01Biography
Jedediah Smith went to St. Louis in 1822, at 23, and signed on as a hunter with William Ashley's fur company. The next year a grizzly bear nearly tore off his scalp and one ear, and a companion, James Clyman, sewed them back on. In 1824 Crow people told his small party of an easy way across the Rockies, and Smith, Thomas Fitzpatrick and their men crossed through South Pass.
Smith's letters to St. Louis described the pass, which later carried the wagon trains over the mountains. He reached California overland in 1826 and the next year made the first recorded crossing of the Sierra Nevada from west to east. In 1828 most of his men were killed on the Umpqua River, and John McLoughlin took him in at Fort Vancouver for the winter.
02Why they matter
Led the trappers who found South Pass again in 1824 and made it known as the easy way over the Rockies.
03How they died
In 1830 his firm sent the first wagons up the Platte to the Rocky Mountains, and the partners wrote to the government that wagons could cross the mountains. He then turned to the Santa Fe trade. On May 27, 1831, while searching for water near the Cimarron River, in present-day southwest Kansas, he was attacked and killed by a party of Comanche men. He was 32, and his body was never found.
04Legacy
Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in California is named for him, and rivers in California and Oregon carry his name. His master map of the West is lost, but around 1850 a surveyor copied many of its details onto a printed Frémont map, and that copy survives.