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.
In the winter of 1848-49, John C. Frémont — the celebrated “Pathfinder” of the American West, lately disgraced by a court-martial — set out to redeem his name with a privately financed expedition. His backers, including his father-in-law Senator Thomas Hart Benton, wanted proof that a central transcontinental railroad could be pushed along the 38th parallel through the central Rockies and crossed even in deep winter. To prove it, Frémont resolved to do the one thing every experienced mountain man warned against: take a party of thirty-three men and well over a hundred mules straight up into the high San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado in December.
It was a decision made against the explicit counsel of his own guide. The aging trapper Bill Williams — “Old Bill” — knew this country, and the men later recalled his unease at the route and the season. Frémont pressed on anyway, into snow that fell deeper and colder than anything the plains-bred mules could endure. By late December the expedition was bogged in drifts on the high divides above the Rio Grande, the animals dying in their tracks, the men hauling baggage by hand through chest-deep snow at well over 11,000 feet.
When it was over, ten of the thirty-three men were dead — frozen, starved, or simply unable to take another step — and the survivors had been reduced to eating their dead mules, their belts, their rawhide, and, by the darkest accounts, possibly one another. The mountains they died in are the homeland of the Nuche (Ute) people, who had hunted and wintered in the San Juans for generations and who would never have attempted what Frémont attempted. The survivors straggled out in broken groups to Taos, in present-day New Mexico, where Kit Carson and others took them in.
It was one of the worst exploration disasters of the era, and unlike most, it was almost entirely self-inflicted. Frémont never fully accepted the blame, hinting that his guide had led them astray; the survivors who left written accounts — chiefly the artist Richard Kern, whose brother Benjamin died on the mountain — told a different story, of a commander who would not turn back.
In the spring of 1869, a one-armed Civil War major named John Wesley Powell launched ten men in four wooden boats onto the Green River in Wyoming Territory, bound for the last great blank space on the map of the United States. Below the confluence of the Green and the Colorado lay a thousand miles of unrun river and, at the bottom, the deepest canyon on the continent — what Powell himself would call the “Great Unknown.” No one knew whether the river was passable at all, or whether it dropped somewhere into unrunnable falls that would kill them.
Over roughly three months the expedition was ground down by the river. They lost a boat — the No Name — and a third of their provisions in a violent rapid on the Green, and the food that survived rotted and spoiled until the men were near starvation on rancid flour and dried apples. One man quit early and walked out. Then, deep in the Grand Canyon and only days from the end, with rations almost gone and one last fearsome rapid ahead, the party fractured. Three men — the brothers Oramel and Seneca Howland and William Dunn — decided they would sooner climb out of the canyon on foot than run the next rapid. They left at a spot Powell named Separation Canyon.
The six who stayed ran the rapid, and within two days reached the mouth of the Virgin River, where Mormon settlers were watching the water for their bodies. They had survived. The three who climbed out did not. They were killed on the high plateau north of the canyon, in country that is the homeland of the Southern Paiute. By one widely repeated account they were killed by Shivwits Paiutes who mistook them for other men; that attribution has been disputed for over a century, with some historians arguing they may instead have been killed by Mormon settlers. Their true fate remains genuinely uncertain.
The river ran through the homelands of many nations — the Ute of the upper Green, the Hopi, the Diné (Navajo), the Hualapai, the Havasupai, and the Southern Paiute of the canyon country — peoples who had lived along and within these canyons long before Powell declared them “unknown.” His expedition mapped the river and made him a national figure, but the phrase “Great Unknown” was always only true from the deck of a white explorer’s boat.
In the summer of 1846, with the United States newly at war with Mexico, the federal government asked the displaced Latter-day Saints — then encamped in misery on the Missouri after being driven out of Illinois — to raise a battalion of volunteers for the army’s invasion of the Southwest. Roughly five hundred men, with a handful of wives and children along as laundresses and family, enlisted. What followed was one of the longest infantry marches in American history: some two thousand miles on foot, from the Missouri River through Santa Fe and across the deserts of present-day New Mexico and Arizona to the Pacific at San Diego.
The Mormon Battalion fought no battle against the Mexican army. Its real enemies were distance, thirst, hunger, and the country itself. Under the hard command of Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke — who took over after the original commander died — the men hauled wagons across waterless stretches, dug and chopped a road for the wagons through the rock of a place they called Box Canyon, and marched until their shoes and rations gave out. Their one “battle,” near the San Pedro River in present-day Arizona, was against a herd of wild bulls that gored mules and men and wrecked wagons before being driven off.
Nearly all of them survived. The deaths — perhaps around twenty over the whole enlistment — came from illness, exhaustion, and exposure rather than combat, and many of the sickest were spun off into “sick detachments” sent to winter at Pueblo rather than die on the trail. When the survivors reached San Diego in late January 1847, Cooke issued an order that has become famous: “History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry.” The road they cut became a wagon route to California used by gold-seekers within two years.
The march cannot be told honestly without its context. It was a campaign of the Mexican-American War, a war of conquest that would strip roughly half of Mexico’s territory and bring the homelands of the Apache, the Tohono O’odham, the Pima (Akimel O’odham), the Yuma (Quechan), the Kumeyaay, and many other nations under United States control. The road the battalion opened was also a road of dispossession.