Famous Mt. Men of the 1800 S

Famous Mt. Men of the 1800’s

John Colter - Fearless Mountain Man

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John Colter (1774?-1812) - An American trapper and guide, Colter was born in Augusta County, Virginia about 1774. Sometime around 1780, Colter's family moved to Kentucky near present-day Maysville. In 1803, Colter enlisted in the Lewis and Clark Expedition as a private with a salary of $5.00 per month. During the expedition, Colter was considered to be one of the best hunters and scouts in the group, and was routinely sent out to hunt game and scout possible trails.

As the expedition was returning to St. Louis, Missouri in 1806, they were met by two trappers by the names of Forest Hancock and Joseph Dickson, who were headed to the Yellowstone River. Colter, not ready to return to "civilization," was granted a discharge to join them, and the trio began the journey in August.

The next year, as Colter was making his way to back to St. Louis, he met Manuel Lisa, and his party of trappers of the newly formed Missouri Fur Company.

Colter was hired to guide them to the mouth of the Big Horn River. Once again, the mountain man turned back leading the party into present day Montana, where they built Fort Raymond on the Yellowstone River, a short distance above the mouth of the Bighorn River.

In October, 1807, Lisa sent Colter out to meet with the the winter Indian camps, alerting them to the presence of the Missouri Fur Company and desire to trade. Though his exact route is uncertain, Colter traveled alone with only his rifle and pack, covering an estimated 500 miles. During the winter, with the help of Indian guides, he was thought to have crossed the Wind River Mountains, the Teton Range, and was probably the first white man to see Jackson's Hole and Yellowstone Lake. Arriving back at Fort Raymond in the spring of 1808, he described the thermal wonders of Yellowstone to the rest of the party, and though most were skeptical of his descriptions, Yellowstone soon became known as "Colter's Hell."

Blackfoot WarriorIn 1808, Colter teamed up with another former member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition named John Potts and the two began to trap in the region near Three Forks, Montana. Both were wounded in a fight with Blackfoot warriors as they led a party of Crow Indians to Fort Raymond. The next year, the men were once again attacked by the Blackfoot and Potts was killed. Colter was captured and amazed when the Indians set him free. However, before doing so, they stripped him naked and took all his possessions.

Telling Colter to run, the mountain man quickly realized he was the object of a "human hunt." A very swift runner, Colter eluded most of the group but one man was gaining on him. Turning and facing the Indian, Colter killed him with his own spear, took his blanket, and by hiding in the river under a pile of logs, was able to escape. For the next eleven days, he walked 200 miles back to Fort Raymond with only the blanket for warmth and survived on bark and roots to eat. When he stumbled into the stockade he was almost dead. However, the brave mountain man was nursed back to health.

Still not ready to give up his life of adventure, Colter signed on to lead another Missouri Fur Company expedition to the Three Forks of the Missouri River in 1810. True to past experience, the group was attacked by the Blackfoot again and Colter finally vowed to return to St. Louis. Returning by the end of 1810, he had been away from civilization for almost six years. He furnished very valuable information to William Clark, who was compiling maps for the report of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and with his fur trade profits he bought a farm near New Haven, Missouri. He soon soon married a woman named Sally and the couple would have one son. However his quiet life as a farmer would not last.

In 1812 the United States declared war on Great Britain, and Colter enlisted. Fighting under Nathan Boone, he died while in service for his country. However, after such an eventful life, he died, not by the hand of the British soldiers or the many Indians he encountered in his travels, but by jaundice on May 7, 1812. After his death, his remains were shipped back to Missouri to his wife. However, Sallie was unable to provide a proper burial. Leaving him lying "in state" in their cabin, she soon moved into her brother's home.

Amazingly, John Colter's body continued to lie in the cabin for the next 114 years, the house slowly falling to ruins around him. In 1926, the land on which the cabin once sat was being cleared and during the process, his bones, as well as a leather pouch portraying his name, were found. Afterwards, his remains were gathered and buried on a bluff in New Haven that overlooks the Missouri River.

Monday, April 7, 2008

James Beckwourth

James Pierson Beckwourth (April 6, 1798 or 1800, Frederick County, Virginia - October 29, 1866, Denver) (a.k.a. Jim Beckworth, James P. Beckwith)

James Pierson Beckwourth was born in Virginia in 1798 to Sir Jennings Beckwith, a descendant of Irish and English nobility, and an African-American mulatto woman about whom little is known.

His life is best known from the book The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth from 1856, which was rejected by early historians of the Old West as being ridiculous campfire lore, but has been rehabilitated since as not reliable in details, but a valuable source of social history. The civil rights movement discovered Beckwourth as an early afro-american pioneer and he is subsequently named a role model in children's literature and textbooks.

In the American west Beckwourth spent his life in fur trapping and Western exploration. With his family he moved around 1809 to Missouri. He attended school in St. Louis for four years and learned at a blacksmith's in the city till age 19. In 1824, while living in Missouri, he joined Gen. William Ashley's fur trapping company as a wrangler on his expedition to explore the Rocky Mountains. In the following years Beckwourth became known as a prominent trapper and Indian fighter. He was well known for telling lore about his adventures about fighting Indians and hunting. But not only did he entertain his listeners, on the 1826 rendezvous trapper colleague Caleb Greenwood told the campfire story of Beckwourth being the child of a Crow chief, who has been stolen as a baby by raiding Cheyennes and sold to the whites. This lore was widely believed, as Beckwourth looked and acted native for years.

Beckwourth as Indian warrior, illustration of the first editionLater that year he got caught by Crow Indians while trapping in the dangerous border county between the areas of Crow, Cheyennes and Blackfoots. They recognised him and as they knew the story of his Crow ancestry he was admitted to the nation and immediately married to the daughter of a chief. For the next eight to nine years he lived with the Crows, rising in their hierarchy, becoming a warrior, a chief, a leader of the Dog clan and finally according to his own record the highest ranking war chief of the Crow Nation. He still went trapping, but did not sell his furs and that of his nation to his former partners of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company but made business with the competing American Fur Company. And he participated in the raids by his new people. They mostly stole horses from neighboring nations and the occasional white party. Sometimes these raids escalated to warfare, most often with the Blackfoots.

In 1837, when the American Fur Company did not want to renew his contract, he returned to St. Louis and volunteered for the Second Seminole War in Florida. In his own book he claims to have been a soldier and courier, but according to preserved records he was a civilian wagon master in the baggage. From 1838 he was an Indian trader on the Arkansas River, working out of Fort Vasquez, Colorado, near Platteville, Colorado with the Cheyennes. 1840 he moved to the Bent & St. Vrain Company and later the same year he established himself as an independent trader, building the trading post Pueblo together with others. From it the city Pueblo, Colorado developed.

From 1844 he traded on the Old Spanish Trail between the Arkansas River and Mexican California. With the beginning of the Mexican-American war in 1846 he returned to the United States, not without stealing around 1800 Mexican horses and bringing them as spoils of war. In the war he was a courier with the US Army and participated in suppressing the Taos Revolt, where his former employer Charles Bent as interims governor of New Mexico was slain.

1848 saw him back in California, in the Gold Rush he opened a store at Sonoma, he sold quickly, going to Sacramento living as a professional card player. In 1850 he discovered Beckwourth Pass, the lowest mountain pass through the Sierra Nevada and in the following year he established Beckwourth Trail, a road through the mountains. It began near Pyramid Lake and the Truckee Meadows east of the mountains, climbed to his pass and on a ridge between two forks of Feather River down to the gold fields of northern California at Marysville. The road should spare the settlers and gold seekers about 150 miles and several steep slopes, such as Donner Pass. It was supposed to be paid by the business communities of the gold towns in California, but when Beckwourth tried to collect his payment in 1851, Marysville suffered from two huge fires and was unable to pay.

Beckwourth eventually began ranching in the Sierra. His ranch, trading post and hotel in today's Sierra Valley later became Beckwourth, California. In the winter of 54/55 Thomas D. Bonner a corrupt Justice of the peace stayed in the hotel, where Beckwourth told him the story of his life. Bonner took it down, edited it the following year and offered the book to Harper & Brothers in New York, where The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth came out in 1856. According to the contract, Beckwourth was entitled to one half of the proceeds, but never got anything from Bonner. His stay in California can be traced until 1858, he returned to Missouri in 1859 and settled later that year in Denver, Colorado. He lived as store keeper and was appointed local agent for Indian affairs by the city council. In 1864 Beckwourth was forced by John M. Chivington of the Third Colorado Volunteers to act as a scout for a campaign against the Cheyenne and Arapaho, that led to the Sand Creek Massacre.

The Cheyennes interdicted him from further business with them as a result of the massacre, and he returned to trapping, well in his 60s. He was employed by the army as a scout in Fort Laramie and Fort Phil Kearny in 1866. While guiding a military column to a Crow Tribe in Montana, he complained of severe headaches and suffering nosebleeds (most probably a severe case of hypertension). Beckworth returned to the Crow village where he died on October 29, 1866. The founder of the "Rocky Mountain News", William Byers, used the death of Beckworth to publish a circulation-boosting, baseless yarn stating that the Crow had poisoned Beckworth. The falsehood is repeated to this day.

Beckwourth and his book

Later in his life, Beckwourth recounted an astonishing life history to Thomas D. Bonner, who produced the book The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout, Pioneer and Chief of the Crow Nation. Beckwourth's language and style were as notable as the reported adventures. Some material in the book provide historical information on the role of alcohol in the US Government, how occupations effect the occupied, our historical relationship to diseases, wildlife, and the environment, as well as reports dealing with massacres and war.

Beckwourth Pass, California

Beckwourth Pass, named in honor of James Beckwourth, is located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Plumas County, California. State Route 70 crosses the Sierras at an elevation of 1,591 m (5,221 ft.), making it one of the lowest crossings of the Sierra Nevadas in California. It is also the route that the Union Pacific Railroad (former Western Pacific Railroad) used to cross the Sierra's along their Feather River route. The pass is located east of Portola, California.

In 1851, Beckwourth, following an Indian trail, discovered a low elevation pass over the Sierra Nevada mountains into California. He improved what became known as the Beckwourth Trail through Plumas, Butte and Yuba counties. In August, 1851, he led the first intact wagon train into the burgeoning Gold Rush city of Marysville, California, named after Mary Murphy, a survivor of the Donner Party in the winter of 1846-47. Beckwourth demanded payment for improving the trail, claiming he had an agreement with the city and its merchants. When the city failed to pay him, he had no standing as a dark-skinned man in a California court to sue for damages. An estimated 10,000 people used the trail to enter Marysville in the following decade. In 1996, at the urging of promoters of Beckwourth Frontier Days, a living history festival, the city of Marysville's largest park was renamed Beckwourth Riverfront Park in recognition of the debt owed by the city and Beckwourth's significance to the growth of the city.

Posted by The What's up News Site at 11:43 AM

Jim Bridger - Mountain Man

Jim Bridger 1804-1881

Jim Bridger, mountain man extraordinaire, was born in 1804 in Richmond, Virginia. In 1812, Bridger’s father moved the family to a farm near St. Louis, Missouri. Ten years later, at the age of 22, young Bridger began his life as a trapper by joining the expedition led by William Ashley and Andrew Henry up the Missouri River as a beaver trapper. Along with Bridger on the expedition went three other future giants of the frontier – Jedediah Smith, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Hugh Glass. Jedediah Smith, who was known for reading his Bible around the campfire, gave Bridger a nickname which would stick for life. He called him ‘Old Gabe’ because Bridger, with his self assured manner, reminded him of the angel Gabriel spreading the word of God. The party travelled in keelboats some 1,800 miles up the mouth of the Yellowstone River. Jim’s education grew by leaps and bounds as he found out how to survive on the land. He came to know the uncharted lands like the back of his hand.

Jim Bridger had undoubtedly found his niche. He would spend much of the next 60 years at the head of groups of trappers and fur hunters for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, of which he was a founder, and the American Fur Company. In 1842, however Bridger and fellow trapper Louis Vasquez set about building a settlement on Black’s Fork of the Green River in what is now Wyoming. The settlement, known as Fort Bridger, would become a vital stopping off point for wary travellers on the overland trail west. The travellers found in Jim Bridger an excellent host. One diary reported the following about the man behind Fort Bridger: “ He was excessively kind and patient with me in laying down the route to Salt Lake, taking the trouble of drawing a chart with charcoal on the door, pointing out a new line that had never been attempted, which would be a short cut of thirty miles.”

That account underscores Bridger’s vast knowledge of the west. According to Captain John W. Gunnison in an 1834 report, “ With a buffalo skin and a piece of charcoal he will map out any portion of this vast region with wonderful accuracy. His renown in the area of plotting and charting maps grew. In 1851, he was assigned by the United States Government to draw the official maps that established the tribal boundaries according to the Fort Laramie Peace Treaty.

By his mid thirties Jim Bridger had grown into a fine specimen of a man. He stood at just over six feet, had a lean, muscular physique and sharp facial features. According to an 1837 copy of the Cincinnati Atlas, “His cheekbones were high, his nose hooked or acquiline, the expression of his eyes mild and thoughtful, that of his face grave almost to solemnity.” The highlight of the trapper’s year was the annual rendezvous. Bridger richly enjoyed such get togethers. He was a natural fireside entertainer. He would amaze his listeners with stories about his adventures and the sights he had seen. Bridger had the ability to mesmerize Indians as well as white men with his tales. On one occasion a Captain Howard Stansbury was amazed to see him keep a circle of Sioux and Cheyenne intrigued for over an hour with a tall tale that was told completely in sign language.

Bridger kept himself busy trapping and scouting after Fort Bridger was established. He laid out a stage route west from Denver for the Central Overland and Pike’s Peak Express Company. He also guided 300 prospectors to Montana goldfields. He also spent some time as a guide for the U.S. Army in their quest for hostile Indians.

One day while scouting ahead of an army column near Tongue River in Wyoming Territory in 1865, Bridger pointed out some smoke rising at a distant point. The Captain, however, saw nothing, even with the aid of field glasses. As they advanced other scouts began reporting an Indian village with campfires up ahead.

Just two years later, however, failing eyesight caused Bridger to retire from his position as an army scout. He purchased a farm in Kansas City, Missouri and settled into the life of a farmer. He died there in 1881. He was 77 years of age.

Source: PageWise, Inc

Legend of Hugh Glass

The story of Hugh Glass ranks as one of the most remarkable stories of survival in American history. So much so, that Hugh Glass became a legend in his own time.

Little is actually known about Glass. It was said that he was a former pirate who gave up his life at sea to travel to the West as a scout and fur trapper. Exactly when is unknown. He is believed to have been born in Philadelphia around 1783.

He had already been in the Western wilderness for several years when he signed on for an expedition up the Missouri River in 1823 with the company of William Ashley and Andrew Henry. The expedition used long-boats similar to those used by Lewis and Clark 19 years earlier to ascend the Missouri as far as the Grand River near present-day Mobridge, SD. There Glass along with a small group of men led by Henry started overland toward Yellowstone.

At a point about 12 miles south of Lemmon, SD, now marked by a small monument, Glass surprised a grizzly bear and her two cubs while scouting for the party. He was away from the rest of the group at the time and the grizzly attacked him before he could fire his rifle. Using only his knife and bare hands, Glass wrestled the full-grown bear to the ground and killed it, but in the process he was badly mauled and bitten.

His companions, hearing his screams, arrived on the scene to see a bloody and badly maimed Glass barely alive and the bear lying on top of him. They shot the bear head and uncovered Glass's mangled body. They bandaged his wounds the best they could and waited for him to die. The party was in a hurry to get to Yellowstone, so Henry asked for volunteers to stay until Glass was dead and then bury him. John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger agreed and immediately began digging the grave. But after three days Glass was still alive when Fitzgerald and Bridger began to panic as a band of hostile Indians was seen approaching. The two men picked up Glass's rifle, knife and other equipment and dumped him into the open grave. They threw a bearskin over him and shoveled in a thin layer of dirt and leaves, leaving Glass for dead.

But Glass did not die. After an unknown time, he regained consciousness to a very grim situation. He was alone and unarmed in hostile Indian territory. He had a broken leg and his wounds were festering. His scalp was almost torn away and the flesh on his back had been ripped away so that his rib bones were exposed. The nearest help was 200 miles away at Ft. Kiowa. His only protection was the bearskin hide.

Glass set his own broken leg and on September 9, 1823, began crawling south overland toward the Cheyenne River about 100 miles away. Fever and infection took their toll and frequently rendered him unconscious. Once he passed out and awoke to discover a huge grizzly standing over him. According to the legend, the animal licked his maggot-infested wounds. This may have saved Glass from further infection and death. Glass survived mostly on wild berries and roots. On one occasion he was able to drive two wolves from a downed bison calf and eat the raw meat.

According to Glass's own account he was driven by revenge. He told others that the only thing that kept him going was the thought of killing the men who had left him for dead.

It took Glass two months to crawl to the Cheyenne River. There he built a raft from a fallen tree and allowed the current to carry him downstream to the Missouri and on to Ft. Kiowa, a point about four miles north of the present-day Chamberlain.

After he regained his health, which took many months, Glass did indeed set out to kill the two men who had left him for dead. He found Bridger at a fur trading post on the Yellowstone River but didn't kill him because Bridger was only 19 years old. Glass later found Fitzgerald but didn't kill him either because Fitzgerald had joined the Army.

Glass eventually returned to the Upper Missouri where he died in 1833 in a battle with hostile Arikaras Indians. As with many mountain men of the era, Glass himself wasn't much of a talker. However the story of his trek was recounted far and wide among other frontiersmen and even the native American tribes. The story needed no embellishment, but at least one version (false) had Glass cutting out the still-beating hearts of the men who left him for dead. Another claimed (again, falsely) that Glass forevermore carried Bridger's and Fitzgerald's scalps on his belt. In truth, Glass may have simply forgiven the men who had left him to die. The story of Hugh Glass is well known and has been made into a movie "A Man in the Wilderness" in 1971 staring Richard Harris and John Huston, a moderately accurate film. A novel, "Lord Grizzly" also recounts and embellishes the story.

There's no evidence that Hugh Glass ever visited the Black Hills, although he certainly did know of them. As early as 1828 stories of gold in the Hills had begun to circulate, but Glass was a trapper and trader, not a gold seeker so he probably had little interest. Some accounts suggest that Glass may have been part of party that passed near the Black Hills in 1831 and may have visited the Hills briefly at that time.

The monument to Hugh Glass is located on the shores of the Shadehill Reservoir southwest of Shadehill, SD.

Books about Hugh Glass include: "Hugh Glass" by Bruce Bradley (1999 ISBN 0966900502) and "The Saga of Hugh Glass: Pirate, Pawnee and Mountain Man" by John Myers Myers (1976 ISBN 0803258348).

Jedediah Smith

Jedediah Smith, the son of a general store owner, was born at Bainbridge, New York, on 6th January, 1799. His parents were Methodists and as a young man he developed strong religious beliefs. In 1810 His family moved to Erie County, Pennsylvania. He developed an interest in travel after reading about the travels of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, overland to the Pacific Ocean.

Smith moved to St. Louis in search of work. On 13th February, 1822, William Ashley placed an advertisement in the Missouri Gazette and Public Adviser where he called for 100 enterprising men to "ascend the river Missouri" to take part in the fur collecting business. Those who agreed to join the party included Smith, Tom Fitzpatrick, Hugh Glass, Jim Beckwourth, David Jackson, William Sublette and James Bridger.

On 30th May, 1823, William Ashley and his party of 70 men were attacked by 600 Arikara. Twelve of Ashley's men were killed and the rest were forced to retreat. Smith volunteered to contact Andrew Henry and bring back reinforcements. A message was sent back to Colonel Henry Leavenworth of the U.S. Sixth Infantry and later 200 soldiers and 700 Sioux allies attacked the Arikara villages.

In 1824 Smith led a small group of men south of the Yellowstone to open up new trapping grounds. During the journey he discovered the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains at Wyoming. Smith was also badly mauled by a bear. The animal ripped Smith's scalp open and for the rest of his life he brushed his hair forward to conceal the scar. The trip was a great success and Smith returned to St. Louis in 1825 with 9,000 pounds of beaver skin.

A devout Methodist, it was said of Smith that "his Bible and his rifle were his inseparable companions." Another mountain man, William Waldo, said that Smith was "a bold, outspoken, professing, and consistent Christian, the first and only one known among the early Rocky Mountain trappers and hunters." Smith was also an outstanding trapper and the 668 pelts he took in the 1824-1825 season was a record haul.

William Ashley, who described Smith as a "a very intelligent and confidential young man", now made him a partner in his business and together they pioneered the Oregon Trail to the mountains. In 1826 Smith joined forces with David Jackson and William Sublette to buy out Ashley. Whereas Sublette and Jackson worked the central Rockies, Smith decided to search out new trapping grounds in the southwest. In August 1826, Smith and a 15 men team headed for the Wasatch Mountains. During this journey they became the first American pioneers to meet the Wintu.

He wrote about his travels in his journal: "I have at different times suffered the extremes of hunger and thirst. Hard as it is to bear for successive days the knawings of hunger, yet it is light in comparison to the agony of burning thirst and, on the other hand, I have observed that a man reduced by hunger is some days in recovering his strength. A man equally reduced by thirst seems renovated almost instantaneously. Hunger can be endured more than twice as long as thirst. To some it may appear surprising that a man who has been for several days without eating has a most incessant desire to drink, and although he can drink but little at a time, yet he wants it much oftener than in ordinary circumstances."

After crossing the Colorado River the men entered the Black Mountains of Arizona. Smith was unable to find "beaver water" and instead of retracing his steps decided to cross the Mojave Desert in California. It took the party 15 days to cross this flat, salt-crusted plain under a blazing sun. Eventually they arrived at what is now Los Angeles. As Kevin Starr has pointed out that "the Smith party constituted the first American penetration of California overland from the east."

This area was under the control of Mexico and Smith and his party were arrested and kept at San Diego until January, 1827. The group then wintered in the San Joaquin Valley. In May, Smith took his men across the Sierra Nevada mountains. The deep snow halted the first attempt and when he tried for a second time, Smith only had two companions. This time he managed to cross the mountains through what is now known as Ebbetts Pass. The three men therefore became the first white men to achieve this feat.

The desert east of the Sierra caused Smith and his companions serious problems. On 24th June Smith wrote in his diary: "With our best exertion we pushed forward, walking as we had been for a long time, over the soft sand. That kind of traveling is very tiresome to men in good health who can eat when and what they choose, and drink as often as they desire, and to us, worn down with hunger and fatigue and burning with thirst increased by the blazing sands, it was almost insupportable."

On 25th June one of the men, Robert Evans, did not have the strength to continue. Smith and the other man went on ahead. Smith wrote in his diary: "We left him and proceeded onward in the hope of finding water in time to return with some in season to save his life. After traveling about three miles we came to the foot of the mountain and there, to our inexpressible joy, we found water." The three men eventually reached Bear Lake. Smith now wrote to William Clark about his trip and what he had discovered. In his letter he explained how he had discovered "a country which has been, measurably, veiled in obscurity, and unknown to the citizens of the United States."On 13th June Smith assembled a new party of 18 men and two women to go back to California. He decided to use the same route as before. While crossing the Colorado River the party was attacked by members of the Mojave tribe. Ten of the men were killed and the two women were captured. Smith and the seven remaining men reached California in late August. Once again Smith was arrested by the Mexican authorities. He was eventually released after he promised he would leave California and not return.

Smith and his party now explored northward into Oregon in search of promising beaver trapping areas. On 14th July, 1828, while Smith and two other members of his party were off on a scouting trip on the Umpqua River, the Kelawatset tribe attacked the camp and killed 15 of his men. Alexander Roderick McLeod returned and recorded the poignant scene in his journal: “... at the entrance of the North Branch, where Mr. Smith's party were destroyed, and a sad spectacle of Indian barbarity presented itself to our view, the skeletons of eleven of those miserable sufferers lying bleaching in the sun.”

Smith and what remained of his party eventually reached Fort Vancouver in Canada. During a three year period Smith had taken 33 men with him on his expeditions to California. Of these, 26 had been killed. Kevin Starr, the author of California (2005) has argued: "Smith's heroic journey - the double encirclement of the Far West - was the physical, moral, and geopolitical equivalent of the great voyages of exploration off the California coast in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Spaniards linked California to the sea; Smith linked California to the interior of the North American continent."

Smith spent the winter of 1828-29 at Fort Vancouver. In March, his party, that included James Bridger, journeyed east to meet up with David Jackson and his trappers on the Clark Fork River. The two trapping parties reached Pierre's Hole in August. The following year Smith and his partners sold their business to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

Smith returned to St. Louis in 1830 with the idea of making maps of the areas he had explored. He found it impossible to settle and in 1831 he agreed to guide 22 wagons on a trading expedition to Sante Fe. Smith made a crucial mistake of not making sure that the party had taken sufficient supplies of water. On 27th May 1831, Jedediah Smith decided to travel ahead in search of water. He was set upon by 20 Comanches and was killed.

Dan L. Thrapp has argued: "Smith was more than 6 feet tall, spare, a man of great courage, vision, dedication and persistence... His contributions to geographical knowledge of the west, and his pioneering expeditions were of great value; his journals and records suggest that he intended at some time to publish his findings, but his early and lamented death aborted that plan."

By John Simkin ([email protected]) © September 1997 (updated August 2014).