The Way to the West / and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone-Crockett-Carson

ies, royal or political. Without wishing to be eccentric or iconoclastic, none the less one may venture to suggest that there may be a certain virtue in beginning with events well within our reach an

not reside on the mountain tops. We know that Frémont, when he stood at the South Pass, was in the middle of a country that had been well known when he was a child. We have seen that his journey across the plains was over a country perfectly understood and fully charted. There were hosti

arson himself, great man as he was, never claimed to be a great explorer. He is properly to be called a great traveler, not a great discoverer. He perhaps found some beaver streams at first hand, but he himse

of his deeds in the Rocky Mountains; so great that, having grossly exceeded his leave of absence, he was eventually reinstated in the Army after he had lost his commission, the president of the United States remarking that he "could not fail so to reward one who had contributed so much to the welfare of hi

the fur trader, and from the latter's gallant associate, Jedediah Smith.[44] As to Bonneville himself, he was, unless we shall except Frémont, the first great example of the class later to be

an important stream in fur trading days. Obviously, Bonneville wanted to grow rich quickly in the fur trade, being more intent on that than on exploration for geographical purposes. He discovered that there was already a West beyond him, even then a distinct region, with ways of its own and men of its own. He continued to move about in the mountains for a couple of years more, the South Pass serving a

ver than about geography; and there was, as we shall presently discover, a very good reason to foresee an abundance of beaver in California. Bonneville and his lieutenant, when these plans first matured, were still on the Green River, this being the year after they had first reached the Rockies. The fur tra

en wandering trappers or so, who desired to join the California venture. Here, then, was a discoverer who started for California more than a decade before Frémont did; more than sixteen years before any one su

ors had so long held back even the hardy trappers of the mountain region. He gave the name Barren River to the stream now called the Humboldt. He gave his own name to another stream. After some fashion he won across the great desert, and crossed als

dred and sixty-five horses when he started eastward in February, 1834. He had, of course, met that Spanish civilization which first explored the Colorado River and firs

ack to the rendezvous on the Bear River. At the rendezvous he made public what information he could add to the general store. Thus it was, perhaps, that Carson and his confrères learned more than they had known before of the beaver country beyond the Sierras. Th

n 1834 the old West of the adventurers was done.[45] He was before Frémont, before Carson's leadership of Frémont; but there was some one else before him, a man who had crossed the continent

t an adventurer; not a talker but a doer of deeds; the very man fit to be type of the Western man to come. Smith himself was the product of a generation of the American West, and though we search all the annals of that West, we shall find no more satisfying record, no more eye-filling picture, nor any greater figure than his own. He is wort

shley. It goes without saying that Smith knew all the upper country of the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the South Pass region, the Sweetwater, the Gre

r his own guidance. They had not told him, as they had told Kit Carson, of the excellent beaver country of the Sacramento. The vast country beyond the Great Salt Lake had been too forbidding for even that later hardy soul to undertake as yet; and the reaches of the Rock

ms River, followed the Colorado for a time, and at length broke boldly away over the awful California desert, until, in such way as we can but imagine, he reached at length the Spanish settlements

ed them. They bade him leave the country at once. Perhaps Smith was not quite candid with the Spaniards, for, though he promised compliance, instead of starting direc

the incredible time of twenty-eight days he was back again at the southwest corner of Salt Lake. We can not tell just how he made this journey. Perhaps he crossed the Sierras near the Sonora Pass, thence went east, far to the south of the Humboldt River, and south also of what is now called Walker Lake. We must remember that neith

The Spaniards seem to have had some notion of Smith's intentions, and they set Indians to watch the trails down the Virgin and the Colorado. These met Smith near the Colorado River and killed ten of his men. Almost destitute, Smith reached the Spanish settlements of San Gabriel and San Diego only to meet with further misfortune. His native guides

not know; but instead of going east, he struck northwest, until he nearly reached the Pacific Ocean. Thence he turned inland, and headed due north,-which meant Oregon. It is e

hose horrible Indian butcheries with which the trapper of that day was all too familiar. Ten men out of his new party had been killed on the Colorado. Here, about the camp in Oregon, lay fifteen more of his men, dead, scalped and mutilated. The horses were gone. Thr

by that time the Columbia was an old story. He knew that this great river was north of him, and knew that there were settlements near its mouth, as we shall presently understand. He further knew that the North Star pointed out the north. Alone, with his rifle as reliance, he made that tremendous journey northward wh

ross at mid-continent. There had been others on the Columbia before Smith. The Hudson Bay factor, Doctor McLaughlin, a great and noble man, a gentleman of the wilderness, meets the wanderer as a friend, a

years earlier, when the latter was in adversity in the Rockies! Strange story indeed, this of the adventures of Jedediah Smith! Survivor of thirty of his men, escaped from a Spanish prison, robbed, nearly ki

r historian, na?vely, "was looking for him!" The ways of that time were, after all, of a certain sufficiency. Sublette he finds on the Henry Fork on August fifth, also much as a matter of course. Strange lands, strange calling, strange restoration after unusua

d rapidly, we may suppose. This was how Carson's friends learned of the Sacramento. This is how the discoveries of Frémont were forerun; for the latter, under Carson's guidance, simply cir

rs before Captain Bonneville sallied out into the West. Contemptuous of the dangers of the prairies, after facing so long those of the mountains, these three hardy Westerners started across the plains with a small outfit of their own. Far out on the Arkan

his own career. Smith was dead before Bonneville saw the Rockies. We see that he antedated Walker and Carson and Frémont. The fatal prairie expedition of these great fur traders, Smith, Sublette and Jackson, went on westward up the Arkansas with the mountain trader, Fitzpatrick, who was bound for

e was the first to cross over the Rockies and the Sierras in mid-America, yet he was not the first white man to stand on the soil of the dry Southwest. Examin

sion on the Colorado near the mouth of the Gila. But he was not the first. Cardenas, a fellow-soldier with Coronado, is perhaps the first man to write of the Grand Ca?on of the Colorado; but he was not the first to disco

nd something like three hundred years before the upper sources of the Mississippi River were known! So thus we may leave this portion of the West to await the Gadsd

s the Wind River; and they said they could have gone on over the South Pass with their wagons had they wished to do so. Poor Bonneville! His distinction of taking the first wagon through the South Pass is as empty as that of Frémont in climbing his mountain peak near that same South Pass. Both accomplishments had been left undone by earlier visitors simply because they did not want to do these

, very soon after hearing the results of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He had a great purpose in his mind. He had fought out and bought out competitors in the fur trade all

o the mouth of the Columbia River, there to take on the cargoes of furs caught by his own men or secured in trade with the Indians. These ships, laden with furs, were to go thence across the Pacific to China, and were to return from

dership of his sea expedition. There was but one leader there, the captain of the ship Tonquin, Thorne by name, a man by no means fitted to command any company of adventurers. The Tonquin left New York September sixth, 1810. It reached the mouth of the Columbia River March twenty-second, 1811. A party was soon thereafter detached for the erection of the proposed post to be known as Astoria. The Tonquin then proceeded

this land party started out on its long and arduous western journey. By June twelfth they had traveled thirteen hundred and twenty-five miles up the Missouri River, being then in the neighborhood of the Arickaree vill

ascended the Wind River about eighty miles, seeking for a place to cross the Rocky Mountains. They had Crow Indians as guides through the Big Horns, and west of the Big Horns the Shoshones had guided them. These Indians detected signs of other Indians on ahead, and hence did not pre

me one before them! Thence, scattered and disorganized, on foot and by boat, this party undertook to go down the Snake River to the Columbia. By January first, 1812, they reached the valley known as the Grande Ronde. By January eighth some of them were on the Umatilla River, an

he Columbia. The party under Hunt reached Astoria February fifteenth, 1812. Crooks and Day, others of the expedition, did not come in until May eleventh. A party of thirteen trappers, who had been left behind to pursue their calling, did not reach the post until January fifteenth, 1813. The trip, measuring by the time of the first arriv

d its tributaries, we may think that by this time we are close to the first of things in Western history. Of course we know that ahead of the Astoria party was the Lewis and Clark expedition. Before Lewis

y, the fort that the Astorians found abandoned, west of the Rocky Mountains? The answer is, Major Andrew Henry, some time partner of that energetic early merchant, General Ashley. Henry was at the Three Forks of the Missouri in 1

s perhaps the first of the Western merchants to catch the full significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. We have heard of one William Morrison, of Kaskaskia, Illinois, who sent a representative to far-off S

he Yellowstone River for the purpose of doing a little beaver trapping on his own account. Colter, it may be remembered, is thought to have been the first discoverer of the region now included in the Yellowstone National Park. This country was discovered and forgotten, to

the beginning of things in the West. For instance, we have heard much of General Ashley, that enterprising and fortunate early fur trader, whose success was the first to

recked, Ashley none the less escaped, and somewhere near the point where he met his disaster, he cut his name on a rock, together with the date, 1825. Major Powell, later an official discoverer, in his expedition down the Colorado River, found the place where Ashley was wrecked on that stream just forty-f

before the Mormons left Missouri! We shall need to allow a few years to pass before we come to the transcontinental migration of the Mormons and the building of their Temp

ssippi River, and to arrange for the proper respect for the American flag in that far-off country. After Pike had returned down the Mississippi River and had been ordered to explore the country near the Rockies, around the headwaters of the Red River, he began to cross the trails of some of these earlier adventurers of whom we have been speaking. Thus, in 1806, while Pike is making his way across

vers and reaches the Solomon Fork. Here he meets the Pawnees, discovers that they are wearing Spanish medals, learns that the Spaniards have sent an expedition into that country from th

cidences, is the fact that Coronado himself recounts that he met on the Missouri River, that is to say, on the stream that is now called the Missouri, an Indian who wore a silver medal that was evidently the work of a white man. There is something singular for you, if you seek a strange incident! Where did Coronado's Indi

e days, that the whites had long lived among the Indians and had come to know their ways. We shall discover, if we care to believe such apochryphal history as that offered by the ostensible Indian captive, John D. Hunter,[46] that the Indian himself has been something of an explorer. Hunter tells of plains Indians, dwellers of the prairie country near t

very of the South Pass and of many other features of the Rocky Mountains. It is doubtful, indeed, whether any party of white men in those ear

icine, on the reservation of those same Blackfeet who once fought the trappers so boldly, the writer once found, high up on the mountain side, a plainly traceable trail that led down to the summit of a high ridge, whence one could look far to the eastward, to where the Sweet Grass hills loomed out of

also know this trail; though there are not wanting those who believe that less than a double decade ago the valleys at the headwaters of the St. Mary's Lake still lay untouched by the foot of white man. Here, along this forgotten mountain trail, came the Kootenais with their war parties against the Blackfeet. H

nd of this old pathway. He pointed to similar paths crossing the sides of the ridge ne

sheep," said he. "They found the easiest ways

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east and west course of the Buena Ventura was an impossibility, although Jedediah Smith had long since shown the

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this significa

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from childhood to young manhood, is by some considered unauthe

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y lived east of the Appalachians. The first settlers of Kentucky and Tennessee simply followed the ancient ways by which the Indians crossed into the valley of the Mississippi. An