauling, Smith's explorations and documented travels were important resources to later American westward expansion.
In March 1831, while in St. Louis, Smith requested of Secretary of War John H. Eaton a federally-funded exploration of the West, but to no avail. Smith informed Eaton that he was completing a map of the West derived from his own journeys. In May, Smith and his partners launched a planned paramilitary trading party to Santa Fe. On May 27, while searching for water in present-day southwest Kansas, Smith disappeared. It was learned weeks later that he had been killed during an encounter with a Comanche defense party– his body was never recovered.
After his death, Smith and his accomplishments were mostly forgotten by Americans. At the beginning of the 20th century, scholars and historians made efforts to recognize and study his achievements. In 1918, a book by Harrison Clifford Dale was published covering Ashley-Smith's western explorations. In 1935, Smith's summary autobiography was finally listed in a biographical dictionary. Smith's first comprehensive biography by Maurice S. Sullivan was published in 1936. A popular Smith biography by Dale Morgan, published in 1953, established Smith as an authentic national hero. Smith's map of the West in 1831 was used by the U.S. Army, including western explorer John C. Frémont, during the early 1840s.
Early life
thumb|Lewis and Clark
Smith was born in Jericho, now Bainbridge, Chenango County, New York, on January 6, 1799, to Jedediah Smith I, a general store owner from New Hampshire, and Sally Strong, both of whom were descended entirely from families that came to New England from England during the Puritan emigration between 1620 and 1640.
Smith received adequate English instruction, learned some Latin, and was taught how to write decently. Around 1810, Smith's father was caught up in a legal issue involving counterfeit currency after which the elder Smith moved his family west to Erie County, Pennsylvania.
At age 13, Smith worked as a clerk on a Lake Erie freighter, where he learned business practices and probably met traders returning from the far west to Montreal. This work gave Smith an ambition for adventurous wilderness trade. According to Dale L. Morgan, Smith's love of nature and adventure came from his mentor, Dr. Titus G. V. Simons, a pioneer medical doctor who was on close terms with the Smith family. Morgan speculated that Simons gave the young Smith a copy of Meriwether Lewis' and William Clark's 1814 book of their 1804–1806 expedition to the Pacific, and according to legend Smith carried this journal on all of his travels throughout the American West. Smith provided Clark, who had become superintendent of Indian affairs, much information from his own expeditions to the West. In 1817, the Smith family moved westward to Ohio and settled in Green Township in what is present-day Ashland County.
Smith joins "Ashley's Hundred"
thumb|left|240px|Regions of the Missouri River Watershed
Coming from a family of modest means, Smith sought to make his own way. He may have left his family in search of a trade or employment a year prior to their settlement in Green Township. In 1822, Smith was living in St. Louis. The same year Smith responded to an advertisement in the Missouri Gazette placed by General William H. Ashley. General Ashley and Major Andrew Henry, veterans of the War of 1812, had established a partnership to engage in the fur trade and were looking for "One Hundred" "Enterprising Young Men" to explore and trap in the Rocky Mountains. Superintendent of Indian Affairs William Clark had granted Ashley and Henry license to trade with Native Americans in the upper Missouri River, and he actively encouraged them to compete with the powerful British fur trade in the Pacific Northwest. Smith, a 6-foot-tall, 23-year-old with a commanding presence, impressed General Ashley to hire him. In late spring, Smith started up the Missouri on the keelboat Enterprize, which sank three weeks into the journey. Smith and the other men waited at the site of the wreck for a replacement boat, hunting and foraging for food. Ashley brought up another boat with an additional 46 men and upon proceeding upriver, Smith got his first glimpse of the western frontier, coming into contact with the Sioux and Arikara. On October 1, Smith reached Fort Henry at the mouth of the Yellowstone River, which had just been built by Major Henry and the men that he had led up earlier. Smith and some other men continued up Missouri River to the mouth of the Musselshell River, where they built a camp from which to trap through the winter.
Arikaras attack
thumb |180px |right |Arikara warrior<br />[[Karl Bodmer|Bodmer (1840–1843)]]
In the spring of 1823, Major Henry ordered Smith back down the Missouri River to the Grand River with a message for Ashley to buy horses from the Arikaras, who, because of a recent skirmish with Missouri Fur Company men, were antagonistic to the white traders. Ashley, who was bringing supplies as well as 70 new men upriver by boat, met Smith at the Arikara village on May 30. They negotiated a trade for several horses and 200 buffalo robes and planned to leave as soon as possible to avert trouble, but weather delayed them. Before they could depart, an incident provoked an Arikara attack. Forty Ashley men, including Smith, were caught in a vulnerable position, and 12 were killed in the ensuing battle. Smith's conduct during the defense was the foundation of his reputation: "When his party was in danger, Mr. Smith was always among the foremost to meet it, and the last to fly; those who saw him on shore, at the Riccaree fight, in 1823, can attest to the truth of this assertion."
Smith and another man were selected by Ashley to return to Fort Henry on foot to inform Henry of the defeat. Ashley and the rest of the surviving party rode back down the river, ultimately enlisting aid from Colonel Henry Leavenworth who was the commander of Fort Atkinson. In August, Leavenworth sent 250 military men along with 80 Ashley-Henry men, 60 men of the Missouri Fur Company and a number of Lakota Sioux warriors to subdue the Arikaras. After a botched campaign, a peace treaty was negotiated. Smith had been appointed commander of one of the two squads of the Ashley-Henry men and was thereafter known as "Captain Smith".
First expedition, grizzly bear attack, and South Pass
thumb|180px|left|19th-century depiction of a grizzly bear attack
After the campaign, in the fall of 1823, Smith and several other of Ashley's men traveled downriver to Fort Kiowa. Leaving Fort Kiowa in September, Smith and 10 to 16 men headed west, beginning his first far-western expedition, to make their way overland to the Rocky Mountains. Smith and his party were the first Euro-Americans to explore the southern Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota and eastern Wyoming. While looking for the Crow tribe to obtain fresh horses and get westward directions, Smith was attacked by a large grizzly bear. Smith was tackled to the ground by the grizzly, breaking his ribs. Members of his party witnessed him fight the bear, which ripped open his side with its claws and took his head in its mouth. When the bear retreated, Smith's men ran to help him. They found his scalp and ear ripped off, but he convinced a friend, Jim Clyman, to sew it loosely back on, giving him directions. The trappers fetched water, bound up his broken ribs, and cleaned his wounds. After recuperating from his injuries, Smith wore his hair long to cover the large scar from his eyebrow to his ear. The only known portrait of Jedediah Smith, painted after his death in 1831, showed the long hair he wore over the side of his head to hide his scars.
thumb|200px|right|Crow Indians<br />Bodmer (1840–1843)
The party spent the rest of 1823 wintering in the Wind River Valley. In 1824, Smith sent an expedition to find an expedient route through the Rocky Mountains. Smith was able to retrieve information from Crow natives. When communicating with the Crows, one of Smith's men made a unique map (consisting of buffalo hide and sand), and the Crows were able to show Smith and his men the direction to the South Pass. Smith and his men crossed through this pass from east to west and encountered the Green River near the mouth of the Big Sandy River in what is now Wyoming. The group broke into two parties—one led by Smith and the other by Thomas Fitzpatrick—to trap upstream and downstream on the Green. The two groups met in July on the Sweetwater River, and it was decided that Fitzpatrick and two others would take the furs and the news of the identification of a feasible highway route through the Rockies to Ashley in St. Louis. Scottish-Canadian trapper Robert Stuart, employed by John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company, had previously discovered the South Pass, in mid-October 1812, while traveling overland to St. Louis from Fort Astoria, but this information was kept secret. Smith later wrote a letter to Secretary of War John Eaton in 1830 making the location of the South Pass public information.
First Rendezvous of 1825
Ashley left St. Louis late in 1824 and after an exploring expedition in Wyoming and Utah, he and Smith were reunited on July 1, 1825, at what would become the first rendezvous. During the rendezvous, Ashley offered Smith a partnership to replace Henry. Smith returned to St. Louis for a time, where he asked Robert Campbell to join the company as a clerk.
Second Rendezvous of 1826
During the second rendezvous in the summer of 1826, Ashley decided to no longer be directly involved in the business of harvesting furs. Smith left a cache near the rendezvous site at what would become known as Cache Valley in northern Utah, and he and Ashley traveled north to meet David E. Jackson and Sublette at Bear River area near present-day Soda Springs, Idaho. Ashley sold his interest in his and Smith's partnership to the newly created partnership of Smith, Jackson & Sublette but agreed to continue to send supplies to the rendezvous
and broker the sale of furs brought to him in St. Louis.
The new partners were immediately faced with the reality that beaver were rapidly disappearing from the region where the two previous partnerships had traditionally trapped. Contemporaneous maps promised untrapped rivers to the west,
such as the non-existent Buenaventura. The legendary Buenaventura was thought to be a navigable waterway to the Pacific Ocean possibly providing an alternative to packing loads of furs back to St. Louis. The previous spring, Smith had searched for rivers flowing to the Pacific west and northwest of the Great Salt Lake. Although he pushed into eastern Nevada, he failed to find the Humboldt River, the probable source of the legend of the Buenaventura. Having determined the Buenaventura must lie farther south, Smith made plans for an exploratory expedition deep into the Mexican territory of Alta California.
First trip to California, 1826–27
thumb|250px|Jedediah Smith's party crossing the burning Mojave Desert during the 1826 trek to California by [[Frederic Remington]]
Smith and his party of 15 left the Bear River on August 7, 1826, and after retrieving the cache he had left earlier, they headed south through present-day Utah and Nevada to the Colorado River, finding increasingly harsh conditions and difficult travel. Finding shelter in a friendly Mojave village near present-day Needles, California, the men and horses recuperated. Smith hired two refugees from the Spanish missions in California to guide them west. After leaving the river and heading into the Mojave Desert, the guides led them through the desert via the Mohave Trail that would become the western portion of the Old Spanish Trail. Upon reaching the San Bernardino Valley of California, Smith and Abraham LaPlant borrowed horses from a rancher and rode to the San Gabriel Mission on November 27, 1826, to present themselves to its director, Father José Bernardo Sánchez, who received them warmly.
thumb|left|150px|Father Sánchez gave Jedediah and LaPlant a lavish dinner at Mission San Gabriel.
The next day, the rest of Smith's men arrived at the mission, and that night the head of the garrison at the mission confiscated all their guns. On December 8, Smith was summoned to San Diego for an interview with Governor José María Echeandía about his party's status in the country. Echeandía, surprised and suspicious of the Americans' unauthorized entrance into California, had Smith arrested, believing him to be a spy. Accompanied by LaPlant, Smith's Spanish interpreter, Smith was taken to San Diego while the remainder of the party remained at the mission. Echeandía detained Smith for about two weeks, demanding that he turn over his journal and maps. Smith requested permission to travel north to the Columbia River on a coastal route, where known paths could take his party back to United States territory. Upon intercession of American sea Captain W.H. Cunningham of Boston on the ship Courier, Smith was released by Echeandía to reunite with his men. Echeandía ordered Smith and his party to leave California by the same route they entered, forbidding him to travel north along the coast to Bodega Bay but giving Smith permission to purchase needed supplies for an eastern overland return journey. Smith boarded the Courier sailing from San Diego to San Pedro, to meet his men.
After waiting for almost another month for an exit visa and then spending at least two more weeks breaking the horses they had purchased for the return trip, Smith's party departed the mission communities of California in mid-February 1827. The party returned on the path it had arrived, but once outside the Mexican settlements, Smith convinced himself he had complied with Echeandía's order to leave by the same route he had entered, and the party veered north crossing over into the Central Valley. The party ultimately made its way to the Kings River on February 28 and began trapping beaver. The party kept working its way north, encountering hostile Maidus. By early May 1827, Smith and his men had traveled north looking for the Buenaventura River, but they found no break in the Sierra Nevada range through which it could have flowed from the Rocky Mountains. On December 16, 1826, Smith had written in a letter to the United States ambassador plenipotentiary to Mexico his plans to "follow up on of the largest Riv(ers) that emptied into the (San Francisco) Bay cross the mon (mountains) at its head and from thence to our deposit on the Great Salt Lake" Also as before, Smith and his party remained in California hunting in the Sacramento Valley for several months. Upon reaching the northern edge of the valley, the party scouted the route to the northeast afforded by the Pit River but determined it to be impassable, so veered northwest toward the Pacific coast to find the Columbia River and return to the Rocky Mountain region. Jedediah Smith became the first explorer to reach the Oregon Country overland by traveling north on the California coast.
Trip to the Oregon Country
thumb|left|180px|Smith met with [[George Simpson (Pre-Confederation Canada politician and trader)|George Simpson, Governor-in-Chief of the HBC, at Fort Vancouver, after the Umpqua massacre.]]
When Smith's party left Mexican Alta California and entered the Oregon Country, the Treaty of 1818 allowed joint occupation between Britain and the United States. In the Oregon Country, Smith's party, then numbering 19 and over 250 horses,