Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner Read Free Book Online

Smith gathered the remnants of his expedition, and they wandered up the Sacramento Valley, trapping as they went. It was by then the middle of winter, and the snowpack in the Sierra was twelve feet deep; crossing the range was out of the question. Smith decided to venture back toward the ocean. Crossing the Yolla Bolly and Trinity mountains, the party found itself in a rain forest dominated by a gigantic species of conifer they had never seen. Reaching the Pacific near the mouth of the river that now bears Smith’s name, they slogged northward through country which can receive a hundred inches of rain during six winter months. At the mouth of the Umpqua River, they stopped to rest. Smith went off to reconnoiter in an improvised canoe. While he was gone, a band of the Umpqua tribe stole into camp and murdered all but three of the men. Fleeing through the tangled forest beneath giant trees, two of the survivors found Smith, and they raced off together in the direction of Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. They arrived there in August of 1828, emaciated and in shock. Their last surviving companion straggled in after them; he had found his way alone.
     
    The British, by then well established in Oregon, considered the attack ominous enough to demand a reprisal. An expedition was dispatched for the Umpqua Valley, where the marauding band was cornered; thirty-nine horses and Smith’s seven hundred beaver pelts were seized. Although the British were still smarting from the War of 1812, the commander refused to let Smith compensate him for his trouble; instead, he paid him $3,200 for the horses and pelts. He also offered the Americans a long rest at the fort, since it would take most of the winter for them to tell all their tales. In the spring of 1829, the assembled force of Fort Vancouver watched in disbelief as Smith and Arthur Black, the last of the four survivors who still retained their nerve, strode confidently through the gates and up the Columbia River, en route to the June rendezvous. “They are sporting with life or courting danger to madness,” remarked the commander, who never went out with fewer than forty men. Within twelve weeks, Smith and Black were back among their companions in Jackson Hole.
     
    After six years of hair-raising adventures, Jedediah Smith decided to relax and devote a season to tranquil pursuits—trapping beaver on icy mountain streams in territory claimed by Indians and grizzly bears—and then returned to St. Louis to see what opportunity lay there. But civilization stank in his nostrils, and wilderness coursed through his blood. After a brief stay in the frontier capital, Smith was back on the Santa Fe Trail, guiding pioneers westward. It was there, at the age of thirty, that his life came to an abrupt end, a Comanche tomahawk embedded in his skull. He is memorialized today across a region the size of Europe, though modern explorers in a Prowler or a Winnebago may not realize that half a dozen Smith Rivers and a landscape of Smith Parks, Passes, Peaks, and Valleys in eleven states are mostly named after the same Smith.
     
    The “useful” role ascribed to the mountain men is that they opened the door to settlement of the West. It might be more accurate, however, to say that they slammed it shut. The terrors they endured were hardly apt to draw settlers, and their written accounts of the region had to lie heavy on a settler’s mind: plains so arid that they could barely support bunchgrass; deserts that were fiercely hot and fiercely cold; streams that flooded a few weeks each year and went dry the rest; forests with trees so large it might take days to bring one down; Indians, grizzly bears, wolves, and grasshopper plagues; hail followed by drought followed by hail; no gold. You could live off the land in better years, but the life of a trapper, a hunter, a fortune seeker—the only type of life that seemed possible in the West—was not what the vast majority of Americans