Goodwin's weekly : a thinking paper for thinking people. [volume], October 17, 1908, Page 4, Image 4

About Goodwin's weekly : a thinking paper for thinking people. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1902-1919

Image provided by: University of Utah, Marriott Library

                
H -J'flSiPrcHjPEK
I THE TRAIL OF BLEACHED BONES Russell
I Take the word of the Jalt Lake Route for It,
I as given in a book of the route published under
j the editorship of Douglas "Whito, just after the
J road was completed, and the "Mormon" trail to
j Los Angeles will bo the theme described in
' i treating the route's trail-blazers.
Consider the word of the older available Utah
histories, and there will be seldom if over a sug
) gestion that any other party than that under
1 Rich and Lyman, which 'settled San Bernardino
in 1851, was a "trail-blazer" along the route. In
i fact, the survivors of the San Bernardino col-
onization wear "trail-blazer" badges furnished by
tf Senator W. A. Clark as a token of his regard
jj for them.
j In this series on the Great Uasin pathfinder,
I " it has already been considered how Etionne Pro
f vost discovered tho South Pass, and sent Gen
oral Ashley out of Utah, back through it with the
Ogden furs in 1S25, and how Ashley discovered
1 that the Green river went to the Pacific in that
same year, and has only just been given his
I credit, in having the Ashley forest named after
I him this summer.
'l This paper takes up the trail to Los Angeles,
1 and the most shabbily treated of all the early
Utah inhabitants and explorers. And here it
H $M should be explained that no blame attaches to
B i'tjjj anyone, that tho dust of forgetfulness has fallen
B jljjjl over those whoso exploits were the most hardy,
B f? ' and brought the greatest results in attracting
B Jr followers towards the paths they made. We saw
B m before how so great a government explorer as
B ( i i , Major Powell knew totally nothing of what Ash-
B ley had done In the river he voyaged on, two
B II decades before this time. The thing that worked
1 A to the neglect of the subject of this paper, Jede-
l i diah S. Smith, was that interest, except in a very
El limited circle, did not attach to this country on
B j 'h ( the part of the nation now governing it. "When
B ifj later that interest was found to bo awake, the
B iJv men who had hallooed to it, and prodded it, and
B ji'jr stirred it into conscious activity, were perhaps
B j.Jj too far out on tho frontier to be given notice, or
B '. fell, as did Jedediah Smith, with a Comanche's
B j j arrow in his back, just at tho beginning of a na-
B I j '' tional interest in his work.
B I 'I j In tllQ conception of Utah as a barren wildor-
B I'g ! ness to which people, "except a few straggling
f t' i hunters and trappers," first oame in 1847, the
SI first step to discredit the early inhabitants is
I taken.
! it ,
With this view in mind it was difficult for the
writer to gather a conception of the trail from
southern Utah to Los Angeles as one on which
an extensive interstate traffic had existed for
twenty years before 1847, a trail which Fremont
found in 1843, nine years before it was "path
found" by the first party given recognition, to be
a long trail of bleached and bleaching bones,
noting th route of the Santa Fe caravans, bound
for the California missions, and Mexican settle
ments. The oldest of them were black with de
cay. The newest in his day we. from his ex
hausted horses, and even from a good many of
his company who fell too far in the rear and
were murdered by the Indians who infested it.
The trouble was not in Utah, or a spirit of
unfairness here to those deserving credit. It
was a national trouble, that everywhere now is
being adjusted. Jedediah Smith's explorations
between Great Salt Lake and Los Angeles
brought him first across the Sierra Nevada moun
tains, curiously enough from east to west. The
records of what he did, come to the historian
with patient digging, and each year more and
more of them are coming to light. They never
would have fallen intb forgotten neglect, except
that the trail seemed to have no importance to
America at the time, and when the consciousness
of this importance came to the people, the rec
ords were not easy to get at and they seized the
most available, honored the first trail-blazers
they could locate, and left the earlier work buried
deep in the archives of the fur trade, from which
historians are now digging it up. Fortunately
for this chapter of Utah's history, Henry M.
Chittenden hah dug through the St. Louis
archives, waded through the files of the St.
Louis papers, and gone through the government
reports and maps made during the era when the
actual discoveries were being made.
His work it is which makes it possible to tell
of Jedediah Smith in any complete way, and if
over a historical society is formed in Utah to
recreate these early characters and read them
permanently into the record, it will find Jedediah
Smith the most shabbily treated of all of them,
and with a record that places his work of the
greatest importance.
Because one of his men was severely wounded
on its banks, and killed a little farther on, the
Virgin river carries its name. Because he made
his camp upon the stream after being ordered out
of California by the Mexican governor, the Amer
ican river is still known in history with a name
dating to that incident. He it was who first car
ried a fear of the Americans into the hearts of
the placid Mexican Californians. He was one of
tho first great mountaineers to meet his death.
The others lived on. Jim Bridger, his compan
ion, outlived the trapper era, and the trader era
as well, and worked through the era of govern
ment scouting, to end up as a respectable settle
ment farmer on a quiet, home-like farm. There
fore, to some extent he came into contact with
army officers, literary men, and newspaper re
porters, so that some record of his work came
into general literature.
The writer's interest in the trapping and ex
ploring era commenced with an explanation from
John Hunt, son of Jefferson Hunt, who guided
the Mormon settlers to San Bernardino in 1851,
that the party had a map of the route given
them by the mountaineers. The records of Kit
Carson showed with very little reading that the
conception of him as a wild, romantic half-Indian
was wrong, and of the trappers as Isolated indi
viduals, roaming at random, and living corrupt,
licentious lives, was equally wrong. It was not
until the days of Buffalo Bill and the pony
express that the frontiersman known to litera
ture began to develop. To his era the hard drink
ing, the careless shooting, and the gun-protected
card game belonged. It was thirty years before
they came that the explorers did their work and
went their way. And men whom we remember
as "mountaineers" did not pack a little merchan
dise on their back. They headed great companies.
Their pack animals numbered into the hundreds.
They .represented great fortunes put into com
merce for Indian trade, and maintained a dis
cipline that would have fitted these men for the
greater roles in any variation of life's drama.
General Ashley, for instance, lost $10,000 in mer
chandise when a single one of his fleet of boats
sank in the Mississippi.
Bancroft, it is true, does not picture them
this way. But, however formidable Bancroft's
many volumes of history may look from the out
side, tho more one has to do with them inside
the covers, the less he wants to have. With an
air sniffing superiority, Bancroft seemed to burn
with a desire to belittle every man who had
preceded him into the West, and to pre-empt
the whole section for himself alone. To get a
view point on the man, a choice bit of reading
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