Jedediah Smith in the Mojave — 1827, Crossing the Burning Desert

Summary

In the late summer of 1826 a young, devout, teetotal trapper named Jedediah Strong Smith led a small fur brigade south and west from the Great Salt Lake into country no American had crossed before, leaving the Bear River on August 7, 1826, with fifteen men. By the time his desert journeys were over he had made the first documented overland crossing into Mexican California across the Mojave Desert, the first known east-to-west traverse of the Sierra Nevada, and the first crossing of the central Great Basin — a string of firsts paid for in men's lives and his own near-death from thirst.

The outbound trip took Smith and his men down to the Colorado River near present-day Needles, to the villages of the Mohave people, who fed the strangers, let them and their horses recover for some two weeks, and gave them guides across the desert westward to the missions of Alta California. They reached Mission San Gabriel in November 1826. There the Mexican governor, José María Echeandía, found an armed band of Americans deep inside his territory alarming, and detained Smith before letting him go on condition he leave the way he had come. Smith instead pushed north to trap, and when spring came he faced the problem of getting home across the mountains and deserts that had nearly stopped him on the way in.

The return in 1827 is the heart of the survival story. Leaving most of his brigade camped in California, Smith and two companions — Robert Evans and Silas Gobel — forced a crossing of the snowbound Sierra Nevada in late May and then struck east across the central Great Basin into a furnace of salt flats and waterless ranges. Smith called it a land where 'high rocky hills afford the only relief to the desolate waste,' the intervals between them 'sand barren Plains.' Their horses died, then nearly the men: Evans collapsed from thirst, and Smith and Gobel left him in the only shade they could find, pushed on, found water some miles ahead, and carried it back to revive him. They reached the Bear Lake rendezvous on July 3, 1827, as walking skeletons.

Smith's luck on the desert routes finally broke the next year. In 1828, leading a second party back down the same southwestern road, he reached the Colorado crossing to find the Mohave's goodwill gone, soured by violence with other American trappers in the interim. The Mohave attacked, killing ten of his men — Silas Gobel among them. Smith and the handful of survivors crossed the Mojave a second time on foot and reached California again. He was killed in 1831 by a Comanche party on the dry Cimarron crossing of the Santa Fe Trail. His crossings, recorded in his own journals and his clerk's, opened the southwestern routes later emigrants would follow.

Timeline

The Setup

Jedediah Smith was an unusual figure in the fur trade: a literate, Bible-reading, non-drinking New Yorker in a business of hard-living men, ambitious less for fortune than for the map. By 1826 he was a partner in the firm grown out of William Ashley's brigades, and he conceived a plan no American had attempted — to strike southwest from the Great Salt Lake into the unknown country beyond, looking for new beaver streams and, half-spoken, for the mythical Buenaventura River that explorers still believed must drain the Great Basin to the Pacific.

Leaving the Bear River on August 7, 1826, with fifteen men, he rode south and west until he struck the Colorado River and followed it down to the lands of the Mohave near present-day Needles, an agricultural people of the river bottoms. The Mohave received the trappers peacefully, traded them food, and let the men and their starved horses recuperate for some two weeks before two mission refugees guided them west across the Mojave by the trail that would become the western leg of the Old Spanish Trail. This help was not incidental; it was the hinge of the whole enterprise. Without Mohave food, water knowledge, and guides across the waterless gap between the Colorado and the missions, Smith's brigade would very likely have died in the Mojave on the way in.

Guided across the desert and over the mountains near Cajon Pass, the party reached Mission San Gabriel in November 1826 — gaunt, ragged Americans appearing without warning inside Mexican California, the first U.S. expedition to reach the province overland. Governor Echeandía, with no category for them, treated Smith as a suspected spy, summoning him to San Diego and holding him until an American sea captain vouched for him. Released with orders to leave by the route he had entered, Smith instead moved north into the Central Valley to take beaver, setting up the far harder problem of the journey home.

The Disaster

Blocked from a simple retreat and with a season's furs to deliver to the summer rendezvous, Smith made a hard choice in the spring of 1827: leave the brigade and its catch camped in California, and cross back east himself with just two men to report and bring out supplies. He chose Robert Evans and Silas Gobel and turned for the mountains. Their first wall was the Sierra Nevada, still deep in spring snow. Beginning around May 20, 1827, the three forced an eight-day crossing over a high pass near present-day Ebbetts Pass — the first documented traverse of the range — losing horses to the cold and emerging onto the eastern slope into country that, if anything, was deadlier than the snow.

Before them lay the central Great Basin: range after range of dry mountains separated by salt flats and sagebrush plains with water days apart and often poisoned with alkali. In the building heat of early summer the three crossed it on failing animals, then on foot as the horses gave out and were eaten or simply died. They dug for water at dry seeps, went two days at a stretch without drinking, and burned across open flats with no shade. Tormented by thirst and exhausted by the loose sand, even the iron-nerved Smith, he later wrote, lost hope of surviving. It was the kind of country where a single missed water hole was fatal, and they missed water more than once.

The crisis came when Robert Evans could go no further. Wrung out by thirst, he collapsed and told the others to leave him to die. Smith and Gobel laid him in the meager shade of a cedar — the only cover in reach — and pushed on, because the only thing that could save Evans was water they did not have. Some miles ahead they reached water, and Smith turned back across the burning ground carrying it in a kettle. By his own account, Evans 'was indeed far gone, being scarcely able to speak,' and his first question was 'have you any water?' Smith handed him the kettle, which held six or seven quarts. Revived, the three staggered on, and on July 3, 1827 they reached the rendezvous at Bear Lake with one horse and one mule left alive — the first men known to have crossed the Great Basin, arriving as gaunt as ghosts to a camp that had given them up for dead.

The Ordeal

The survival of that return crossing turned on a few hard disciplines. Smith kept moving when stopping meant death, and he kept reckoning where water might be rather than wandering; he was willing to push ahead to find water and carry it back to a dying man rather than abandon him, which is what saved Evans. The party ate its own horses and mules as they failed, wringing every calorie and drop from the animals, and friendly Indians the men met directed them toward water — the same Indigenous knowledge that had carried them in. None of it made the desert safe; it made it barely survivable, and Evans only because of the water Smith carried back.

Smith barely rested before turning around. Soon after the rendezvous he organized a second expedition back to the California brigade he had left, retracing the southwestern route down to the Colorado and the Mohave villages. But the situation on the river had changed. Other American trappers had clashed violently with the Mohave in the interval, and the goodwill that had carried Smith across the desert the first time was gone. As his party crossed the Colorado in August 1828, the Mohave attacked. Ten of Smith's men were killed — among them Silas Gobel, who had survived the Great Basin only to die at the river — and the survivors lost most of their horses and gear.

Smith and the eight men who lived threw up a defensive stand, drove the attackers off, then crossed the Mojave Desert again on foot, fighting thirst a second time, to reach the California missions. It was a far costlier crossing than the first, paid for in the lives of men who had trusted the desert road. Smith had now traversed the Mojave twice, the Sierra once, and the Great Basin once, and each had nearly killed him; the deserts that made his reputation as the great pathfinder of the Southwest were, every time, a margin measured in hours and the next water hole.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

The survivors of the second Colorado crossing — Smith among them — reached the California missions and rejoined his scattered men, then pushed north into Oregon country to trap. There, on the Umpqua River in July 1828, another ambush killed most of the party while Smith was scouting ahead; only Smith and three others are known to have escaped to Fort Vancouver. He had a genius for opening country and a recurring, terrible tendency to lose his men to the dangers of it. The journals he and his clerk Harrison Rogers kept turned his crossings into geography, correcting the old myth of a Buenaventura River draining the Great Basin.

Smith did not live to see the routes he had pioneered fill with emigrants. In 1831, on the Santa Fe Trail, he rode ahead to find water for his thirsty party on the dry Cimarron crossing — the same instinct that had saved Robert Evans years before — and was killed by a Comanche party at a waterhole. He was thirty-two, and his body was never recovered: an ordinary frontier death for the man who had survived two crossings of the Mojave and the first traverse of the Great Basin.

What endured was the map. Smith's desert crossings, recorded and later compiled, established the practical geography of the central and southwestern routes to California decades before the gold rush. The Mojave road he opened became part of the network of trails that funneled later parties west — some of whom, like the Death Valley '49ers and the Donner Party, would learn for themselves how thin the margins were in the very country Smith had been the first American to survive.

Lessons

References

• Jedediah Smith Wikipedia
• Mohave people Wikipedia
• Jedediah Smith | Biography & Facts Encyclopaedia Britannica