Background
Jedediah was born on June 24, 1798 in Bainbridge, Chenango County, New York, United States. He was the son of Jedediah Smith, a native of New Hampshire.
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Jedediah was born on June 24, 1798 in Bainbridge, Chenango County, New York, United States. He was the son of Jedediah Smith, a native of New Hampshire.
He received a fair English education, acquired a little Latin, and learned to write a good hand.
At thirteen he became clerk on a Lake Erie freighter, learning business methods and presumably meeting traders returning from the Far West to Montreal from whom he imbibed an ambition for adventurous wilderness trade.
Testimony concerning the time of Smith's arrival at the frontier is conflicting. He may have been in St. Louis as early as 1816, or he may have gone there several years later. Gen. William Henry Ashley, who organized his Rocky Mountain trade in 1822, probably had Smith in his employ from the first. It is certain that the latter was on the upper Missouri with Ashley in 1823, and continued with him thereafter until, at Great Salt Lake in the summer of 1826, Ashley sold his business to Smith, David E. Jackson, and William L. Sublette, all trusty lieutenants of the previous years' campaigns. These three men now carried on the Rocky Mountain trade till the summer of 1830, when they sold out to other mountain men, among them James Bridger.
It was in the period 1826-30 that Smith made the journeys on which his fame as an explorer rests. He had already become familiar with the trade of the Columbia region, contested by the British, and he now proposed to investigate the Southwest and the practicability of penetrating the Oregon country from California.
Leaving Great Salt Lake in August 1826, with seventeen men, he passed through the nations of the Utes, the Paiutes, and the Mohaves, and entered California from the Mohave desert, on November 27, reaching the Mission San Gabriel, where he was kindly received. The governor of California was suspicious of him, however, and it was only through the intercession of Capt. W. H. Cunningham of the ship Courier, of Boston, that he escaped imprisonment and received permission to lead his party back across the mountains.
Smith proceeded eastward and northward to the valley of King's River whence, in February 1827, he tried to cross the mountains and failed. He then moved farther north, to the American River, established camp for his main party, and, taking with him two companions, in May crossed the mountains, probably on the line of the present railway. He did not chance upon the Humboldt River, and made his dreary way to Salt Lake over the unrelieved desert.
About a month later he retraced the previous year's route, this time with a company of eighteen men, but the Mohave Indians, probably instigated thereto by the Californians, attacked the party treacherously, killing ten and plundering goods and papers. With the remaining eight, Smith reached San Gabriel Mission, secured a few necessaries, and turned northeast to join the men left on the American. He found them in sad plight, which he was unable to relieve. He finally gained permission to purchase supplies and leave the country.
He wintered in the Sacramento Valley, but in April 1828, instead of crossing the mountains eastward or directly northward, he headed northwest and on June 8 reached the seacoast at the mouth of Klamath River. On July 14, he had already crossed the Umpqua on the way to the Willamette, his chosen route to the Columbia, when the Umpqua Indians massacred all his men save two. Smith and John Turner followed the Willamette route to Fort Vancouver, where they found Arthur Black, the other survivor. Dr. John McLoughlin aided Smith to recover his property, kept him as guest till March, and gave him a passage up the river to the Spokane, whence he made his way, over ground already familiar, to Pierre's Hole, the new rendezvous.
Smith retired from the Rocky Mountain trade the following year. In 1831 he entered the Santa Fe trade and toward the end of May, at a water hole near the Cimarron, he was surrounded by a body of hostile Comanches and killed.
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Smith's immediate family were practicing Christians; his younger brother Benjamin was named after a Methodist circuit preacher and his letters indicate his own Christian beliefs.
While traveling throughout the American West, Jedediah's policy with the Native Americans was to maintain friendly relations with gifts and exchanges, learning from their cultures.
Smith was a true gentleman. He had a dry, not raucous, sense of humor, and was not known to use the profanity common to his peers. He was known to be physically strong, cool under pressure, extremely skilled at surviving in the wild and possessed extraordinary leadership skills.