Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man. by Barton H. Barbour

Abstract

 Reviews today provides a warning for escape,which did not exist in 1903. Despite a few minor quibbles concerning community context, the author has written a useful and as complete an account of the Heppner Flood and its consequences for the people of that town as records will allow. The book’s ultimate strength is the way it recaptures the human dimension of the story by showing how various individuals attempted to make sense of what happened to them and their community as a result of an overwhelming natural disaster. William F. Willingham Portland, Oregon Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man by Barton H. Barbour University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2009. Illustrations, maps, index. 288 pages. $26.95 cloth. Mountain man stereotypes have long dominated popular images of the fur-trading enterprise in the Rocky Mountain West during the first half of the nineteenth century. Telling and retelling their exploits has made them larger-than-life figures and tended to simplify our understanding of a complex era and a complicated business.In Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man, historian Barton Barbour plays off the typecast roles fur trappers have played in the western American saga by interpreting Smith’s life in the context of an era of aggressiveexpansion.Smith,Barbourargues, was a complex man who did not mistake the historic role of the fur trade enterprise.He was a man who lent his energy to the expansion of American enterprise and political hegemony to the FarWest as“a walking symbol of Jacksonian America” (p. 264–65). Barbour’s treatment of Smith’s life in the West is a comprehensive and thoughtful discussion of the trader’s brief but significant experience in western America. Smith had been born in western New York, where his neighbor was Patrick Gass, veteran of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Whether because of stories from Gass or other sources, Smith longed for adventure as a teenager and struck out west to St. Louis, where he joined William Ashley’s fur trading enterprise in 1822. By 1825, his prowess and energy made him a business partner, and in 1826, he formed his own company with David Jackson and William Sublette. He spent less than a decade in the Far West, but his explorations contributed significantly to American western expansion, even if he did not meet his own ambitions as a trader. Smith died at the hands of Comanches along the Santa Fe Trail in 1831, at the age of thirty-two. Barbour’s book is not so much revisionist as it is new and complete. There is much here that we have long known about Smith, such as his storied and historic treks across the Rockies, the arid Southwest,California,Oregon,and the Columbia Plateau. Other familiar topics and episodes detailed here include Smith’s near scalping by a grizzly bear in 1823, but there is also new information that fills in murky parts of the trader’s peregrinations, especially the tense relations he had in California with Mexican officials who tried to impede his trapping . Barbour draws on recently discovered documents that bolster his interpretation of Smith as an advocate of American expansion. The author dispenses with the oft-repeated characterization of Smith as a Bible-toting mountain man who tried to convert Indians to Christianity. Smith was deeply religious, Barbour concedes, but“his western career was economically, not ecclesiastically, motivated” (p. 261). Readers of Oregon Historical Quarterly will find interest in the author’s coverage of Smith’s historic transit of Oregon in 1828 and the famous ambush of his party on the Umpqua River near present-day Reedsport by Kelawat-  OHQ vol. 111, no. 1 sets. The attack, which took place while Smith was absent, left more than a dozen of Smith’s men dead or dying and the survivors,including Smith, on foot and defenseless. After they had slogged on north to Fort Vancouver, Hudson’s Bay Company Chief Factor John McLoughlin listened to their tale of disaster and detailed a party underAlexander McLeod to the Umpqua to secure Smith’s property and tamp down the Kelawatsets’ animus against traders. Smith sought vengeance, a reaction that Barbour arguesfitsahard-nosedattitudetowardNatives that Smith consistently exhibited during his...