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Show I THE TRAIL OF BLEACHED BONES Russell I Take the word of the Jalt Lake Route for It, I as given in a book of the route published under j the editorship of Douglas "Whito, just after the J road was completed, and the "Mormon" trail to j Los Angeles will bo the theme described in ' i treating the route's trail-blazers. Consider the word of the older available Utah histories, and there will be seldom if over a sug-) sug-) gestion that any other party than that under 1 Rich and Lyman, which 'settled San Bernardino in 1851, was a "trail-blazer" along the route. In i fact, the survivors of the San Bernardino col- onization wear "trail-blazer" badges furnished by tf Senator W. A. Clark as a token of his regard jj for them. j In this series on the Great Uasin pathfinder, I " it has already been considered how Etionne Pro-f Pro-f vost discovered tho South Pass, and sent Gen-oral Gen-oral Ashley out of Utah, back through it with the Ogden furs in 1S25, and how Ashley discovered 1 that the Green river went to the Pacific in that same year, and has only just been given his I credit, in having the Ashley forest named after I him this summer. 'l This paper takes up the trail to Los Angeles, 1 and the most shabbily treated of all the early Utah inhabitants and explorers. And here it H $M should be explained that no blame attaches to B i'tjjj anyone, that tho dust of forgetfulness has fallen B jljjjl over those whoso exploits were the most hardy, B f? ' and brought the greatest results in attracting B Jr followers towards the paths they made. We saw B m before how so great a government explorer as B ( i i , Major Powell knew totally nothing of what Ash- B ley had done In the river he voyaged on, two B II decades before this time. The thing that worked 1 A to the neglect of the subject of this paper, Jede- l i diah S. Smith, was that interest, except in a very El limited circle, did not attach to this country on B j 'h ( the part of the nation now governing it. "When B ifj later that interest was found to bo awake, the B iJv men who had hallooed to it, and prodded it, and B ji'jr stirred it into conscious activity, were perhaps B j.Jj too far out on tho frontier to be given notice, or B '. fell, as did Jedediah Smith, with a Comanche's B j j arrow in his back, just at tho beginning of a na- B I j '' tional interest in his work. B I 'I j In tllQ conception of Utah as a barren wildor- B I'g ! ness to which people, "except a few straggling f t' i hunters and trappers," first oame in 1847, the SI first step to discredit the early inhabitants is I taken. ! it , With this view in mind it was difficult for the writer to gather a conception of the trail from southern Utah to Los Angeles as one on which an extensive interstate traffic had existed for twenty years before 1847, a trail which Fremont found in 1843, nine years before it was "path-found" "path-found" by the first party given recognition, to be a long trail of bleached and bleaching bones, noting th route of the Santa Fe caravans, bound for the California missions, and Mexican settlements. settle-ments. The oldest of them were black with decay. de-cay. The newest in his day we. from his exhausted ex-hausted horses, and even from a good many of his company who fell too far in the rear and were murdered by the Indians who infested it. The trouble was not in Utah, or a spirit of unfairness here to those deserving credit. It was a national trouble, that everywhere now is being adjusted. Jedediah Smith's explorations between Great Salt Lake and Los Angeles brought him first across the Sierra Nevada mountains, moun-tains, curiously enough from east to west. The records of what he did, come to the historian with patient digging, and each year more and more of them are coming to light. They never would have fallen intb forgotten neglect, except that the trail seemed to have no importance to America at the time, and when the consciousness of this importance came to the people, the records rec-ords were not easy to get at and they seized the most available, honored the first trail-blazers they could locate, and left the earlier work buried deep in the archives of the fur trade, from which historians are now digging it up. Fortunately for this chapter of Utah's history, Henry M. Chittenden hah dug through the St. Louis archives, waded through the files of the St. Louis papers, and gone through the government reports and maps made during the era when the actual discoveries were being made. His work it is which makes it possible to tell of Jedediah Smith in any complete way, and if over a historical society is formed in Utah to recreate these early characters and read them permanently into the record, it will find Jedediah Smith the most shabbily treated of all of them, and with a record that places his work of the greatest importance. Because one of his men was severely wounded on its banks, and killed a little farther on, the Virgin river carries its name. Because he made his camp upon the stream after being ordered out of California by the Mexican governor, the American Amer-ican river is still known in history with a name dating to that incident. He it was who first carried car-ried a fear of the Americans into the hearts of the placid Mexican Californians. He was one of tho first great mountaineers to meet his death. The others lived on. Jim Bridger, his companion, compan-ion, outlived the trapper era, and the trader era as well, and worked through the era of government govern-ment scouting, to end up as a respectable settlement settle-ment farmer on a quiet, home-like farm. Therefore, There-fore, to some extent he came into contact with army officers, literary men, and newspaper reporters, re-porters, so that some record of his work came into general literature. The writer's interest in the trapping and exploring ex-ploring era commenced with an explanation from John Hunt, son of Jefferson Hunt, who guided the Mormon settlers to San Bernardino in 1851, that the party had a map of the route given them by the mountaineers. The records of Kit Carson showed with very little reading that the conception of him as a wild, romantic half-Indian was wrong, and of the trappers as Isolated individuals, indi-viduals, roaming at random, and living corrupt, licentious lives, was equally wrong. It was not until the days of Buffalo Bill and the pony express that the frontiersman known to literature litera-ture began to develop. To his era the hard drinking, drink-ing, the careless shooting, and the gun-protected card game belonged. It was thirty years before they came that the explorers did their work and went their way. And men whom we remember as "mountaineers" did not pack a little merchandise merchan-dise on their back. They headed great companies. Their pack animals numbered into the hundreds. They .represented great fortunes put into commerce com-merce for Indian trade, and maintained a discipline dis-cipline that would have fitted these men for the greater roles in any variation of life's drama. General Ashley, for instance, lost $10,000 in merchandise mer-chandise when a single one of his fleet of boats sank in the Mississippi. Bancroft, it is true, does not picture them this way. But, however formidable Bancroft's many volumes of history may look from the outside, out-side, tho more one has to do with them inside the covers, the less he wants to have. With an air sniffing superiority, Bancroft seemed to burn with a desire to belittle every man who had preceded him into the West, and to pre-empt the whole section for himself alone. To get a view point on the man, a choice bit of reading would bo to go through Washington Irving's charming narrative of the Astorians, then into fBancroft's purported review of this narrative, not neglecting the many insulting flings that are wholly without basis in fact, as to Irving's syco-nphancy syco-nphancy and relationship with John Jacob Astor. 'Then read John C. Fremont's charming and simple-hearted descriptions of his entrance into tho wonderful valley of the Great Salt Lake, and Bancroft's insulting diatribe, flinging aspersions 'at the man whose work counted for so much in he bringing of the West to attention of tha United States government. And so, forgetting Bancroft as iuily as possible, pos-sible, and approaching such a man as Jedediah Smith, prepared to do credit iu tne men who had the nation-making hardihood to push out into country really unknown, search out its highways and byways, we And first of all that he was de-voutedly de-voutedly a Christian, that his sense of honor was of the highest order, that much of his wealth (and he accumulated a fortune), went to the Methodist Meth-odist church, and that he carried always with him a copy of the Holy Bible, for solace when out in the wilderness, and for comfort upon all occasions. oc-casions. Once even he abandoned a great trapping trap-ping area out of a sense of honor, and a pledged word to a British claimant. There is on file with the Missouri Historical society a document having much more to do with "Utah than with Missouri history. It is a remarkable-bill of sale, executed "near the Grand Lake west of the Rocky Mountains, July 18, 1826." The seller was William H. Ashley, whose two years of adventure in Utah ended with this date. The buyers were three men of the hundred and twenty who served under Ashley. Jedediah Smith, of these, was the senior, and the others were Jackson, and William L. Sublette. The Arm of . Smith, Jackson and Sublette came into being in Great Salt Lake valley, from this incident. Its trappers were dispatched from the lendezvous held here that summer, to gather again with their catches in the same place in the summer of 1827. While some of them scattered to the north and east, Smith, with a considerable party, de-I de-I tevmined to prospect to the south and west. That was the trip that carried him past Los Vegas, through the Cajon pass and into Los Angeles. To return to his Great Salt Lake valley meeting arranged ar-ranged for 1857, it was that he crowded back over the Sierras, and crossed the desert west of 'Great Salt Lake, bringing with him only a few of his men, and leaving the rest there to fall into serious trouble with the scared Mexican governors. gov-ernors. His return to them in the fall, their arrest, confinement, and banishment from California! over a route which brought them to the American Amer-ican river when it was so high that they could not ford and were forced to make a camp, from which the Spaniards gave it this name, is trace able through his letters and reports to friends and government officials. Thtre is first a letter to General Clark, written writ-ten at Great Salt Lake in the summer of 1827, and published in the Missouri Republican for Oct. 11, 1827. All the writer has seen Is a reference refer-ence to it, but for a Utah historical society would it not make a document worth while? Then there is a letter from Capt. Cunningham, of the ship Courier, dated at San Diego, December, Decem-ber, 1826, and published in the Missouri Republican Repub-lican for Oct. 25, 1827. The Kansas Historical society possesses the letter book of the superintendent superin-tendent of Indian affairs, and in this is a statement state-ment of Smith's explorations as furnished by him at the request of the agent. Tho first that is heard of Smith on the plains and In the mountains was in 1823, when his name appeared among the "hundred adventurous young men" that Ashley wanted for mountain work. A native of Now York state, he was then 18 years old. Andrew Henry had already 'built a fort on the Yellowstone, and when, in 1823, Ashley's caravan, outbound, was surrounded by Aricara Indians on the Missouri, and stopped after a serious battle, a volunteer became necessary neces-sary to push on alone to Henry's fort and carry the message as a warning-. Smith came into no-lice no-lice in that he volunteered for the service and carried the message, his power at concealment and cunning in eluding Indians being all he could depend on to take him through. His career ended in 1831. In the meantime he kept his senior membership in the Arm of Smith, Jackson and Sublette, after Ashley sold out in 1826, until 1830, when Jim Bridger, in turn, bought him out, with other associates. Then he went into the Santa Fe trade out of St. Louis, and in 1831 he lost his life. The trapper era leaves little credit for Fremont Fre-mont as a "pathfinder." Like Capt. Bonneville, whoso greatest achievement was to fall Into the hands of Washington Irving, and to be written up in the period of interested readers, Fremont served in that he carried the message of a country coun-try over which he was guided by companions of Smith and Bridger, on their earlier trails, to people peo-ple in a ferment of interest concerning it. His government report, 20,000 copies of which were printed, won converts to the idea of California and Oregon emigration, and served as u guide Look to the colonization era. Much of it, by the way, was reprinted in the Millenial Star, preceding preced-ing the Mormon emigration westward. And a presentation copy of it .was made by Senator Benton, of Missouri, to Joseph Smith, while a digest of the book, written by Orson Hyde, was sent to Joseph Smith, ho having been loaned a personal copy by Senator Benton to read up on, while in Washington on business. But a glance over Jedediah Smith's western, adventures will show well that he and his men knew practically all of the Fremont ground west of the Rockies. ' He first set out from Great Salt Lake, via Utah Lake, Sevier valley, to the Virgin, then down that to the Colorado, which he recrossed, and cut through the Mojave country to the coast. In June, 1827, he was back In Salt Lake valley for the rendezvous, his crossing of the Sierras having been near Sonora pass, and south of Walker lake. July 13 he started on his second trip through the southwest. On Aug. 10 he struck trouble, and it was trouble that continued incessantly inces-santly all along the southern border, until the Mexican war came pell mell out of the hatred engendered. en-gendered. Mexican offlicals, fearful of American aggression, and possessed of the data concerning Smith's first route into the country, had instructed the Mojave Indians to kill all Americans who attempted at-tempted to follow In Smith's footsteps. Where he had been received kindly the year before, this time he was set upon in an attempted massacre, while his men were on a raft crossing the river. Two Indian guides Were killed, and two of his men, while the rest escaped, bereft and destitute, some of them wounded. ' Smith, once back in California, was thrown into prison in San Jose, and taken under guard -J to Monterey Then finally he was ordered out of the country, via the River Buenaventura. In December De-cember he started, but found the river so high that he camped until April, 1828, when he set out northward up the coast, only to suffer another massacre on the Umquah river, and finally reach Fort Vancouver, destitute and almost without companions. His $20,000 worth of furs had been lifted in the massacre, and the British officials were good enough to send out an armed force to recover them, charging only expenses. This was the act of kindness for which Smith, in return, refused to trap west of the Rocky Mountains in the next season, thus recognizing the claims Great Britain was trying anxiously to make to the Utah country, and especially to the Columbia and Snake river country. That year he worked up the Columbia with British friends to assist him, trapped the Wind river country next year, and on Aug. 4, 1830, sold out to the firm which brought James Bridget J p- eminently Into the fur business. j The date of sale was August 4, and the buy ers were James Brldger, Jean Baptiste Gervais, Henry Fraeb, Milton G. Sublette, and Thomas Fitzpatrick, who was the senior member of the new firm. The sale closed out the fur gathering game in J Utah, except as it was carried on by Jim Brldger -j until the immigration era overtook him. The document with which the firm then selling sell-ing out commenced its history, throws a unique view point into the true inwardness of the trapper trap-per game, and the trading system. It contains a . long invoice of the material which General Ashley Ash-ley bought out presumably to equip Fort Ashley on Utah lake and the prices at which each article is to be transferred is set forth. Hero are some of the items, as gathered from a digest of the document made by Chittenden: Flints, 50 cents per dozen; steel bracelets, $1.50 a pair; looking glasses, 50 cents each; tobacco, JJ $1.50 a pound; brass wire, $2 a pound; 4th proof - rum, $13.50 per gallon; ribbon, $3 a bolt; blankets, blan-kets, $9 each; green blankets, $11 each; scarlet cloth, $6 per yard; butcher knives, 75 cents; northwest fuzils (a trade gun much in demand among the Indians), $24; scarlet cloth, $G a yard; calicos, $1 a yard; vermilllon, $3 per pound; assorted beads, $2.50 per pound. The question now is, with Bridger's fort being be-ing selected as the first movement to take care of the westward emigration, and the thing which first signalled the new era represented in the settlement of Oregon, California, and Utah, and Ashley being honored in the name of a new na-J na-J tional forest, where his explorations were made, how long will It be before something: is down for J" Jedediah S. Smith, to whom southwestward explorations ex-plorations particularly and intimately belong? When will a Utah historical society take up the work of collecting the data appertaining to his - service? . THE RACE MEET. L There Is a great race meet being held at the Fair Grounds, and in spite of the threatening weather, the enthusiastic crowds that have gathered gath-ered there every day so far are the mo3t convincing convinc-ing argument that Salt Lake should have at least a semi-annual meet. It is a sport which, run under un-der the conditions that are now prevailing, should meet with all possible encouragement from local people of all classes, and though Starter Murray has had his own troubles in gaining a few concessions, con-cessions, he has made it possible for Salt Lakers to see the sport as it should be, even on a little half-mile track, and it is to be hoped that he and his associates will be well repaid for the time, trouble and expense necessarily involved in bringing bring-ing their fine strings to Salt Lake. No one could ask for better sport than that on . the opening day, in which the interest centered in the Utah handicap. Every one of the five events was a great race, with a bunch of flyers at the barrier, such as is seldom seen in this part of the country. Doubtless Doubt-less a large crowd will be in attendance today and every one of the twelve remaining days until the finish "of the season. |