Jedediah Smith: A Sewn-On Ear, South Pass and Two Crossings of the Mojave

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Jedediah Smith, born in 1799 to a New England family of modest means, clerked on a Lake Erie freighter at 13 and reportedly studied records of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In 1822, at 23, he answered William Ashley and Andrew Henry's call for 100 enterprising young men to trap the Rockies. After the 1823 Arikara fight killed 12 of his colleagues and closed the Missouri, he turned overland. In the Black Hills a grizzly broke his ribs and tore off his scalp and an ear, which James Clyman sewed back on with needle and thread. Crow guides in 1824 showed him the gentle 20-mile-wide South Pass, later the route of the Oregon Trail. He became Ashley's partner in 1825 and in 1826 bought the business with David Jackson and William Sublette.

Searching for the mythical Buenaventura River, his party became the first U.S. citizens to cross the Mojave Desert into Mexican California in 1826, where Governor José María Echeandía arrested him. Blocked by Sierra Nevada snow, he crossed with two men to reach the 1827 rendezvous on July 3, where trappers fired a cannon to greet him. Returning for the men he had left, he lost 10 to a Mojave ambush, was arrested again and freed on a $30,000 bond. In Oregon in July 1828 a dispute over a stolen axe led to an Umpqua attack that killed 11 of his men. The Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver recovered his furs and journals and paid for them. He sold out in 1830, compiled a master map of the West and was killed by Comanches in 1831, aged 32.

• In the Great Basin his party butchered exhausted horses for moisture, and Smith twice carried water back to revive Robert Evans.
• Governor George Simpson paid market price for the recovered furs in exchange for Smith keeping his trappers east of the Great Divide.
• Wealthy in St. Louis, he bought two enslaved people to keep his town property.
• His warning letter to Secretary of War John Eaton about British expansion went unanswered amid the Petticoat Affair.
• His map disproved the Buenaventura River, but it went unpublished and John C. Frémont later gained fame on much of the same ground.