Background
He was born at Belleville, Illinois on December 19, 1818.
He was born at Belleville, Illinois on December 19, 1818.
He early learned the use of firearms, but had little schooling.
At nineteen he started west, and in St. Louis met James Bridger, then recruiting a company of trappers for the American Fur Company. On May 25, 1839, he left the city with the Bridger party for the annual rendezvous in the mountains. The journey was, according to Baker, a hazardous one, for the Indians along the trail "were as thick as bees" and unusually bellicose. The pacifying genius of Bridger, however, carried the party safely to its destination. Baker spent the next two years in trapping. In the summer of 1840 he returned to St. Louis and also made a brief visit to his boyhood home; but in the spring of 1841 he started again for the mountains. He was in the desperate fight at the junction of Battle Creek and Little Snake River, on the Colorado-Wyoming line, August 21-22, when thirty-five trappers beat off a large force of Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos, though with the loss of their leader, Henry Fraeb, and three others. In the spring following the famous "cold winter of '45" (which seems actually to have been the winter of 1843-44), when most of the horses and even many of the wild animals in the mountains perished, he took part in a trappers' raid on the horse-herds of the Southern Californians.
Though the decline of the fur trade in the early forties drove most of the trappers to abandon the field, Baker stayed on. Little is known of his movements, however, from 1844 to 1855, when he emerged as a chief of scouts for Gen. W. S. Harney at Fort Laramie. In 1857 he guided as far as Fort Bridger a part of the Federal army sent against the Mormons. With Tim Goodale as assistant, he served as guide to Capt. Marcy's expedition which left Fort Bridger on Nov. 24 to cross the Colorado mountains to Fort Massachusetts - an adventure in which both guides lost their way and in which the party narrowly escaped destruction. Returning by the foothills east of the Rockies, and passing by the future site of Denver, where one of the men discovered gold, the expedition reached Fort Bridger on June 9, 1858. Baker remained for a short time in the Green River region, and then returned to the Colorado placers and built a cabin on Clear Creek, near the present Denver. At some time between 1866 and 1869 he returned to Green River. In 1873 he chose for his permanent home a spot in the valley of the Little Snake River, near the scene of the famous battle, erected on it a cabin with a watch tower, and began to raise livestock. Here he died. His grave, which is marked with an inscribed stone, is about a mile from the town of Savery.
Quotes from others about the person
Captain Marcy wrote of him as "a generous, noble-hearted specimen of the trapper type who would peril his life for a friend at any time or divide his last morsel of food. "
Baker was six times married - each time to an Indian woman--and had a number of children.