Cadillac Desert (5 page)

The country Lewis and Clark saw amazed, appalled, and enchanted them. Above all, it bewildered them. They had seen the western plains at their wettest—in the springtime of an apparently wet year—but still there were few rivers, and full ones were fewer. The sky was so immense it swallowed the landscape, but the land swallowed up the provenance of the sky. There was game—at times a ludicrous abundance of it—but there were no trees. To an easterner, no trees meant no possibility of agriculture. If the potential wealth of the land could be judged by the layers of fat on its inhabitants, it was worthwhile to note that the only fat Indians seen by Lewis and Clark were those on the Pacific Coast, sating themselves on salmon and clams. Reading their journals, one gets the impression that Lewis and Clark simply didn’t know what to think. They had never seen a landscape like this, never guessed one could even exist. Each “fertile prairie” and “happy prospect” is counterweighted by a “forbidding plain.” Louisiana, though penetrated, remained an enigma.

The explorers who followed Lewis and Clark were more certain of their impressions. In the same year the expedition returned, General Zebulon Montgomery Pike crossed the plains on a more southerly course, through what was to become Kansas and Colorado. There he saw “tracts of many leagues ... where not a speck of vegetable matter existed” and dismissed the whole country as an arid waste. “These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time as celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa,” wrote Pike. Major Stephen Long, who followed Pike a decade later, had a similar impression. Long referred to the whole territory between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains as the Great American Desert—a phrase and an image that held for almost half a century. The desert might have sat there even longer in the public mind, ineradicable and fixed, had not a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition by the name of John Colter noticed, in the rivers and streams tumbling out of the Rocky Mountains, a plenitude of beaver.

The settlement of the American West owed itself, as much as anything, to a hat. The hat was made of beaver felt, and, during the 1820s and 1830s, no dedicated follower of fashion would settle for anything less. Demand was great enough, and beavers east of the Mississippi were scarce enough, that a cured plew could fetch $6 to $10—at the time, a week’s wages. If one was reckless, adventurous, mildly to strongly sociopathic, and used to living by one’s wits, it was enough money to make the ride across the plains and winters spent amid the hostile Blackfoot and Crow worth the danger and travail. The mountain men never numbered more than a few hundred, but their names—Bridger, Jackson, Carson, Colter, Bent, Walker, Ogden, Sublette—are writ large all over the American West. Supreme outdoorsmen, they could read important facts in the angle and depth of a bear track; they could hide from the Blackfoot in an icy stream, breathing through a hollow stem, and live out a sudden blizzard in the warm corpse of an eviscerated mountain sheep. As trappers, they were equally proficient—so proficient that within a few years of their arrival in the Rocky Mountain territory, the beavers had already begun to thin out. But that was all the more reason for the more restless of them, especially those backed by eastern money, to go off exploring unknown parts for more beaver streams. And no explorer in the continent’s history was more compulsive and indefatigable than Jedediah Smith.

In 1822, when he joined the Rocky Mountain Fur Trading Company, Smith was twenty-two years old, and had never seen the other side of the Rockies. Within two years, however, he was in charge of an exploratory party of trappers heading into utterly unfamiliar territory along the Green River. They found beaver there in fabulous numbers, and Smith, feeling unneeded, decided to see what lay off to the north and west. With six others, he set a course across the Great Basin toward Great Salt Lake. The landscape was more desolate than anything they had seen. If the Great American Desert was on the other side of the mountains, then what would you call this? Game was pitifully scarce. The herds of buffalo had vanished, and the only creatures appearing in numbers were rattlesnakes and jackrabbits. The few human beings encountered were numbingly primitive. They built no lodges, used the crudest tools, made no art. They subsisted, from all appearances, on roots and insects; a live gecko made a fine repast. Mark Twain, encountering some of the last of the wild Digger Indians half a century later, called them “the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen.” But they were, as Twain noted, merely a reflection of the landscape they found themselves in.

Smith’s party skirted Great Salt Lake and continued westward, becoming the first whites, and probably the first humans, to cross the Bonneville Salt Flats—a hundred miles of horrifyingly barren terrain. They then struck across what is now eastern Oregon, eventually reaching a British fort near the Columbia River. Sensing something less than a generous welcome (the British still wanted at least a piece of this subcontinent), the party turned around, and was back on the Green River by July of 1825, in time for the trappers’ first rendezvous.

The rendezvous was the first all-male ritual in the non-Indian West—a kind of Baghdad bazaar leavened by fighting, fornication, and adventure stories that would have seemed outlandish if they hadn’t, for the most part, been true. Trappers arrived from hundreds of miles around with their pelts, which they traded for whiskey sold by St. Louis entrepreneurs at $25 the gallon, for ammunition, and for staples such as squaws. There was usually carnage, inhibited mainly by the water the traders had added to the whiskey. At the Green River rendezvous, however, Smith and two of his partners, David Jackson and William Sublette, forsook the festivities for serious business. They had decided to take over the Missouri Fur Trading Company from its owner, General William Ashley, who had amassed a substantial fortune in an astonishingly short time. When the deal was consummated, Smith was given the assignment he coveted—to be in charge of finding new sources of pelts.

Within days of returning from Oregon, Smith was already heading out with a party of fourteen men from Cache Valley, Utah, in search of virgin beaver streams. They followed the languid Sevier River through the red-and-blond deserts of southwestern Utah, then jumped across to the Virgin River, which led them to the Colorado above the present site of Hoover Dam. Unknowingly, they were breaking the Mormon Outlet Trail, by which the secrets of successful irrigation would migrate to California and Arizona and be applied with such ambition that, within a scant century and a half, there would be proposals to import irrigation water from Alaska along the same route. By the time they reached the Colorado River, winter was already near; they had trapped only a few beaver, and didn’t feel like turning back. Anxious to find warmth and food, Smith decided to lead the party across the Mojave Desert toward the ocean coast. “A complete barrens” was his description, “a country of starvation.” After several exhausting days (they had to carry all their water), the explorers sighted two tall ranges to the west. They crossed the pass between them and found themselves in the Los Angeles Basin, at Mission San Gabriel Archangel in Spanish California. The padres’ reception was friendly, but the Spanish governor’s was not. Ever since hearing about the expedition of “Capitán Merrie Weather,” his attitude toward Yankees had tilted toward paranoia. Exiled from the basin, Smith led his party up the San Joaquin Valley and into the Sierra Nevada, where, along the Stanislaus River, they found beaver in urban concentrations. After a few weeks of trapping, Smith loaded hundreds of plews on horses, selected his two toughest men, and set off across the spine of the Sierra Nevada into what is now Nevada.

Of all the routes across the Great Basin, the one he chose is the longest and driest. U.S. Highway 6 now runs parallel and slightly south; the trip is so desolate and frightening that many motorists will not take it, even in an air-conditioned car loaded with water jugs; they go north, along Interstate 80, which stays reassuringly in sight of the Humboldt River. In six hundred miles of travel, Smith’s party crossed three small inconstant streams. That they survived at all is a miracle. “My arrival caused a considerable bustle in camp,” he wrote in his diary after arriving in time for the second rendezvous on the Bear River in Utah. “A small cannon, brought up from St. Louis, was loaded and fired for a salute.... Myself and party had been given up for lost.”

Two weeks after the rendezvous, Smith was, incredibly, on the way to California again, anxious to relieve the men who had remained on the Stanislaus and to trap out the beaver of the Sierra Nevada before someone else discovered them. His route was pretty much the same as the time before. While crossing the Colorado, however, his party was ambushed by a band of Mojave Indians; nine of the nineteen men survived, among them Smith. Fleeing across the desert, they finally reached southern California, where Smith left three wounded men to recover. The rest of the party then joined the trappers they had left the year before. (How they managed to find each other is a subject Smith passes over lightly in his diary.) Both groups, by now, were bereft of supplies. Selecting his two friendliest surviving men, Smith rode across the Central Valley to the missions at Santa Clara and San Jose to barter plews for food, medicine, clothing, and ammunition. As soon as the members of the party were sighted, they were dragged off to jail in Monterey. Bail was set at $30,000, an amount calculated to ensure that they would remain there at the governor’s whim. Smith’s luck, however, seemed to ricochet between the abominable and sublime; a wealthy sea captain from New England, who was holding over in Monterey, was so impressed by Smith’s courage that he arranged to post the entire amount.

Freed but banished forever from California, 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 sought.

There were those who believed, in the 1830s, that the Louisiana Purchase had been a waste of $15 million—that the whole billion acres would remain as empty as Mongolia or the Sahara. And then, just a generation later, there were those who believed a billion people were destined to settle there. It seemed there was only one person in the whole United States with the wisdom, the scientific detachment, and the explorer’s insight to dissect both myths and find the truth that lay buried within.