Just decades after our young nation’s founding, the call of the wild west echoed across America. On Our American Stories, we journey back to the early 1800s, when intrepid trailblazers known as Mountain Men ventured into a vast, untamed frontier. These legendary explorers, driven by a thirst for discovery, pushed the boundaries of the known world, mapping crucial routes for future generations. Among them, one figure stands as a giant: Jedediah Smith, the intrepid explorer who was the first to cross the Sierra Nevada and the first to come overland into California, blazing pathways that would ultimately pave the way for the Oregon Trail and the Gold Rush.
But this grand adventure was fraught with peril. The Western wilderness demanded extraordinary resilience, pitting these early American heroes against unforgiving landscapes and formidable challenges. From battling the elements to facing intense conflicts, like the harrowing Arikara battle, Jedediah Smith and his comrades exemplified courage and sheer determination. Their incredible stories of survival and exploration are vital chapters in our nation’s narrative, illustrating the spirit that fueled America’s westward expansion and forever shaped the map of the United States.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
By 1821, 24 U.S. states had been established. The population was something around 9.6 million. The country’s border expands to the Missouri River, and beyond that border lies a vast western territory of brutal wilderness shrouded in myth. Reconquering it requires extraordinary men. One of the greatest of these is Jedediah Smith.
He was the first to come overland into California.
He’s the first known person to cross the Sierra.
Nevada, the first man to recognize the significance of the South past.
Smith’s discoveries beyond the Missouri surpassed those of even Lewis and Clark. Here’s Jim Hardy, director of the Fur Trade Research Center.
Without men like Jededi Smith and particularly his trails, we wouldn’t have had an Oregon Trail. We wouldn’t have had a Gold Rush because the route to California and Oregon wouldn’t have been there yet.
of what’s out there.
And I think Jed was suffering from a little wanderlust.
I want to be the first to view a country on which the eyes of a white man have never gazed, and to follow the course of rivers that run through a new land.
And you’ve been listening to the story of Jedediah Smith, and it’s so interesting to hear from Buzz Aldrin, one of the great 20th-century explorers, talking about one of the greatest 19th-century explorers. When we come back, more of Jedediah Smith’s story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on communism is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Jedediah Smith as being told by Roger McGrath. Let’s pick up where we last left off.
The Ashley-Henry Expedition ascends the Missouri River in two keelboats during the spring of 1822 for 22 weeks, and then travels nearly 1,400 miles, covering some 5 to 20 miles a day. When spring arrives in 1823, the 24-year-old Jedediah Smith has spent his first winter trapping beaver at the Mussel Shell River in central Montana. But the pelts come with a price. The local Indians have stolen almost all of the mountain men’s horses. Because of this, Andrew Henry looked for someone to carry a message to William Ashley, asking her to buy horses from the Ourca Indians at their village on the Missouri River.
“I’ll go. Be dangerous traveling all by yourself.”
Here’s historian Mike Moore.
To me.
Jedediah is the epitome of a man’s man in the West. He’s mentally and physically tough. He’s brave. He doesn’t say, “I cannot do that.” He just says, “Let’s go.”
They soon reached the Arikara Indian village near present-day Mobridge, South Dakota. Ashley approaches the village cautiously with some 40 men to negotiate with Chief Gray Eyes Tobacco, who met Lewis and Clark in 1806 and earned a reputation as an iron-willed negotiator. “We need horses with many blankets, many other things to trade for.” Smith is left in commit and of the shore party, great positioned on the sandbar. Ashley manages to conclude a deal trading Kettle’s blankets, lives, and supplies of all kinds for horses. All seems flying. The Arikara delivered the horses to the sandbar, but before Ashley’s men can swim them to the opposite bank of the Missouri, a violent storm sweeps down upon them. The shore party now has to remain with the horses on the sandbar overnight. This gives the Arikara play. I have time to think about the situation. There are six or seven hundred Arikara warriors and a mirror 40 Ashley men down below on the sandbar. Why not annihilate them and capture the keelboats with all the cargo and weapons aboard? At the break of day on June 2, 1823, Smith and the others on the sandbar hear the crack of rifles, and lead ball began ripping into their position. Horses start toppling over, and men died behind them for cover. Within minutes, most of the horses and several of the men are dead.
The Arikara unleashed a fusillade of hundreds of flintlock guns. Arikara archers were also launching clouds of arrows as best they could with this massed firepower. These guys on the exposed sand barber in deep, deep trouble.
By the twos and threes, then died into the river and are swept downstream. Smith makes it into the river unscathed, and later is hauled the board a keelboat.
But as Jed’s leaving, he’s looking at a beach that’s strung with the bodies of a dozen or so of his comrades and all these dead horses they had just traded for. And there’s nothing that he can do.
But my thoughts I kept to myself, knowing that a few words from me would discourage my men.
Thirteen men are killed at the battle site, and two others later die of their wounds. The Arikara evidently suffer few casualties.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
The battle is one of the deadliest in the history of the Western fur trade. Amen survivors of the attack head downstream and reach Colonel Henry Leavenworth at Fort Atkinson, about 15 miles north at present-day Omaha, Nebraska.
Leavenworth organizes what one fair trader called the “Missouri Legion,” some 350 soldiers, another 75 or 80 mountain men and trappers, and then Sioux warriors who saw a great opportunity here to have Uncle Sam help destroy their inveterate enemies, the Arikara.
On August 9, 1823, six weeks after the Arikara battle, the mountain men are organized into two companies, and Jedediah Smith is made captain of one of the companies. When the force reaches the Arikara of villages, the Lakota Sioux waste no time and immediately begin pouring fire into the Arikara. Without any plan of attack, Jedediah Smith and Colonel Leavenworth’s forces have no choice but to join in. Fifty Arikara are dead, and Sioux managed to kill Chief Gray Eyes. The “Missouri Legion” suffers no losses. The Arikara signal they want to parlay. Arikara subsequently agreed to all of Colonel Leavenworth’s demands, and Leavenworth calls off further attack. The Lakota Sioux are outraged.
The Lakota people thought it was stupid and disgusting that the whites didn’t carry through this fight against the Arikara. That boosted the Lakota’s contempt for white soldiers in their power.
Jedediah Smith and the other mountain men are also outraged, knowing it is simply an Arikara ploy to gain time. The mountain men are right. That night, the Arikara slipped out of their village and disappeared. Smith heads west and spends the next three years leading trapping parties through the Rocky Mountains. It’s the beginning of expeditions that will learn him five historic firsts. The first of these is pioneering a trail through South Pass. Together with some Crow Indians, friend James Clyman and Tom Fitzpatrick, Smith establishes a trail through a 20-min-wide valley, the one opening through the Rockies. It is the door to Oregon in California. The route will be taken by pioneers on the Oregon Trail, a stagecoach, the Pony Express, and the Union Pacific Railroad. That fall, Jed and his crew blazed through grizzly country in present-day South Dakota. The grizzly bear is the most deadly frontier beast, up to 10 feet tall and 1,000 pounds, with claws 6 inches long. Grizzlies don’t fear anything on earth, including man.
The grizzly was the largest, most powerful animal in North America at the time. It had nothing above it in the food chain. It looked at everything as a potential source of food, and it stood up and towered over you. You could pump bullets into the thing, that it would still come at you. It was literally a monster.
Suddenly, to hear this thrashing in the underbrush nearby. Sure enough, pristly bear bursts out of the thickets, smashes into the line of march, and…
Jed is in the front, and he runs up into this clearing, and I think that Jed running drew that bear to him. Bear attacks.
The bear immediately grabbed him in a vicious and deadly bear hug and seized Jedediah’s head in his jaws.
And as he pulls his head away, pulls his jaws off, he just rips the scalp.
And you’ve been listening to Roger McGrath, author of Gunfighters, Howiemen and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier, the U.S. Marine and former history professor at UCLA, a regular contributor here tell the story of Jedediah Smith, and what a story! It’s unimaginable what these men did. These Mountain Men, Lewis and Clark, forged the path, but these guys created the pathways, and many and multiple ones, including the Oregon Trail — Jedediah Smith responsible for that — and the South Pass and what they had to deal with in the interim: warring Indian tribes, nature itself, storms; and yet they prevailed. The ambition, by the way, is such a big part of this, and Jedediah Smith had it in spades. He wanted to do good. He also had that ambition that fuels so much of the move west, and that is money and freedom. And when we come back, more of Jedediah Smith’s story here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Jedediah Smith. Telling that story is Roger McGrath. Let’s pick up where Roger last left off.
There laid Jedediah in a bloody heat, his manner panic-stricken, and there’s no surgeons there. They don’t know what the heck to do, and nobody wants to lay their hands on this guy’s mangled face.
“You gotta sit around and watch me bleed to death?”
“What’s best to do?”
“Well, give me a pike.”
“Somebody get some water!”
And the only one who’s not panicking is Jedediah Smith, and he’s saying, “All right, guys, you need to work on me here.”
Jedediah’s friend James Clyman describes the incredible ordeal in his journal.
“Get some water,” Captain said. “Send one or two men for water. If you have a needle in thread, get it out and sew up my wounds around my head, to Clyman.”
“You got a needle and thread? You gotta get it out now.”
“I got no thread; got some fine sinew.”
“It’ll have to do. You’re gonna have to work on me right here.”
Oh.
“I got a pair of scissors and cut off his hair, and then began my first job of dressing wounds. Upon examination, the bear had taken nearly all his head in his capacious mouth and torn his face from his left eye to his right ear, and laid the skull bare near the crown of his head.”
“You sew it up tight, Clyman, all I need to bleed to death.”
Right here.
“One of his ears was torn from his head out to the outer rim. After stitching all the other wounds, and the best way I was capable, the ear was last. Then I put in my needle, stitching it through and through, over and over, you know, laying the parts together as nice as I could.”
“I got it.”
Miraculously, a stitching job is successful. Although Smith is left with a frightful scar, he grows his hair long and styles it with a distinct combover to hide the vivid red scar, missing eyebrow, and displaced ear. It becomes his signature look. Just 10 days after the attack, Jed Smith is back on his horse and heads west to high Beaver Country, 600 miles away. Smith’s trapping skills earn him the record for beaver pelts taken in one season. He arrives at the annual rendezvous with 668 pelts, which sell for $6 apiece, earning him some $4,000. That’s more than $400,000 in today’s money. Smith is so successful as a mountain man that in 1826, at 27 years of age and five years of experience already as a trapper, he organizes his own fur trading company and brings in David Jackson and William Sublette as partners. For the next five years, Smith’s company dominates the American fur trade. The 1826 Mountain Man rendezvous is held at the Great Salt Lake in Utah. When it concludes, Smith assembles a party of 20 men, having talked them into an audacious plan to blaze a trail to the Mexican province of California. Now the map behind the Great Salt Lake is a blank. The Indians are unable to help. They can’t answer Smith’s questions about this unm…
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