Our Smith was a member of that firm of young men, Smith, Sublette and Jackson, who bought out the business of that first great fur trader, General Ashley. It goes without saying that Smith knew all the upper country of the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the South Pass region, the Sweetwater, the Green, the Bear, long before he first resolved to gratify his love of initial adventure and to head out across that unknown country of the far Southwest.
We are getting close to the first of new-American things when we come to the story of his journey. There had been early Spaniards, there had been Indians perhaps, who knew the way across, but there was none to pilot Smith. He started of his own resolve and traveled under his own guidance. They had not told him, as they had told Kit Carson, of the excellent beaver country of the Sacramento. The vast country beyond the Great Salt Lake had been too forbidding for even that later hardy soul to undertake as yet; and the reaches of the Rockies above and below the eastern edge of that desert had contented all of Bridger's hardy companions. The more reason, therefore, thought Smith, that he and his little party of fifteen men should cross the desert; and he did so, quite as though it were a matter of course.
Having no guide, he simply went west as well as he could, clinging to grass and water as he went. He left the rendezvous near Salt Lake in 1826, crossed the Sevier valley, struck the Virgin or Adams River, followed the Colorado for a time, and at length broke boldly away over the awful California desert, until, in such way as we can but imagine, he reached at length the Spanish settlements of San Diego. This was in the month of October. Smith crossed the Sierras near the point where runs to-day the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railroad. He was somewhat in advance of the engineers.
Although we do not learn that Smith had any guide or any advance information, it seems that the Spaniards did not appreciate the difficulties under which he had visited them. They bade him leave the country at once. Perhaps Smith was not quite candid with the Spaniards, for, though he promised compliance, instead of starting directly back to the eastward, he went north four hundred miles, put out his traps and wintered on the San Joaquin and Merced rivers. He found there a trapper's El Dorado.