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| Jed Smith, drawn ca. 1835 by a close family friend. Family archives. |
Historians do agree that he was born in Bainbridge, New York, an outpost about 25 miles east of Binghamton. The family moved to Erie County around 1810 and then to Ohio in 1817. Jedediah headed even further west around 1821.
In 1822, William Ashley published a St. Louis newspaper notice that said, in part, “The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri river to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years.”
That was the beginning of what became the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, organized by Ashley and Andrew Henry [blog, March 20]. Smith joined the company and, in 1824, led a small band of trappers into southeast Idaho. There they stumbled across a party of “pilaged and destitute” Iroquois Indian trappers. These men worked for the British-Canadian Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). British-Canadian fur companies had had the western slopes of the Rockies to themselves since the War of 1812.
Smith escorted the hapless Iroquois back to the HBC camp on the Salmon River, near today's Challis or possibly the mouth of the Pahsimeroi River. The Britishers were none too pleased when the Americans showed up, on October 14, 1824. Their leader, Alexander Ross, grumbled about the newcomers “whom I rather take to be spies than trappers.”
Smith managed to stick with the HBC contingent when they first returned to their base in Montana, and then marched back to Idaho under a new leader, Peter Skene Ogden [blog, January 1]. The Americans would dog the Brigade until the groups separated on the Bear River in late April, 1925. Smith’s party headed north to trap the Blackfoot River.
We next see Smith in July at the rendezvous (the first) that Ashley held in southwest Wyoming. Sometime shortly after they met, Ashley took Jedediah on as a junior partner because Andrew Henry had retired from the trade. Back in Saint Louis, Smith helped Ashley organize matters for the next season.
Accounts vary as to when Jedediah next led a trapping party in the Rockies. It is agreed, however, that he and Ashley guided a supply column to the 1926 rendezvous, held in the Cache Valley of Utah. At that gathering, Ashley sold his share of the business to William Sublette and David E. Jackson, two other experienced fur traders.
Smith and his new partners were shrewd enough to realize that going head-to-head with the established HBC might not be their most profitable course. Jedediah therefore led a trapper/explorer party through country then unknown to Americans: across Utah and southern Nevada, and then into Spanish California.
Jedediah Smith’s monumental accomplishments in exploring the West between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast are beyond the scope of this brief item.
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| Thomas Fitzpatrick. Colorado Historical Society. |
Besides his own accomplishments, Smith provided an example for several other famous Mountain Men. One such was Thomas Fitzpatrick, who was among a group of partners who bought out Smith, Sublette, and Jackson in 1830.
Later, Fitzgerald acted as guide for one of John C. Frémont’s major exploratory expeditions.
* The June date is listed in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
| References: [B&W], [Brit] |
| H. M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln (1986). Originally publication date: 1935. |
| Alexander Ross, T. C. Elliott (Ed.), “Journal of Alexander Ross, Snake Country Expedition, 1824,” Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 14 (Dec. 1913). |
| Stephen W. Sears, “Trail Blazer of the Far West,” American Heritage Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 4 (June 1963). |