Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (Bison Book S)

First, this is a fascinating book in great part. The author (this book was written in the 1950s) has done an admirable job of taking records and reminiscences that are scant and incomplete and giving as complete a picture as possible of the life of one of the great Mountain Men who helped open the West and expand the United States.One reads in awe of these men who willingly (in chase of profit and adventure) went far into the unknown - an unknown that contained very real known threats of hostile Indians, difficult terrain, large and wild animals and annual snows that could make travel impossible. Jedidiah Smith was one of the ableist and most successful.Smith made the original American traverses through parts of the Rocky Mountains and from the Great Salt Lake to California. He was also the first American I believe to trail northward from California through the Oregon territory. Starvation, thirst, imprisonment and the loss of men, material, beaver pelts and horse flesh attended his adventures (as did success in some years). Twice he was part of parties which lost a dozen or so men to Indian attack. The Spanish, rightly suspicious of this encroaching American who appeared from the East (though Smith himself was only in pursuit of beaver, not an American agent), held he and his men for months as they decided what to do with their neighbors from the expansive next door nation.A man who survived and even flourished in the face of these incredible risks eventually succumbed in the wild lands that had become his home. In addition to luck and fortitude, Smith possessed an incredible optimism and faith (though his faith is stated but little underscored in the book) that helped propel his travels.The reason for three stars are primary the lack of a good map (but also for other criticisms below). There is a map printed over two pages in the book but the writing is so small as to render it useless. Also, so many of Smith and his contemporaries travels and adventures are described using contemporary place names for mountains, valleys, rivers and creeks that a sense of place is rarely developed for the reader below the regional level (Rocky Mountain, Sierra's, California, etc.). While I realize parenthesizing all of the place names with current locations would have been difficult and perhaps disruptive, more maps with a smaller scale would have allowed the reader to have a better idea of where the locations described are and where they are in relation to each other.Also distracting is that long quotes from contemporary letters and reports are excerpted. The author would have done better to get the gist of the original source with more selectivity instead of bogging down the narrative with long writings that go beyond illustrating the point being made.The early travels depicted in the book aren't about Smith directly. He was on the General Ashley early fur expeditions but some of Smith's journals were lost and many in his company were either illiterate or not diarists. His presence is inferred for long stretches of the first 100 or so pages, though the reader does get a good sense for the challenges and organization that went into 1820's ventures into the Rockies in chase of beaver pelts. The book is very good in describing the life and difficulties these adventurers experienced in the largely at the time unknown Rocky Mountains.Also interesting was the business of organizing and supporting fur trappers. The book is good on describing the company system of both the English (from Canada and Vancouver), our Americans and the intersection of both with the free trappers who were also about beavering for wealth. I would have liked more detail on the annual rendezvous in the Green River area, but it is noted. Other accounts I've read describe a combination annual trade faire and bacchanal with native and non-native peoples in attendance. That system of bringing provisions every July to an agreed to meeting place and exchanging the pelts there was a brilliant business innovation that did much to create the profits that sustained the fur trade for its time of prevalence.In this book, one is constantly impressed with how notions of risk taking have changed over the centuries. While many in the 1820's risked capital as we do today in pursuit of wealth, the earlier era held life much less dear and the loss to privation, arrow, tomahawk, or the elements was accepted as part of the cost of doing business. I guess analogous today would be the world's wholesale and retail criminal enterprises in narcotics and flesh. Legitimate business today is rarely bought with human loss at anywhere near the levels that were commonplace in this frontier era.All in all an interesting book with the deficiencies noted.

Jedediah Smith's life in the west is a truly amazing tale of adventure, endurance, violence, devotion, and courage.Jedediah Smith was a very interesting man, perhaps an enigma. Well educated and deeply religious, he chose to spend much of his life in a lawless, bookless society. No doubt the irresistable call of adventure as well as the curiosity as to what lies on the other side of that hill called the young man to this life.Most amazing is the stoic response to incredible hardships these men showed. Being attacked by indians, scalped by a bear, lost in the mountains and walking across vast, unknown deserts did not deter this man. Remarkable!Jedediah Smith's journal is one of the few sources of information about the lives and travels of the mountain men of the early 1800s. Imagine the stories that would be available to us had more of the mountain men been able to document their adventures.

This book was so bad I was tempted to give up after 100 pages, something I almost never do. But this guy, Smith, is so famous I kept on to the bitter end. And bitter it was, I've never looked forward to the end of book more.Part of my problem is that I really only like to read first-person narratives. I've read at least 15 such books over the past 5 years on early fur trading activities in North America. This is the first I've read by an historian.The book does briefly become a human narrative in a couple spots. Otherwise, Smith's story is "fleshed out" by giving endless details of the business side of his activities.One thing that was particularly aggravating was that no effort was made to understand the hostile attacks of the Indians on Smith's parties. One big factor, I believe, is that these trapping parties were seen as competitive and damaging. These tribes had been trapping and trading with various fur trading companies for over a hundred years and had become dependent on European goods, especially firearms and ammunition. Trapping parties like Smith's had no stake in the country they traversed and practiced total trapping, leaving no further generations of beaver possible. The Indians are portrayed as either bland and bovine or perversely blood-thirsty.Smith himself doesn't really come across as that likeable. He seems to be greedy, prudish and impulsive. Nonetheless, he's portrayed in this book as some kind of martyr to American free enterprise and the drive for geo-political expansion.Another irritating thing was the tendency of the author in the first half of the book to use exuberant and flowery language to enliven his leaden litany of dull facts.This is the first Bison Book I've been really disappointed in.

Arrived as promised was better than advertised will buy again

Amazing, well documented book. Easy read, not a drab historic tome. Drop right in with the characters of this interesting time, just before the west is opened. Journey across the no-mans land between St. Louis and California. Witness the discoveries of the ubiquitous, South Pass and the Great Salt Lake. How could one furry animal influence the political boundaries and economies we live with today?

I purchased this for my 11 year old to use for a research report. The way it is written makes it a very difficult read. He is a fluent reader but it just didn't connect with him. I read some of it and it is very difficult to follow at times.

He was a very moral man and a Bible carrying trapper. He was one of the first who went from the Misssiour river to the Pacific. The suffering he endured is hard to believe amid our lives of luxuray and plenty. They had to eat horse flesh, adn dogs when necessary and fight Indians. He lost his life at the hands of Indians. A great figure in the time of mountian men.

In the year 1800 a vast area of North America west of the Missouri river was virtually unknown to white people. There were a few small settlements on the Pacific coast but inland was a huge blank area on the map. President Thomas Jefferson wanted to know who lived in the plains and mountains of the west and what resources it contained so in 1804 he commissioned the first expedition called the Corps of Discovery led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to survey and map this area. In the three decades following this expedition a number of white trappers called mountain men travelled across the region hunting for beavers whose highly prized skins were used for hats by the fashionable folk of the east and in Europe.No mountain man knew these lands and the native peoples who lived there better than Jedediah Strong Smith who was born in 1799. He left home in 1821 and after 1822 he trapped beaver in the rivers of the Rockies and in the following years took part in several important expeditions to Missouri, Oregon and California. He was an explorer at heart as well as someone who trapped for a living and he kept meticulous records of his travels intending to share his findings with the world but his early death at the hands of Comanches on the Sante Fe Trail in 1831 led to his findings being delayed for a decade after his untimely death.Unlike most mountain men he never drank intoxicents or smoked tobacco and he was a very serious and deeply religious man. He was trusted by everyone who came to know him and he became a legend in the west during his lifetime. He was perhaps the most important of the early explorers of the west prior to the movement of the first wagon trails. He had several close encounters with native tribesmen and on one occasion with a grizzly bear which tore his face open.Dale Morgan has written a fascinating and exciting tribute to Smith which emphasises how important Smith was in opening up and mapping the American west and the contribution he made towards the settlement of this part of the continent. Smith and a few other mountain men like John Colter, Joe Walker, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger and Joe Meek blazed trails through the Rockies to the Pacific and the stories about how they did this and how they lived makes terrific reading.

An interesting book on a subject with which I am fascinated.