mapmaking would have jumped twenty years ahead.
Physical comage was the sine qua non of mountain men, and Smith proved his at the Ankara massacre, which made Ashley’s first expedition a failure. A grizzly marked Smith’s face for life a few months later, and his endurance and personal force carried him within three years from head of a hunting party to senior partner of the dominant fur-harvesting partnership in the Rockies—Smith, Jackson, and Sublette.
Smith roamed the tributaries of the Upper Missouri, went as far as the Bitterroot, and later traversed the South Pass gateway into the Great Basin.
But his most astonishing overland odyssey began in the late summer of 1826 when, in search of new beaver country, he headed southwest from the summer rendezvous at Bear Lake. In a year’s time he pushed to the lower Colorado River, through the parched Mojave Desert to the California missions (where he got a reception befitting the first American overland party), trapped his way up the San Joaquin Valley, made the initial crossing of the Sierra Nevada, and returned across the Great Basin to his headquarters. As if this weren’t enough for any man, he set out a month later to retrace his steps, lost half of his men to a savage Mojave attack, and blazed the first trail from southern California north to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. Of twenty men who had survived the Mojave attack only four lived through an ambush by the Umpqua Indians in southern Oregon, but Smith pushed on up the Columbia to Fort Colville and two years after his departure rejoined his partners at Pierre’s Hole in southern Idaho. Unlike the military expedition of Lewis and Clark, Smith’s men were ill equipped, and he imposed discipline only by the force of his own fortitude. Before he was through, his travels covered nearly three times the distance spanned by Lewis and Clark in their earlier voyage of discovery.
The objective of these expeditions was beaver, but Smith once wrote in his journal that he was also led on by “the love of novelty common to all.” Weather-beaten and rawhide-tough, he had appeared in California and Oregon, without credentials or a flag, but the very presence of this scout in buckskin was a rude announcement of Manifest Destiny to the colonial outposts of Britain and Spain.
None of the mountain men got rich trapping, and most died poor. Beaver plews sold for six dollars apiece in peak years, and a good trapper could make one thousand dollars a season. But at the summer rendezvous the fur companies charged outrageous prices for supplies hauled in from St. Louis, and most of the time the trappers decided to stay on another year in the high country and hope for a bumper harvest. A few cleaned up, and John Jacob Astor, running part of the show from back East, became the richest man in America because he knew how to organize the extermination of the beaver. But while in pursuit of beaver, Smith and the mountain men planted outposts, learned a way of life, and enjoyed a once-upon-a-continent freedom to explore some of the finest mountain country in the world.
Some of them later used their hard-won knowledge of the wilderness to guide the wagon trains that began to spill out across the plains in the ’40’s and ’50’s. The last of the White Indians gave what discipline they could to an undisciplined migration, found the waterholes, and kept the emigrant-trains moving.
What is the land legacy of the mountain men? Legends aside, surely we owe them a larger debt than we have yet acknowledged.
Thomas Jefferson knew their fathers, and wagered all on the ability of such men to respond to the wilderness challenge. For nearly a generation these men were the American presence in an area where sovereignties overlapped and national boundaries were still undefined. As Jefferson foresaw, in the last analysis it would be unafraid men, outward bound to conquer and explore, who would fill the vacuums and fix the boundaries of the nation. The mountain men, if they failed in all else, made him a prophet.
Like Kit Carson, the best of them were “cougar all the way,” and they established an ideal of prowess which entered the marrow of our national character, which saw us up San Juan Hill and through two world wars. Our sentimental fondness and genuine respect for this ideal is, I suspect, the secret of the durability and fascination of the American “Western.”
But all qualities, including a mustang human spirit, have their defects, and these, too, must be entered in the record. The trappers’ raid on the beaver was a harbinger of things to come. Their undisciplined creed of reckless individualism became the code of those who later used a higher technology to raid our resources systematically. The spiritual sons of the mountain men were the men of the next wave—the skin-and-scoot market hunters, the cut-and-get-out lumbermen, the cattle barons whose herds grazed the plains bare.
It is neither fair nor quite true to say that the tradition of thoughtless land exploitation started with the mountain men, but certainly a part of it can be traced to them. Leatherstocking, James Fenimore Cooper’s idealized frontiersman, found God in the trees and water and the breath of summer air; but the true-life mountain man made his demands on America’s abundance without thought, without thanks, and without veneration for living things. These men embodied, as few others have, one facet of the self-reliance of which Emerson later wrote, but they wholly lacked the self-discipline which alone could give it grace and meaning.
In all this, the circular process of history was at work. The land was determining the character of men, who, in ton, were determining the future of the land itself. The result of this interaction was the clearest possible example of the American ambivalence toward the land that continues to dominate our relationship to the continent and its resources. It is a combination of a love for the land and the practical urge to exploit it shortsightedly for profit.
It is in their love of the land that the frontiersmen and the mountain men have given us a lasting gift. Each new generation of Americans is inspired by their ideal of individual prowess. In our few remaining wild lands we can still catch a glimpse of the world of Kit Carson and Jim Bridger and Jed Smith—the world that shaped our character and influenced our history. The spirit of Boone and the mountain men still walks the woods and Western ranges. A stanza Vachel Lindsay once wrote is their ultimate epitaph:
When Daniel Boone goes by, at night,
The phantom deer arise
And all lost, wild America
Is burning in their eyes.
Thoreau and the Naturalists
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels!
—WALT WHITMAN “Song of Myself”
There was another kind of moccasin stalking the wilderness at the end of the eighteenth and through the nineteenth century. Its wearer was not Indian, though he quickly grasped the age-old insights of Indian living. Nor was he White Indian: the brain was too self-aware, the mind too attuned to overtones, the
