Jedediah Smith arrived in St. Louis with Ashley on October 4,1825. Just twenty-six days later he was off for the Rockies at the head of a party of 70 men, with 160 horses and mules and an outfit valued at $20,000.1 No four weeks of his life were ever so filled with concentrated activity, and he must have found in them the kind of intoxication lesser members of Ashley’s company were content to have served up to them out of the cellar of LeBarras’ Hotel. Gunsmiths, blacksmiths, saddlers and horse and mule dealers filled Jedediah’s days while the senior partner in the new firm dickered for the thousand and one articles they had engaged to deliver in the mountains.
Beyond most men of his time, William H. Ashley had a flair for public relations. Grant him also administrative genius, extraordinary energy, willingness to break with tradition, moral stamina and physical courage. But wish that occasionally the limelight had been permitted to play on his associates. No notice of Ashley’s activities this fall even intimates that he had taken a new partner. Jedediah’s departure from St. Louis October 30 the Missouri Republican remarked only to say:
We understand (hat a party of men in the employ of Gen. Ashley, started from this place for the Rocky Mountains on yesterday. The party consists of about 70 men. They go by land, and are furnished with mules and horses to transport the goods and articles necessary for the expedition.
Modest and reserved, Jedediah himself had little more to say about this notable development in his life. A new-found letter, written a year later, says merely that “having left St. Louis, in the state of Missouri, on the first of N°. 1825 as a partner of Gen Wm H Ashley’s in the Fur Trade and Trapping Business—with 60 men & an equipment for prosecuting our business Wt of the Rocky Mount we arrived at the place of destination in June.”2 All the same, the memory of those weeks in St. Louis must have stayed with him to the end of his life, the furious round of activity with Ashley, the letters written home in moments stolen from sleep, the rare privilege of worshiping on Sundays in the old courthouse with his fellow Methodists, the brilliant social display attendant on the General’s marriage October 26 to Miss Eliza Christy. Perhaps above all, the circumstance of his call on General Clark to procure his license. Although Ashley’s license to trade west of the mountains still had two years to run and the partners did not bother to take out a new one, Jedediah had to obtain an authorization to enter the Indian country. He had left St. Louis in the spring of 1822 as one of the greenest of Ashley’s raw recruits, but he had come back possessed of a fund of information and a far-ranging experience to which even William Clark could listen with profit. Jedediah’s composed manner belied his torn face; he had made himself master of a strange, cruel, exalting world, and men respected him.
Almost nothing is known about Jedediah’s return trip to the Rockies. It is probable that he was the first to travel purposefully the Oregon Trail west from the mouth of the Kaw. Ashley the previous year had gone up the left bank of the Missouri, crossed the Missouri at Fort Atkinson and moved on west by what became the Mormon Trail, but the southern route was shorter and Jedediah, like all mountain men, never went the long way round if he could help it. The cutoff would have led him up the Kaw River some miles on the Santa Fe road, then off northwest to strike the Platte near the head of Grand Island. That Jedediah traveled by this route is mainly inference: There is no mention of his party’s having visited Fort Atkinson; and the trail was used a year later by an express which came down from the mountains.
Once Jedediah reached the Platte, his travels can be described with more confidence, though all we have to go on are some sketchy indications of an itinerary on David Burr’s map of 1839, which was based on Jedediah’s, and some even more sketchy remarks in Jim Beckwourth’s book. Our gaudy liar is busy spinning an extravaganza, in which he figures as a hero who for $1,000 had agreed to carry an express from Ashley to his parties in the mountains—(this through a country “considered dangerous even for an army”)—and it is only reluctantly that Jim takes his humble place as one among Jedediah’s seventy men. In fact, all Beckwourth is willing to grant us is that he traveled up the north branch of the Platte and crossed over to Green River, striking it higher up than previously. He adds that after crossing the Green he held his course to “the head of Salt River,” and there falling in with an Ashley party, made his way to Cache Valley, the place of rendezvous for the trappers who had remained in the mountains.3
The Burr map is somewhat contradictory, but it can be interpreted to say that after reaching the upper Green River Valley, Jedediah turned northwest to the Hoback River, followed this stream down into lower Jackson Hole, crossed the Tetons to Henrys Fork, went down that stream and the Snake to the mouth of Salt River, ascended the Salt to its head, descended Smiths Fork to the Bear, and followed that river to Cache Valley. If this itinerary properly interprets the Burr map, it was a tremendous, even incredible journey to make in late fall.
Jedediah had now mastered the technique of moving large parties to and from the mountains. A clear description Ashley wrote in 1829 of how it was done would represent some of the fruits of Jedediah’s experience. No officer in the United States Army then possessed this kind of practical knowledge.
In the organization of a party of, say from 60 to 80 men, four of the most confidential and experienced of the number are selected to aid in the command; the rest are divided in messes of eight or ten. A suitable man is also appointed at the head of each mess, whose duty it is to make known the wants of his mess, receive supplies for them, make distributions, watch over their conduct, enforce order, &c. &c.
The party thus organised, each man receives the horse and mules alloted to him, their equipage, and the packs which his mules are to carry; every article so disposed of is entered in a book kept for that purpose. When the party reaches the Indian country, great order and vigilance in the discharge of their duty are required of every man. A variety of circumstances confines our march very often to the borders of large water courses; when that is the case, it is found convenient and safe, when the ground will admit, to locate our camps (which are generally laid off in a square) so as to make the river form one line, and include as much ground in it as may be sufficient for the whole number of horses, allowing for each a range of thirty feet in diameter. On the arrival of the party at their camping ground, the position of each mess is pointed out, where their packs, saddles, &c. are taken off, and with them a breastwork immediately put up, to cover them from a night attack by Indians: the horses are then watered and delivered to the horse guard, who keep them on the best grass outside and near the encampment, where they graze until sunset; then each man brings his horses within the limits of the camp, exchanges the light halter for the other more substantial, sets his stakes, which are placed at the distance of thirty feet from each other, and secures his horses to them. This range of 30 feet, in addition to the grass the horse has collected outside the camp, will be all sufficient for him during the night. After these regulations, the proceedings of the night are pretty much the same as are practised in military camps [except that sentries ordinarily did not move about: a moving figure at night presented too good a target]. At day light (when in dangerous parts of the country) two or more men are mounted on horseback, and sent to examine ravines, woods, hills, and other places within striking distance of the camp, where Indians might secrete themselves, before the men are allowed to leave their breastworks to make the necessary morning arrangements before marching. When these spies report favorably, the horses are then taken outside the camp, delivered to the horse guard, and allowed to graze until the party has breakfasted, and are ready for saddling. In the line of march, each mess march together, and take their choice of positions in the line according to their activity in making themselves ready to move, viz: the mess first ready to march moves up in the rear of an officer who marches in the front of the party, and takes choice of a position in the line, and so they all proceed until the Kne is formed; and in that way they march the whole of that day. Spies are sent several miles ahead, to examine the country in the vicinity of the route; and others are kept at the distance of a half mile or more from the party, as the situation of the ground seems to require, in front, rear, and on the flanks. In making discoveries of Indians, they communicate the same by a signal or otherwise to the commanding officer with the party, who makes his arrangements accordingly.4
Instances are almost unknown of men in such parties being cut down by Indians. The hazard came after the companies reached the mountains and split into small parties for trapping. Horses might be run off; Ashley himself had lost horses to the Crows and the Blackfeet in the spring and summer of 1825, but the mountain men had learned from that experience, and from this time one hears little about the loss of horses on the march.
Few among Jedediah’s company can be named. The probability is that Robert Campbell made one of the party, perhaps as Jedediah’s clerk. Campbell may have gone to the mountains with Ashley the previous year, and it is just possible that he and Jedediah became good friends while traveling down from rendezvous. But it is more likely their acquaintance dates from this fall; no other opportunity ever offered for them to become such fast friends that in drawing up his will Jedediah named Campbell his executor; the closeness of the bond between them is touchingly reflected in one of Jedediah’s letters of 1830. The young Irishman was soon to become leader of a brigade in his own right; in the ‘30s, he was associated with William L. Sublette in one of the fur trade’s best-known partnerships; still later he became one of the most respected and wealthy of St. Louis merchants. In each period he left his impress on the West. Gay, intelligent, forthright, Robert Campbell had the power to warm men’s hearts; everybody Meed him, including the men who called him “booshway.”5
Whatever is doubtful about Jedediah’s return west, there is no question that he ended up in Cache Valley. Jim Beckwourth and a mountain man no less celebrated, Louis Vasquez, agree on this. Vasquez goes on to say that the winter became so severe, the snow falling to a depth of eight feet, that the trappers had to move down into the valley of the Great Salt Lake, which they found free from snow and well filled with buffalo; they divided into two camps, “one party, under Weber, wintering on the river which now bears his name; the other party wintering on Bear river, near its mouth.”6 This latter encampment probably was Jedediah’s.
One dark and stormy night a considerable number of horses, eighty by Jim Beckwourth’s accounting, were run off by the Indians; Jim says that the thieves were Bannocks, and that a party of forty men, including himself, Fitzpatrick and Jim Bridger, followed on foot, not only recovering their own animals but making prize of a number belonging to the Indians. On the other hand, Peter Skene Ogden intimated in the spring of 1826 that the thieves, Snakes by his understanding, made good their escape.7
Beckwourth says that on his return from the chase after the stolen horses he found “an encampment of Snake Indians, to the number of six hundred lodges, comprising about two thousand five hundred warriors,” which entirely surrounded the American camp. Reduce these figures by two thirds, a standard discount for Jim’s numbers, and they would be about right. These Snakes were perfectly friendly, Jim adds, and the whites apprehended no danger from their proximity. Peter Skene Ogden met up with these Snakes March 24, a month after the winter encampment broke up; he then estimated their number at two hundred lodges and observed, “it appears these fellows have spent their winter with the Americans and from their own accounts have made peace with them this I am inclin’d to belive is the case as they have received an American Flag and appear pleased and contented with the reception they have received from them.” The Snakes told him that the American camp consisted of twenty-five tents—perhaps a hundred trappers.8
With the opening of the spring hunt, the Americans split into at least three and probably four or more detachments. Ogden met one of these parties on the Snake April 9; it consisted of twenty-eight men, including several of his deserters of the previous year. This company went north to the Flathead country, and in August John Work, conducting the Hudson’s Bay Company’s summer trade with the Flatheads, listened to tales of Ashley’s intention to establish a post in the Big Hole Prairie and of the imminent ousting of the Hudson’s Bay Company from the Columbia by men coming on American ships. A principal figure in this party, which seems not to have made it back to rendezvous in 1826, was John Grey.9
Another company was that with which Jim Beckwourth trapped; Jim says that it was led by Fitzpatrick.10 Beckwourth and his fellows trapped the Bear and the adjacent tributaries of the Snake, but what is chiefly remembered of their adventures is the circumstance that gave name to Cache Valley—up to this time it had been called Willow Valley. Jim says that at the opening of spring, whites and Indians moved back to Cache Valley, and soon after their arrival the whites commenced digging caches to deposit seventy-five packs of beaver, the fruits of their fall hunt. While the cache was being dug, the earth caved in, killing a trapper whom Jedediah later remembered as one Marshall. His companions, Warren Ferris relates, “believed him to have been instantly killed, knew him to be well buried, and the cache destroyed, and therefore left him ‘Unknelled, uncoffined, ne’er to rise, Till Gabriel’s trumpet shakes the skies,’ and accompanied their object elsewhere.” Trust Jim Beckwourth to figure large in the sequel. His was the privilege of taking for servant the widow of the man killed in the bank. “She was of light complexion, smart, trim and active, and never tired in her efforts to please me, she seeming to think that she belonged to me for the remainder of her life.” Jim, whose mother was a slave, had never had a servant before, and he found her of great service “in keeping my clothes in repair, making my bed, and taking care of my weapons.”11
When Jedediah broke up his winter camp at the mouth of the Bear, he plunged straight into the unknown, the country north and west of Great Salt Lake.
At rendezvous the previous summer Jedediah and Ashley had threshed out with the Hudson’s Bay Company deserters what was known about this region. Ashley had been disposed to think that the Bear, the Weber, the Provo and the “Grand Lake” itself were sources of the Multnomah. The British trappers had corrected him; there was a great deal they did not know about “the Spanish waters,” as they called the country lying south of the Snake, but they did know from firsthand observation the high degree of fantasy that had got into William Clark’s conception of the Willamette, the river he called Multnomah. Far from rising in the Rockies, it had its sources in the Cascades, only a few hundred miles from its mouth.12
Ashley then guessed that the lake was the Timpanogos, but that idea he discarded; Great Salt Lake became for him the Buenaventura. All the maps showed a river draining from that lake into the Pacific, and Ashley understood the Indians to confirm this information, “at the extreme west end of this lake, a large river flows out, and runs in a westwardly direction.”13 (He was hearing about the Humboldt, which rises in the Independence and Ruby Mountains 150 miles west of Great Salt Lake and manages to flow most of the way across Nevada before expiring in the Humboldt Sink.) The Hudson’s Bay Company’s George Simpson, who had no-belief in the Buenaventura but did have information about the Umpqua and had heard rumors of a lake in which it rose, had contemplated that Ogden should trap this enticing river, but Ogden had been prevented even from trying. It was left to Jedediah Smith to find out what the mass of rumor boiled down to.
This narrative has evaded coming to grips with the complicated question of when and by whom Great Salt Lake was discovered, but the principal factors are now all in and it is time to meet the question head on. On August 28, 1834, William Marshall Anderson asked some questions around a mountain camp fire, and wrote in his diary that “the great salt lake at the termination of Bear river, which has been claimed to be discovered by Genl. Ashley & which in the U. S. bears his name, I am informed by good authority has never been seen by him. . . . Tis believed the credit, if there is any in the accidental discovery of a place is due to Weaver or Provost.”14
Later Anderson became an impassioned advocate of Provost and declared extravagantly that Provost had reached, trapped on, and “circumambulated” the inland sea as early as 1820, so that to him alone belonged the credit of having discovered and made known its existence.15 There is little doubt that Provost laid eyes on the Great Salt Lake as early as the fall of 1824, but the priority of discovery has been fantastically complicated through the nearly simultaneous approach to the lake of many different parties. For Weber’s party the discoverer was Jim Bridger; the fact is well attested though there is some doubt whether the event occurred in the late fall of 1824 or the early spring of 1825. Bridger’s own statement, as elicited by Robert Campbell in the spring of 1857, was that
a party of beaver trappers who had ascended the Missouri with Henry and Ashley, found themselves in pursuit of their occupation on Bear river, in Cache (or Willow) valley, where they wintered in the winter of 1824 and 1825; and in descending the course which Bear river ran, a bet was made between two of the party, and James Bridger was selected to follow the course of the river and determine the bet. This took him to where the river passes through the mountains, and there he discovered the Great Salt lake. He went to its margin and tasted the water, and on his return reported his discovery. The fact of the water being salt induced the belief that it was an arm of the Pacific ocean. . . ,16
Weber’s party had gone on down into the valley of the Great Salt Lake before Peter Skene Ogden’s brigade reached Cache Valley in May 1825. The first intimation of the existence of the great lake in the British journals is a nutation by Ogden May 5; on seeing thousands of small gulls flying about Cache Valley, he reasoned that near at hand was a large body of water “at present unknown to us all.” A week later the interpreter Charles McKay climbed the mountains overlooking the camp and came back to report a “large lake into which Bear River falls,” twelve miles to the southwest. Ogden was more interested in beaver than in geographical discovery, and he continued his march south through the chain of valleys which lie east of the valley of the lake. Kittson several times refers to the existence beyond the range to the west of “the Large Bear Lake,” but it was not until May 22, when the brigade had reached its farthest south in the canyon of the Weber, that the new-found lake made an impression on Ogden’s journal:
From two of our trappers who Came in [I learned] they had Seen a large lake equal in Size Winipeg & that Bear River & New River [a name Ogden applied indiscriminately to the Weber and the Ogden] discharge their Waters in the Lake so the point is now ascertained that Bear River has nothing to do with the Spanish River from what they could observe the Lake runs due west, if so & as the Natives inform there is a large river at the west end this must be the Umqua.
Ogden was soon in flight back to the Snake, and it was three and a half years before he himself laid eyes on this singular mountain sea.17
No claim of prime discovery can be made for Jedediah Smith, though in following Weber’s party down into the great valley he had the experience of seeing title vast lake open out before him, burnished by sun and space. From that time Jedediah began to have a proprietary feeling about the Great Salt Lake, and by the summer of 1827 he was speaking of it as his home of the wilderness.
The search Jedediah launched for the river which flowed from Great Salt Lake to the sea apparently led directly to the first exploration of the lake by water. It has long been known that a party of four trappers paddled around the lake in the spring of 1826, but it is now possible to see that exploit in new perspective.
On breaking up his winter camp, probably in late February 1826, Jedediah took his party around the head of Bear River Bay and on across the Promontory Mountains, a route later adopted for the Pacific Railroad. West of the summit where the Golden Spike was eventually driven, the lake opened to view again, the wide reaches of Spring Bay veiled at this season with gray wraiths of fog. The country here had a savage monotony, for a wintry dryness rested on the land, the sagebrush gray and contorted, the scattered dark junipers unrelated to anything, not even one another. Clouds of waterfowl wheeled overhead, and as the party came down to the shore they found numerous springs pouring a desperate abundance into the lake. Many of these were brackish, some as salt as the lake itself. Coming finally to the northwest corner of the lake, where beyond all doubt the shore line turned south, Jedediah was confronted with the necessity of continuing his reconnaissance by water.
There is no way of determining how far Jedediah and his men attempted to investigate the west shore of the lake on horses. Probably not very far, for though an outsize salt lake might be impressive as a spectacle, it was hard to live with. The water was eight times as salty as the ocean, totally undrinkable, and the scattered, salt-resistant greenery that fought for life along the storm line was fare the horses and mules would not touch. It was the part of wisdom to detail four men to build a bullboat, the reliable skin canoe which had proved its worth all over the West; and Jedediah would have been more attracted by this alternative if (as one of the accounts suggests) he was short of horses.
Four men, it may be assumed, were detached for the reconnaissance. It took them twenty-four days, and a very thirsty time they had of it before they reached the fresh-water springs at the south shore of the lake. When they turned up at the rendezvous in Cache Valley, it was an odd report they made; they had not exactly ascertained the outlet of the lake, but they had passed a place where they supposed it to be. The explorers had evidently observed the opening along the western shore line through which the lake during late Pleistocene times had retreated from the Salt Desert. On various occasions Jim Clyman, Louis Vasquez and Black Harris claimed to have floated around the lake, and the same claim was made for Henry G. Fraeb, so it may be that these were the four men who “coasted the lake.”18
When he parted from his seafarers, Jedediah may have expected to meet them at some point on the Buenaventura farther west, though it must have troubled him to reflect that a river flowing from so salty a body of water must be salt also—and that would mean no beaver. Jedediah’s narrative of his exploration northwest of Great Salt Lake is another of the lost documents of American history, and indeed it is barely established that he made such a journey. The slim record is composed of a few notations in the journal of Peter Skene Ogden and an itinerary depicted on the Burr map.
It would appear that Jedediah got into the dry, hungry country which rims the smoking-white Salt Desert, south of the later trails by which immigrants traveled to California. As he continued west into the arid reaches of eastern Nevada, he found no beaver, very little game and not much water. In desperation he turned north toward the Snake, coming on Salmon Falls Creek and going down it to the great South Branch. So Ogden understood, for on May 21, at Salmon Falls Creek, he heard from the Snakes “that about a month since a party of Americans about 30 in number had descended this Stream on their return from Salt Lake without Beaver.” And again, on June 2, when Ogden had descended the Snake to the Bruneau, he noted the probability that a fur country existed to the south, discharging its streams into the Gulf of California:
it appears from the accounts we have again received from the Indians here, the Americans have made an attempt to reach it but starvation had Driven them back and they had crossed over from the entrance of Bruneau’s River to the North side of the South Branch . . . when last seen they were destitute of both [beaver and game] and were Killing their Horses.19
So much for the tales of a majestic river flowing to the sea. Jedediah must have been glad to reach the Snake, a country sufficiently desolate, but offering at least the prospect of something to eat. In fact, after so unpromising a beginning, his spring hunt must suddenly have come alive. The Burr map enables us to follow its further course in at least rough approximation: Jedediah crossed the Snake below Lower Salmon Falls, struck north to the Boise, then again north to the Payette, and trapped that river clear to its source in Payette Lake (“Ward’s Lake,” the map names it, perhaps for a member of Jedediah’s party). After retracing their steps as far as the Boise, the Americans made their way east to the Malade (present Big Wood), and after trapping some distance up that river, crossed over to the sources of the Big Lost, which brought them back down to the lava plain Jedediah had crossed and recrossed in 1824-1825. All of these streams had been trapped by Alexander Ross in the summer of 1824, but the country should have recovered somewhat, and it seems likely that Jedediah had a fruitful hunt. By what course he found his way back to Cache Valley is obscure, but the Burr map might indicate that he moved east to Henrys Fork, on around the Tetons to Jackson Hole, down the Snake and back to the Bear by way of Salt River, the Blackfoot or the Portneuf.
Cache Valley was the place appointed for the second great summer rendezvous. Accounts of the American fur trade have usually placed this rendezvous in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, but it is apparent that Cache Valley was the locale, the vicinity of present Hyrum.20 From hundreds of miles in all directions the mountain men converged on this valley, and Ashley himself was present, having come up from St. Louis with a new consignment of goods.
The General had set out from St. Louis March 8 with twenty-five men, his departure evoking the usual huzzas from the press: “Such enterprise richly merits, and we hope will meet with, ample success.”21 Before his departure Ashley had given out to the newspapers some interesting ideas about the significance of what he and his men were learning of the West, and they are worth quoting; they have the ring of the future about them:
Heretofore, those great barriers of nature, the Rocky Mountains, have been called up in judgment against the practicability of establishing a communication between this point and the Pacific Ocean. But the Great Author of nature, in His wisdom has prepared, and individual enterprize discovered, that so “broad and easy is the way” that thousands may travel it in safety, without meeting with any obstruction deserving the name of a MOUNTAIN.
The route proposed, after leaving St Louis and passing generally on the north side of the Missouri river, strikes the river Platte a short distance above its junction with the Missouri; then pursues the waters of the Platte to their sources, and in continuation, crosses the head waters of what Gen. Ashley believes to be, the Rio Colorado of the West, and strikes for the first time, a ridge, or single connecting chain of mountains running from north to south [the Bear River Divide]. This, however, presents no difficulty, as a wide gap is found, apparently prepared for the purpose of a passage. After passing this gap, the route proposed, falls directly on a river, called by Gen. Ashley, the Buenaventura, and runs with that river to the Pacific Ocean.
The face of the country, in the general, is a continuation of high, rugged, and barren mountains; the summits of which, are either timbered with pine, quaking-asp, or cedar; or, in fact, almost entirely destitute of vegetation. Other parts are hilly and undulating; and the valleys and table lands, (except on the borders of water courses, which are more or less timbered with cotton-wood and willows,) are destitute of wood; but this indispensable article is substituted by an herb, called by the hunters, wild sage: which grows from one to five feet high, and is found in great abundance, in most parts of the country.
Soil.—The sterility of the country, generally, is almost incredible. That part of it, however, bounded by the three principle ranges of mountains, and watered by the sources of the supposed Buenaventura is less sterile; yet the proportion of arable land even within those limits, is comparatively small; and no district of the country visited by Gen. Ashley, or of which he obtained satisfactory information, offers inducements to civilized people, sufficient to justify an expectation of permanent settlements. . .22
There is no detailed narrative of Ashley’s journey this spring, only the briefest of summaries printed in the Missouri Herald and St. Louis Advertiser after his return home: “He went to the station of the party which he had left beyond the mountains when he came in a year ago, and thence descended a river, believed to be the Buenaventura, about one hundred and fifty miles to the Great Lake.” This would indicate that from Henrys Fork, Ashley crossed over to the Bear and then followed the path his men had beaten out the past two years, down the circuitous course of the Bear to Cache Valley.
As many as a hundred men may have been present at rendezvous, though less than half were in Ashley’s immediate service. Free trappers were on hand in numbers, including, it would seem, Etienne Provost. In a life of boundless obscurity, nothing is more obscure than how and why Provost’s partnership with LeClerc ended in ruin. It may be that LeClerc the previous fall had gone down to the States via Taos and the Santa Fe Trail, and that he was killed by Indians en route.23 If this happened, and if Provost had depended on him to bring a new outfit to the mountains, the game was up. All that is certainly known is that Provost went back to the States this fall and made proposals to the Chouteaus to be taken into their service, proposals that were finally accepted.
Captain Weber, too, may have left the mountains this fall, though the tradition preserved in his family was that he came back from the Rockies in 1827. The way the family remembered his story was that Weber made about $20,000 by hunting, trapping and trading in the Rockies, “but was beaten out of what was then a fortune by dishonest partners. He never made or saved much wealth afterwards and died poor.” After his return to St. Louis the Captain moved to Galena, Illinois, in the spring of 1832, and twelve years later across the Mississippi to Bellevue, Iowa. It is said that he became a victim of neuralgia. “Life became a burden to him and he . . . deliberately committed suicide in 1859 by cutting his throat, bleeding to death in a few minutes.”24 Weber’s name was all but lost from the record of the West, preserved solely in the name of the Weber River, and only now is his role in the mountains coming to be understood.
The great event of the summer was Ashley’s selling out to a new firm, Smith, Jackson & Sublette. Ashley’s association of Jedediah with himself in the firm Ashley & Smith led logically to this development, and Jedediah’s partnership with Ashley furnished both the funds and the practical experience which made possible the organization of the new firm. Smith, Jackson & Sublette became so famous a concern as to obscure the nine-months partnership of Ashley & Smith which paved the way to it, but Jedediah became senior partner in the new firm for sufficient reasons.
William L. Subletted entrance into the new partnership is understandable enough; he had been with Jedediah constantly from 1823 to 1825, and this past winter had emerged as a booshway in his own right.25 But it is difficult to make much of David E. Jackson. Down to the moment he signed the instrument of partnership with Smith and Sublette, scarcely his existence can be demonstrated. He is said to have been with Jedediah on the beach before the Ree towns in 1823, and he has been misidenti-fied as the George C. Jackson who was one of Ashley’s officers in Leavenworth’s campaign against the Rees.26 As far as the American trappers were concerned, he was the discoverer of Jackson Hole, but no one knows when he first got into that locality. Possibly he was one of the twenty-five men who in the summer of 1825 escorted Ashley to the Big Horn, and afterward turned back across the divide to make the discovery for which he will be longest remembered.
The actual instrument by which Ashley was bought out has not been preserved, but a letter the General wrote the Chouteaus later in the fall sets forth the essentials. On leaving the mountains, Ashley explained, he
placed under the direction of three young men, Messrs. Smith, Jackson and Sublett, my remaining stock of merchandise, amounting altogether, to about sixteen thousand dollars, which (after deducting therefrom five thousand dollars which I paid Mr. Smith on a dissolution of Partnership with him) they promise to pay me in Beaver fur delivered in that country at three dollars pr. pound or I am to receive the fur, transport the same to St Louis and have it disposed of on their account, deducting from the amount of sale one dollar twelve & half cents per pound for transportation, and place the net proceeds to their credit in discharge of the debt aforesaid. I have also transfered to the sd Smith, Jackson and Sublett, the services of a number of men employed by me as hunters, whose time of service will expire in July next [there were forty-two of these in all, engaged to Ashley & Smith]. . . . They bound themselves to deliver me all the beaver furs they may collect from the time I left them, until the first of July next . . . any amount which may appear from the proceeds of the fur after paying for the goods already delivered and any ballance which may be due the men transferred as aforesaid, is to be appropriated towards the payment of the goods to be delivered in July next, and any ballance of that debt which may remain after that appropriation, is to be paid on or before the first of July 1828.27
Ashley had made money enough the year before to clear his debts, and he had on hand another 123 packs of beaver, sufficient to provide him with a comfortable fortune if he got them down to the States. The arrangement he described, and another we shall describe, involved only a limited liability and would permit him to remain in Missouri and cultivate his temporarily arrested career in politics.
One document that has survived from these negotiations, the earliest known instrument bearing Jedediah Smith’s signature, is an agreement between Ashley and the new partners concerning goods to be brought to the mountains next year. Entered into “this 18th day of July 1826,” its most interesting feature follows on an itemizing of the merchandise:
. . . which merchandise is to be by said Ashley or his agent delivered to said Smith Jackson & Sublett or to their agent at or near the west end of the little lake of Bear river a watter of the pacific ocean on or before the first day of July 1827 without some unavoidable occurrence should prevent, but as it is uncertain whether the situation of said Smith Jackson & Subletts business will Justify the proposed purchase of Merchandise as aforesaid it is understood and agreed [that the new partners] shall send an Express to said Ashley to reach him in St Louis on or before the first day of March next, with orders to fo[r]ward the merchandise as aforesaid, and on its arrival at its place of destination, that they the said Smith Jackson & Sublett will pay him the said Ashley the amount for Merchandise sold them on this day for which the said Ashley holds their notes payable the first day of July 1827 for, and it is further understood that the amount of merchandise to be delivered as aforesaid on or before the first of July 1827 shall not be less than Seven Thousand dollars nor more than fifteen thousand. . . .
and it is understood and agreed between the two said parties that so long as the said Ashley continues to furnish said Smith Jackson & Sublett with Merchandise as aforesaid That he will furnish no other company or Individual with Merchandise other than those who may be in his immediate service28
Ashley returned to St. Louis the last week of September to the usual spate of compliments from the papers: “We sincerely rejoice that the efforts of this worthy and enterprising individual have been again crowned with success.”29 A more reflective piece was published November 8 in the Missouri Herald and St. Louis Advertiser. The editor of that paper was Charles Keemle, who had given up the fur trade to return to his first love, new-spapering, but who now and ever after lent a sympathetic ear to the tales of men down from the mountains. Keemle wrote:
The recent expedition of General Ashley to the country west of the Rocky Mountains has been productive of information on subjects of no small interest to the people of the Union. It has proved, that overland expeditions in large bodies may be made to that remote region without the necessity of transporting provisions for man or beast. Gen. Ashley left St. Louis in March last, and returned in September. His return caravan consisted of upwards of one hundred horses and mules, and more than one half that number of men. . . . His return march to St. Louis occupied about seventy days, each mule and horse carrying nearly two hundred pounds of beaver fur—the animals keeping their strength and flesh on the grass which they found, and without losing any time on this long journey. The men also found an abundance of food; they say there was no day in which they could not have subsisted a thousand men, and often ten thousand. Buff aloe furnished the principal food—water of the best quality was met with every day. The whole route lay through a level and open country, better for carriages than any turnpike road in the United States. Wagons and carriages could go with ease as far as General Ashley went, crossing the Rocky Mountains at the sources of the north fork of the Platte, and descending the valley of the Buenaventura towards the Pacific Ocean. . . .
In the whole expedition, Gen. Ashley did not lose a man, nor had any one of those died whom he left behind last year, many of whom have been out four or five years, and are too happy in the freedom of those wild regions to think of returning to the comparative thraldom of civilized Me. It would seem that no attempt has been made to ascertain the precise latitude and longitude of the point at which Gen. Ashley crossed the mountains.—It is to be hoped that this will not be neglected on the next expedition. From all that we can learn, the elevation is exceedingly small where the passage of the mountains was effected—so small as hardly to affect the rate of going of the caravan, and forming at the most, an angle of three degrees, being two degrees less than the steepest ascent on the Cumberland road.
So much for Ashley, beginning to reap the fruits of all that he had done for himself, all that had been done for him, beyond the continental divide. But Jedediah and his new partners had futures of their own to seek out.