After all, then, it did not seem to be so hard to get across the country in those early times. Nor was it so difficult to return. Walker had fifty-two men and three hundred and sixty-five horses when he started eastward in February, 1834. He had, of course, met that Spanish civilization which first explored the Colorado River and first settled the Pacific slope. Walker now had guides, Indians of the land, who led him eastward across the Sierras, somewhat south of the place where he crossed going west.
Once over the mountains, he headed northward along the eastern edge of the range, until he intercepted his own west-bound trail, which he followed back until he reached what is now known as the Humboldt River. Thence he went north to the Snake River, and so on back to the rendezvous on the Bear River. At the rendezvous he made public what information he could add to the general store. Thus it was, perhaps, that Carson and his confrères learned more than they had known before of the beaver country beyond the Sierras. That rendezvous of the old mountain men--ah! who will one day understand it and immortalize it? That was a great market, a great journal, a great college! There indeed maps were made! There indeed geography grew! That was where the West was really learned ab initio.
This mountain market, this map-making college of a primeval West, was first established in 1824; hence we may say that Walker, in 1834, had no license to be called an old-timer in the West. In 1834 the old West of the adventurers was done.[45] He was before Frémont, before Carson's leadership of Frémont; but there was some one else before him, a man who had crossed the continent and had seen the western sea even before Kit Carson made his first journey thither with the men of Taos and Bent's Fort neighborhood; even before Walker's successful expedition was conceived.
Who was this earlier man, this first man to cross to the Pacific by the land trail? No less than one Smith, Jedediah Smith, a man of no rank nor title, and all too little station in American history. This was the man that first led the trappers from the Rockies west to California. This man, Jedediah Smith, is indeed a hero. Not a boaster but an adventurer; not a talker but a doer of deeds; the very man fit to be type of the Western man to come. Smith himself was the product of a generation of the American West, and though we search all the annals of that West, we shall find no more satisfying record, no more eye-filling picture, nor any greater figure than his own. He is worthy of a place by the side of that other Smith, the John Smith who explored Virginia, near the starting place of the American star of empire. What pity that Washington Irving did not find Jedediah Smith rather than the inconsequent Bonneville, and so immortalize the right man with his beautifying pen! There is a great hero story left untold!