Readable but poorly-unified story about Jedediah Smith and the other famous "mountain men" of the 1820s and 1830s, during the battle for control of the American West between the English, American and Mexican governments.
Jed Smith turns out to be just a partial player in this book, he's one of several Paul Bunyan-esque figures described here; men who undertook incredible journeys through the bush, suffered incredible privations and dangers, and at the same time, as they led various trading and fur trapping operations, they helped the USA establish eventual control over a huge region that was truly up for grabs.
The main criticism most readers will likely have of this book is its lack of a unifying thread. This period of history is complicated, with lots of bit players and a lot of historical background that the authors must explain to readers for the overall story to make sense and move along. Note also that sometimes the authors don't explain this historical background clearly enough--see the difficult-to-follow Chapter 13 for example. Perhaps a history like this is impossible to unify and tell in a clean, well-organized way: but the book is still interesting, and in places, fascinating.
It's hard to believe that in those days so much was riding on beaver pelts: not just money, but literal geopolitical control of huge swathes of the Western USA. The major fur companies (and the mountain men they employed) were effectively extensions of nation-state power as they began establishing control over lands like the Oregon Territory and much of the Southwest, regions that could have ended up in anybody's hands. Think of it like an early, primitive version of what is described in John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
And if you still need proof that history traffics in irony: within a decade or so of this critical battle for control in the West, the beaver pelt market collapsed, as Europeans switched to Chinese silk. They wanted something else for their hats and fashion.
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Finally, it never hurts to be reminded what men, real men, could really do. Some of these stories are preposterous, they're so unbelievable, incredible stories of endurance, luck and will. The survival stories of Hugh Glass and John Colter, both minor side characters in this history, are simply incredible (see chapters 8, 9 and 10). It's a necessary reminder to read about men like this in today's era of Patagonia vests, corporate ID badges and lattes.
[Readers, as usual, feel free to read no further. What follows are just my notes and thoughts on the text. However, if you're interested in a reading list and/or movies and documentary suggestions related to this book, scroll to the very bottom of this post.]
Notes:
Chapter 1: "Enterprising Young Men"
1) The books starts off with quite a bit of backstory: first describing Jedediah Smith's ancestors migrating from New England to New York and then to Western Pennsylvania; then a young Jedediah arriving to St. Louis. Describing aspects of the region and era: Mississippi River, relations between various Indian tribes (steadily deteriorating as more and more whites moved into the region disrupting the order of things among the various tribes, causing a surge in intra-tribe violence as well as violence against interloping whites), and finally on the excursion into the Mississippi Territory to obtain beaver pelts, led by general William Ashley. Jedediah, a capable woodsman, signs on.
Chapter 2: Astor's Folly
2) John Jacob Astor and his failed Pacific Fur Company.
3) Ashley used a different payment model with his trappers: they got paid per pelt, thus they were called "free trappers" with far more incentives to increase their catch.
Chapter 3: The Horse and the Gun
4) Influence of horses and guns, brought over by the Spanish, on the dynamics among various tribes all over the Americas. The author's view is very orthodox/modern: they frequently remind readers how racist Europeans and whites were "back then," etc. [Keep in mind the idea of retrospective bigoteering, a concept Nassim Taleb discusses in his works: the idea that blaming ancients for things like racism is like blaming ancients for not knowing germ theory: in both cases it's tantamount to assuming neither knowledge nor ethics can ever be improved over time!]
5) On the various events that led to "the great horse dispersal," a large exodus of mustangs across the plains of the American West. Basically the Pueblo Indians erupted in anger in 1680 and ejected all Spanish from the New Mexico territory, but because they never developed a taste for horse flesh they just flung open the Spanish corrals and let the mustangs run free across the Southern plains. The Comanches were the first who tried to perfect horse breeding techniques; ultimately the use of horses led to many social dislocations and migrations among the various tribes in the greater region.
6) On Samuel de Champlain in 1609, using an arquebus during the conflict between the Hurons and the Mohawks, killing the Mohawk headman as well as the warriors on either side of him from a distance.
7) See also various conflicts during the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois, armed with guns by the Dutch, decimated the Algonquins; see also a conflict between Iroquois and the Shawnee where the Iroquois used guns and won a battle within moments.
8) Growth in the western gun trade in the regions of the Mississippi, Missouri and Arkansas Rivers between French traders and native tribes. Obviously in the long run there was a blowback here, as the various tribes began using these guns not just against each other but against white settlers too. [The easiest way to conquer a divided territory is to incite violence between the various peoples already there, give them mechanisms to kill each other, and let them exhaust themselves fighting it out. You can easily take what's left afterward.]
Chapter 4: Shipwreck
9) Ashley's expedition's boat capsizes early on; on how they had to either pole or towline the boat upstream. On "sawyers": huge uprooted trees floating downstream that had to be fended off or they'd destroy your boat.
10) They pass Floyd's Bluff, the burial place of Sergeant Charles Floyd, the only member of Lewis and Clark's expedition to die (of a ruptured appendix). It was considered a bad omen for anyone going by this bluff to not replace the grave marker, several were consumed by prairie fires over the years.
Chapter 5: Hivernants
11) On the conflict between the Arikara and the Sioux: their initial interaction was a good example of "no good deed goes unpunished"; the Arikara initially helped some of the ill-fed wandering bands of Sioux who arrived in their territory; the Arikara had horses and steel blades; note that the Sioux had guns. Later, smallpox weekend the Arikara to the point that they became easy victims of the Sioux.
12) Jed Smith distinguishes himself on this mission, he starts being seen as a leader.
13) Hivernants, adapted from French [literally "winterers" more or less] and a term of respect for a man who could survive the harsh winter weather of the upper Rockies.
14) The authors cite a surprising omission in Smith's journals, as he never mentions the famous trapper and boatman Mike Fink who was nearly 50 years old at the time and had also signed on with the Henry-Ashley expedition.
15) Many beaver trappers, "like Daniel Boone himself, who had trapped for decades along the Appalachians, spent the final years of their lives barely able to walk, much less mount and ride a horse." The authors claim this was due to freezing cold water causing rheumatoid arthritis.
Chapter 6: Bloodstained Beach
16) On mountain man Jim Clyman and Edward Rose; also on Jed Smith's friends among the hands: Thomas Fitzpatrick and Jim Bridger; names largely forgotten today but "upon which the myth of America's western expansion would become reality." These guys were about to experience the gamesmanship and power politics of the hostile Arikara.
17) Smith displays bravery by being a last man to evacuate the shore after an overwhelming attack from the Arikara. [It's interesting to read about these very, very small battles, with incredible bravery, there's nothing of the scale of typical wars/battle scenes that historians write about and yet the subject is just as emotionally gripping.]
18) June 3, 1823: Jed Smith volunteers with another French Canadian hunter, Baptiste, to carry the news of the disaster, on foot, to Andrew Henry, the other leader of the expedition, on the Yellowstone.
Chapter 7: The Missouri Legion
19) This chapter discusses the Arikara War, the first time the US Army officially took up arms, "however halfheartedly," against Plains Indians.
20) Smith reaches Andrew Henry, learns that a group of Indian tribes had united and had wiped out entire groups of trappers, including the entire Missouri Fur Company expedition; including what happened to the Henry/Ashley team on Bloodstained Beach, "the death toll constituted the most lethal to date in the history of the fur trade." Jed Smith and Andrew Henry head back to relieve William Ashley and his team.
21) Ashley then alerts Colonel Henry Leavenworth at Fort Atkinson, who decide to mobilize six companies into the field to make a reprisal attack against the Arikara. "And thus was initiated the phenomenon of the American West's cyclical festivals of violence against its native inhabitants."
22) Colonel Leavenworth had what his civilian observers considered "an irrational empathy" even an "imbecility" of "romantic notions" towards the Indians.
23) "...it should be noted that whites have always been keener to affix the label massacre to successful Indian attacks while referring to designate their own such victories as battles."
24) Leavenworth and the Sioux warriors accompanying them achieve an easy victory, and then Leavenworth negotiates an agreement for the Arikara to surrender, the Sioux are disgusted by the idea of a peaceful resolution, they consider it a sign of weakness of the Americans.
Part II: The Pass
Chapter 8: Les Mauvais Terres
25) Interesting to think about the neomercantilism that's happening here around these trading and trapping companies, as they seamlessly integrate themselves in with the US military to take care of "the Indian problem."
26) The reader is introduced to hunter/mountain man Hugh Glass; Jed Smith goes with a team further west, to the western slope of the Continental Divide. [Basically his journeys, two round trips during 1823-1825, took him from what today is central South Dakota to Oregon.] On surviving the Badlands of South Dakota.
27) Smith is attacked by a grizzly bear, breaking ribs, it actually bites his head (!) his ear was nearly torn off, plus a bunch of other gruesome lacerations on his scalp and face; he had Clyman stitch him back up in the bush.
Chapter 9: Glass
28) On Hugh Glass and a fantastic story of survival after a grizzly attack and then being left for dead. [This story is almost too ludicrous to believe.] See the 1971 movie Man in the Wilderness starring Richard Harris and the 2015 movie The Revenant starring Leonardo DiCaprio for fictionalizations of this story.
Chapter 10: South Pass
29) The even more ridiculous escape story of John Colter, stripped naked and told to run by his Blackfeet captors, he outruns them, kills one, evades them over eleven days, surviving on roots and tree bark, in what came to be known as "Colter's Run."
30) On Jed Smith's doomed attempt to get to the Union Pass; he is then told about the South Pass through the Rockies. The South Pass likely was already known by Robert Stewart and his explorer group in 1812 but he may have withheld information about it from the British; this is similar to Daniel Boone discovering the Cumberland Gap through the Appalachians in 1769 while unaware of that a British expedition had found it already 19 years earlier but kept it secret. The South Pass would eventually be a path of migration for hundreds of thousands of Americans through to the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail and the California Trail.
Chapter 11: The Survivor
31) Smith finds a small camp, figures it to be Clyman's but fears he was captured or killed by Indians. Then the narrative shifts to Clyman's perspective: somehow Clyman manages to survive after escaping one war tribe of Indians then stumbling into an Indian encampment who robbed him of most of his stuff, then he managed to club two badgers with a bone for protein, and then finds himself stumbling towards the American Ford Atkinson.
Chapter 12: Dead Men Walking
32) Now we return to Hugh Glass, "the luckiest frontiersman along the borderlands" having survived a severe mauling from a grizzly bear; he's then on a volunteer messenger trip with four other men to carry a message to William Ashley in St Louis; traveling by river, they are called to shore by what appear to be Pawnee Indians, but it turns out that these are Arikara acting friendly but intending to kill them to avenge their Chief Gray Eyes' death, Glass and his group make an escape but two of their guys are run down, killed and desecrated.
33) Now on to Andrew Henry and William Ashley and their beaver pelt partnership which really fell apart; Henry decides he's done, he wants to go back to his lead mine business; Ashley also loses the election for Missouri governor.
34) Also on the geopolitical implications of the American hunter/trapper mountain men abandoning the Rockies because of threats from Indian tribes; this left a chance for the British "to fill the vacuum they left behind" which was hugely important to political control of Oregon country; note that the Hudson's Bay Company and the Northwest Fur Company had merged and "was literally planting Union Jacks across the pathway that Lewis and Clark had marked for a future continental United States."
35) See also the 1818 agreement between the US and Great Britain to joint occupation of Oregon country for 10 years until negotiators would figure out where the international border would be. The US wanted the border to be the 49th parallel all the way to the Pacific; Britain wanted the 49th parallel to the Columbia River, meaning most of Washington state would end up in British hands. Interesting reference here to "The Great Game," a discussion of England's jockeying for global position against Russia, and England's paranoid fear that Russia would try to invade India [something literally and geographically impossible, see for example The Genesis of Russophobia in England.]
36) With this as background, this is where William Ashley saw a potential opportunity both to consolidate American control of this region but also make a lot of money pelting, the idea was to have some successful trapping seasons with the teams led by Jed Smith.
Chapter 13: Flathead Post
37) Jed Smith's small group of fur trappers "represented the first stirrings of a tentative U.S. occupation of the far northwest frontier that could weigh heavily on international border negotiations. And the British knew it." [Again, this is textbook mercantilism here: think of this economic battle as a land-based American version of England's East India Company or its South Sea Company, making tons of money while expanding effective English control and dominance all over the world.]
38) Some more context that the authors have to fill in for the reader: the authors have to back up and explain why there's much more violence towards trappers from the various Indian tribes when Jed Smith was out West, and it has to backtrack further to Donald McKenzie and then Finan McDonald, both working for trapping groups for the Hudson's Bay Company, and also engaging in hostile activity against Indians; also on those guys innovated the idea of hiring Indians and running a heavy head count trapping organization, mainly for defense reasons.
39) This huge backstory is to explain how it was that a group of Iroquois had a fateful encounter with the Shoshone Indians, and then Jed Smith stumbled into them in 1824. The thread here gets a bit complicated.
40) Interesting discussion here on how the Hudson's Bay Company does business at the important trading post at Flathead Post in Montana. How the company would employ wives and indigenous women to skin, clean and stretch beaver pelts, how the company would bring in pelts from native trappers, and then have a whole trade fair with hundreds of Indians every year. Also on the Hudson's Bay Company's plan to "overfur" the western region; this would both thwart the American trappers, but more importantly and keep them far away from their upper Northwest furring territory. We'll see more discussion of this in the next chapter.
Chapter 14: "A Sly, Cunning Yankey"
41) Discussion here of how the Hudson's Bay Company was basically the administrative agent of the British government: it had been granted a royal charter to handle administration of what would eventually be British Columbia (which was at the time called New Caledonia); again this is mercantilism! The country basically contracts out governance to the company and the company gets to keep the profits they earn in the region; their business strategy is basically also England's geopolitical strategy.
42) Again, the English/Hudson's Bay Company's idea here was to eliminate all the beaver pelts (and even kill the baby beavers) in the Montana region so that there would be a belt of beaver-barren territory across a huge expanse between this region and British Columbia; this would keep American trappers away from their truly rich fur territory in the North [see note 40 above].
43) See below for the flag of one of the all-time great enterprises from the mercantile era, now a nearly forgotten company that owns forgettable retail and fashion industry properties:
44) Jed Smith and his team briefly accompanied the Hudson's Bay group but then decided to split off, the two trapping groups played cat and mouse looking for trapping advantages.
Chapter 15: "Shetskeedee"
45) On publication of the (re)discovery of the South Pass across the Rockies; this gave rise to enthusiasm for pioneers, missionaries, farmers and miners heading west; the US sent infantry regiments through the region to secure treaties of "perpetual friendship" with the various tribes in the region before the pioneers came through.
46) On the legacy of the first trapper "Rendezvous" in 1825, when Ashley told his trappers that he would either strip trees and bark in order to leave a trail or leave cairns of rocks to indicate an assembly point for the group to meet up.
Chapter 16: Guns Along the Bear
47) Good example here of how the authors have a hard time with this complex history and how it lacks a clear thread when events overlap, need a backfilled explanation, etc.; here, the authors tell multiple nested side-stories in this chapter: they're talking the mountain men mapping out territory; then talking about some of the trappers who met up in Ogden's camp, other threads, it's a challenge to follow along here.
48) On the arrival of forty or so mountain Men approached Ogden's British/Canadian encampment; they were American trappers and they were attempting to intimidate the Canadian authorities; the two had a discussion about how it was up to the governments but who was allowed to be where, the irony was that all of them were technically on sovereign Mexican soil at the time below the 42nd parallel! The Americans also told the Canadian team's trapper employees that they were being taken advantage of, they offered them four or five times more per pelt, persuading them that they would get paid much more working for the Americans rather than under the borderline indentured servitude of the British/Canadian company. Many workers switched over to the American side and the Canadians ended up having to leave the region.
Chapter 17: "Randavouze Creek"
49) Now back to discussing the first mountain man "Rendezvous" [see the end of Chapter 15]; this was the brainchild of William Henry Ashley, which arose spontaneously in 1825 as various trapping parties met up at a creek mouth somewhere near Wyoming; it's not clear where, nothing was written about it, but this is where many of these original trappers met up again; Jed Smith saw Jim Clyman after his bear accident at a Rendezvous, also Smith and Thomas Fitzpatrick for the first time after a long period. Ashley comes up with the idea after collecting tremendous value in furs that he could do these "Randavouze" annually.
50) Brief discussion here on how a lot of the mountain men wanted to stay away from the "thralldom" of civilization: they didn't want to live under the constraints of "flatlander" life. The sure sounds like the old Holy Desert Fathers and Saint Antony, doesn't it? Civilization ejects certain people, and certain people eject themselves out of civilization.
51) Also the trapping business started to centralize, it wasn't worth having far-flung trading posts and stockades, they were too hard to defend; likewise the Hudson's Bay Company became too slow and not agile enough, thus Ashley's new "Rondezvous" method of paying mountain men much more for their furs and then gathering everything at a rendezvous point worked better. Thus Ashley's idea was to have this rendezvous point as an interface between civilization and the trapping industry. It would also be an extension of United States power over this geographical area. But Ashley needed a partner and he proposed the idea to Smith who enthusiastically accepted.
52) Ashley returns in triumph to St. Louis, also a nice contrast here of the trappers partying into "incoherence" while Jed Smith goes to Methodist services.
53) "A mere thirty months earlier, Smith had enlisted as one of the Henry-Ashley Company's rawest high-country recruits. Now he was the most traveled American west of the continent's great cordillera as well as a co-owner of the firm." He then leaves St. Louis in October of 1825 as head of a sixty-man company of trappers and engagés. "...it would be five long years before he again set foot in St. Louis." [It's amazing how much and how fast you can grow and develop under the right circumstances.]
Part III: The Odyssey
Chapter 18: Eastern Stirrings
54) On the mountain men who were destined to become high country legends: Jim Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick, John Henry Weber, Jim Clyman, as well as Jim Beckwourth and Robert Campbell who became close friends with Jed Smith.
55) Smith splits his trapper team into two groups: he himself went north to the Bear River; he sent a second group toward the Utah River (now called Weber River); that group lost all 80 of their horses to an Indian raid, but they track the Indians, who were from the Bannock tribe, and recaptured all their horses plus another forty additional ones. [Also amazing how your fortunes can wax and wane rapidly out in the bush.]
56) On the importance of the South Pass to the USA's claim on the West vs England or Mexico's.
Chapter 19:"A Country of Starvation"
57) On Harrison Rogers, who wrote for and kept a day book for Jed Smith.
58) Smith's team heads south, through desert land to the Utah, Arizona, Nevada border area, where they meet poor Paiute people scratching a living out of the soil. They find basically no furs, but Smith decides to try and make it to California across the Mojave desert.
59) Interesting footnote here about the 1826 Fredonian Rebellion where Haden Edwards attempted to get independence from Mexico for the Republic of Fredonia in East Texas; they were routed by the Mexican Army within weeks.
Chapter 20: Spanish Inquisition
60) Smith's team arrives in California, they are hosted at Mission San Gabriel, then he is more or less arrested by the governor-general Jose Maria de Encheandia and kept at San Diego; luckily a Boston captain, William Cunningham, was berthed at San Diego who vouched for Smith. Smith was freed but he had to return via the same way he came, via the Mojave Desert. Smith didn't go that way, instead he headed north through California's San Joaquin Valley.
61) Smith and his team struggle to find a pass across the Sierra Nevada mountains westward; they attempt to cross the Northern Nevada desert; one of the men, Robert Evans, gives up, but then Smith managed to find water in a cedar taproot and they go back and save him; the team then makes it to water and then to the Great Salt Lake.
62) "Over the course of twelve months Jedediah Smith had become the first European American to lead a party across the Mojave Desert, over the Sierra Nevada, and through North America's Great Basin. His subsequent reports of these extraordinary travels, brimming with detailed geographic, topographic, military, cultural, and political observations, were soon being pored over by America's fledgling military-industrial complex."
Chapter 22: Dueling Warpaths
63) Smith returns to to St. Louis, hardly anybody can believe he made it; he has a huge stack of pelts worth $23,000 in that era's dollars (probably 40-50x that in today's dollars); also Jim Clyman decides to retire from trapping; Smith decides to do another excursion across the Mojave Desert to retrieve his team members that he had to leave with General Echeandia.
64) When he returned and met with the Paiute Indians there was a trapping group that came through earlier who had killed some braves in the Mojave territory and burned some of the dwellings; the Paiute were looking for revenge. Nine of Smith's team were killed by a sudden attack as they tried to cross the Colorado River; they got attacked from the other side of the river too, but managed to kill two warriors and scare off everybody else. Finally, the team barely made it through the desert to the Cajon Pass to arrive at Southern California.
Chapter 23: Bloody Oregon
65) Conflict and suspicion with the Spanish government here on Smith's second trip through; they are seized and jailed in San Jose and then transferred to Monterey. Smith uses this time to update his journals. Once again American sea captains basically came to his rescue offering to purchase Smith's furs, and fund him to get out of Mexican territory. These captains didn't want to see a minor misunderstanding become an international incident which would then affect shipping.
66) Smith's team was planning to escape northbound but found themselves in territory where the indigenous people were more aggressive and more aware of white intruders, as well as better organized and more unpredictable: they would trade with the white man one day and then attack him the next. Also the terrain became very difficult when they got to the Cascades.
67) They keep failing to find any way through the cliffs of the Cascades. [This is analogous to a one-way function in cryptography, once you know the way you just follow the way, but finding the way for the first time is incredibly painstaking, and you can't get from one place to another at all until the way is found.]
68) One of the braves of the one of the tribes of the Umpqua Confederacy stole an axe; then Chad Smith's group insulted some of the young braves in getting it back, so to tribe followed them as they left the next day, Harrison Rogers and Thomas Virgin were both killed in a surprise attack.
Chapter 24: Fort Vancouver
69) This chapter jumps ahead and then has a flashback where it was assumed that everyone in Jed Smith's team had died, including Jed Smith himself, in the Umpqua Massacre. Reports went out from the Hudson Bay's Vancouver fort referring to "the late Jedediah Smith"; at this point Smith had developed kind of a heroic reputation for all of his exploits. Thus it was a huge shock shot when he walked through the fort Vancouver gate on August 10th 1828, very much alive.
70) Over the next four months Smith and a team of people from the Vancouver fort traveled around the region and recovered some of their stuff; also they were able to bury his teammates properly. But most importantly some Indians came to their camp at one point and returned the diaries of Jed Smith and Harrison Rogers, this was lucky in that it saved Jed Smith's notes and journals for posterity. [Shocking that we only know his exploits because of some earnest Native Americans.]
71) Next we move on to a discussion of the new manager of the Hudson's Bay Company and what he did to make their trapping business more competitive, as well as stop defections of trappers to the American side. Then some back and forth (and uncooperative) communications between George Simpson, who was Hudson Bay's regional governor here, and Jed Smith about storing pelts, paying for his mounts, exchanging for new mounts etc.
Chapter 25: "A Throne of Grace"
72) March 12th, 1829, the following spring: Chad Smith and Arthur Black begin a 500 mile trek to Montana from Fort Vancouver, they reached it without incident, astoundingly, and meet up with their teammates Jackson and Sublette.
73) Discussion here of the Battle at Pierre's Hole and other raids and conflicts with Indians throughout 1828; And then Jed Smith plans for a series of brief sketches of his travels that he wanted to send to Andrew Jackson and his Secretary of War John Eaton; the authors describe Jed Smith as "the human seedbed of Manifest Destiny."
74) Some quotes here from some very affecting letters that Smith wrote to his parents and to his brother, about returning from the mountains and coming home, how unworthy he was and how in need of prayer; also including some money to be forwarded to his brother to educate their younger brothers "at a good English Scool," [sic] etc. Quite beautiful. Also a letter to General William Clark in St. Louis on the conditions of the Fort at San Francisco and other Mexican positions in North America as well as context on the Hudson Bay company's properties [again, these guys were extensions of state power].
75) On Jed Smith likely recognizing the "trapping out" of much of the West and the Northwest as many more trappers came to the area; he was also wealthy beyond his dreams at this point; he also then received news that his mother had died at age 58, in 1830. Smith, Jackson and Sublette break up their partnership and transfer their provisions and supply contract with William Ashley to a group headed by Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jim Bridger, and Milton Sublette (William's brother), which would be named the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.
Chapter 26: The Last Trailhead
76) Smith returns to St Louis in 1830, directs his brother to buy a farm for residential retirement, then writes a long dispatch to Secretary of War Eaton on the ease of traveling via the South Pass, warning about British control of the Indians in The Oregon Territory, etc., and then lays plans for a journey to Santa Fe to engage in trapping and trade with the Mexican territories there; he leaves St. Louis in April 1831 with the combined party at 74 men and 20 mule-drawn wagons. They even brought along a 6lb artillery piece.
77) On the "Cimarron Cutoff": this is a shortcut on the Santa Fe Trail through eastern New Mexico that saves about a hundred miles, but it was waterless and extremely difficult to navigate: it was flat, usually windy, with sand shifting around, it was easy to get lost in the region, etc. Smith's group ran out of water here, Smith found a wet crater, ordered digging, and then rode off to explore some broken ground in the distance. He disappeared.
Chapter 27: "Where His Bones Are Bleaching"
78) A few weeks later the caravan, which had to keep going or they would die of thirst, spotted a Mexican comanchero holding Jed Smith's pistols and rifle. He told the story that Smith was spotted by Comanches and surrounded, killed at age 32.
79) "History, as Smith had lived it, was a complicated weave of plot lines that, by the time of his lonesome demise, were either careening away from their conventional narratives or coming to an end altogether." The authors then go on to describe Nat Turner's rebellion, the coming of the steam locomotive; as well as John James Audubon and Alexis de Toqueville, who both came to the United States at the same time of Smith's death.
Epilogue
80) Twenty years later, 1851, at the site of the Fort Laramie Treaty, a convocation to work out a peace deal with Native Americans to let white settlers through the region.
81) 1840: the last Rendezvous was held, as silk, imported by the British East India Company from Asia, starts to replace beaver fur as the hat material of choice across Europe. [Fashion is brutal.]
82) Also on the USA's defeat of Mexico in the 1848 War; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which relinquished all Mexican claims to Texas and ceded New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California, most of Arizona and Colorado as well as parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming territory--territory that was in aggregate nearly half as large as the existing USA.
83) Postscripts here on various figures from the story; on Hudson Bay's governor George Simpson who became very wealthy, retired to Montreal and then died of a stroke at age 68; Donald Mackenzie, who instigated the brigade-size trapping technique, died at 57 as a gentleman farmer in New York; John Colter never really made that much money trapping, he was a little early to the game; he then became a farmer in Missouri, John Henry Weber became wealthy but then was possibly swindled out of all of his assets and died by suicide at the age of 80; Etienne Provost, for whom the city of Provo, Utah was named (using the phoneticized English spelling) ended up getting really fat and died in St Louis at age 65.
84) On Jim Bridger (one more interesting backgrounder/postscript here): he fathered a bunch of children with a succession of Indian wives, then got caught up between the conflict between Mormons and Indians and was even found guilty in absentia in a secret Mormon hearing and a posse of Mormons was sent after him to Provo; he escaped, warned by friendly Indians. Then involved in the Mormon war, guiding federal troops in the region, later he died at 77, an unusually late age for a mountain man.
Vocab:
in spate: a river with more water in it and flowing faster than it usually does: "The stream was in full spate and we struggled to cross it"
tramontane: traveling to, situated on, or living on the other side of mountains
travois: an A-frame structure used to drag loads over land, most notably by the Plains Indians of North America
pemmican: a mixture of tallow, dried meat, and sometimes dried berries. A calorie-rich food, it can be used as a key component in prepared meals or eaten raw. Historically, it was an important part of indigenous cuisine in certain parts of North America and it is still prepared today
plew: a beaver skin, used as a standard unit of value in the fur trade
lagniappe: "a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase" (such as a 13th doughnut on purchase of a dozen), or more broadly, "something given or obtained gratuitously or by way of good measure."
jument: female horse (French), pack animal; beast of burden (English)
remuda: a herd of horses that have been saddle-broken, from which ranch hands choose their mounts for the day
endorheic: a body of water that never flows into another body of water, like a river, lake or ocean
roundelay: A poem or song having a line or phrase repeated at regular intervals; a dance in a circle
peripeteia: a sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, especially in reference to fictional narrative
calumet: a North American Indian peace pipe
coup de foudre: (French: lit "a strike of lightning") a sudden unforeseen event, in particular an instance of love at first sight
lithifying: to transform (a sediment or other material) into stone
hegira: an exodus or migration, refers to Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina in AD 622, marking the consolidation of the first Muslim community
acequia: an irrigation canal or ditch used to distribute and share water in communities
proleptic: a flashforward; "prolepsis" is a literary device that disrupts the order of events in a story by telling a future plot point earlier than it actually occurs
To Read:
***Francis Parkman: The Oregon Trail
George Parker Winship: The Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542
Stanley Vestal: Kit Carson: The Happy Warrior of the Old West
Walter Prescott Webb: The Great Plains
Don Berry: A Majority of Scoundrels
James P. Beckwourth: The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians
Maurice S. Sullivan: The Travels of Jedediah Smith
Dale Morgan: Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West
Media:
The Donner Party (PBS Documentary by Ric Burns)
Man in the Wilderness (1971 film starring Richard Harris)
The Revenant (2015 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio)