On May 27, 1831, a group of New Mexico merchants huddled together on the banks of the Cimarron River in present-day southern Kansas, anxious to put distance between themselves and the party of Comanche they had just traded with. They had come far to conduct their business, and their profits weighed heavy on their minds, but so did the ever-present knowledge that nothing stopped the Comanche from trailing them, killing them all, and taking back everything they had traded. The merchants, known as comancheros, were descendants of Spanish settlers who had intermarried with surrounding tribes, and their way of life in the desolate expanses of New Mexico and West Texas was perpetually dangerous. They had managed to broker mutually beneficial relationships with the Comanche that lasted decades, providing the tribe with goods they could not produce themselves.
The Comanche possessed the largest collective swath of North American territory of any tribe on the continent, rich in land, buffalo meat, hides, and horses, but they had no tradition in pottery or weaving, no access to copper and iron, and prized the cotton shirts, hats, jewelry, and firearms that traders brought them. Just as the comancheros prepared to resume their course southward, one of them spotted a lone figure approaching on horseback only a few hundred yards away. Even at a distance, it was clear the rider was not a Comanche. As he drew nearer, the comancheros could see he was an American.
What they could not have known was that this man was one of the most well-traveled Americans alive, a legendary figure of the frontier whose name would one day be etched into the annals of Western history. The man was Jedediah Strong Smith. In the previous decade, he had seen more of the North American continent than nearly anyone alive. He had come from upstate New York, worked on freighters across the Great Lakes, and made his way to St.
Louis. From there, he had traveled from the Dakotas to the Rocky Mountains, the Mojave Desert, the missions of Southern California, the San Joaquin Valley, the Sierra Nevadas, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and then north through Oregon and Washington into Canada. He had survived deadly attacks from the Arikara in South Dakota, the Mojave in California, and the Umpqua in Oregon. He had worked alongside legendary mountain men like William Ashley, Hugh Glass, Jim Bridger, William Wolfskill, Milton Sublette, Joseph Meek, and Bill Williams.
He had narrowly survived a grizzly bear mauling that required crude frontier surgery to sew his ear back onto his head, a wound that left him permanently scarred and caused him to wear his hair long to hide the disfigurement. He had been detained by Mexican officials in California who were dubiously suspicious of the intentions of these oddly dressed Americans claiming merely to pass through their territory. Through it all, he remained steadfast in his Methodist faith and committed to the venture capitalism he hoped would provide for his family. Only a year before, Smith had returned to St.
Louis and cashed in the pelts he had collected at the cost of so many lives and miles. He swore never to enter the mountains again. He purchased a sizable home on Broadway Street, sent a banknote for fifteen hundred dollars to Ohio to buy land near his brother’s farm, and brought three of his younger brothers to live with him, hoping to provide them with better economic opportunities than he had found at their age. His mother had recently passed away, and guilt hounded him for his long absence from home.
Yet the wanderlust that had driven him to such extremes began to drown out that guilt. He had written to Secretary of War John Eaton requesting to be part of a proposed military expedition into the Rocky Mountains, but he never received a response, and the expedition never materialized. He then turned his attention to publishing his memoirs and the many accurate maps he had compiled during his travels, hoping to share his exploits with the Eastern Seaboard and perhaps even Europe. To do that, he felt he needed to add one more trip to his list of expeditions.
The town of Santa Fe had been growing in population and reputation as a trading post and waypoint on the route to California. After hearing nothing from the Secretary of War, Smith signed on to lead a wagon train to Santa Fe with William Sublette and David Jackson, carrying roughly twenty thousand dollars in goods. He also enlisted Samuel Parkman to help arrange his writings and maps into a publishable manuscript and to polish his Spanish skills so he might better decipher Spanish terms in his diaries. The trail from St.
Louis to Santa Fe was well traveled and considered comparatively safe, despite being over a thousand miles. The wagon train of eighty-three men left in the spring of 1831 in high spirits. At first, all went well. Then trouble began.
On May 19, a company clerk named Mentor, who had long worked for Sublette and Jackson, wandered off from the main party near the Pawnee River and was murdered by Pawnee warriors. Then the water began to run out. By May 27, the party was completely out of water for both men and livestock; all the established water sources on the trail had dried up. That morning, Smith and his partner, a man named Fitzpatrick, headed south, hoping to find a spring on the north side of the Cimarron River.
The river itself flowed through mineral deposits, rendering its water too salty to drink, but several drinkable springs lay nearby. The pair came upon a depression in the flat landscape with damp ground at its lowest point. Smith directed Fitzpatrick to stay and dig while he rode ahead to see if any springs were nearby. Within a few miles, Smith was out of sight of Fitzpatrick.
Then he came into view of the band of comancheros. The legendary mountain man loped his horse toward them, speaking in broken Spanish and asking where water might be found. The comancheros were alarmed. To them, Smith presented a clear and present danger not only to himself but to them as well.
They offered him no water and only pointed toward a spring a few miles away. They also informed him, in concise broken English, that the Comanche were nearby and that he would not be able to avoid them no matter his next move. He was told he must leave immediately, as he presented a liability; should the Comanche find him in their company, they might suppose him to be a spy and kill them all. This was not a risk the comancheros were willing to take.
Smith was on his own. Seeing no better course of action, Smith continued in the direction of the spring. He and his party would surely die without water, and while he knew there was a very real possibility the Comanche would bring him to an even more immediate end, he saw little other choice. As the comancheros watched from a distance, he made his way further south to what is now known as Wagon Bed Spring in southwestern Kansas.
Just before he reached it, a band of fifteen to twenty Comanche came upon him. They had spotted him even before he departed the comanchero party and had spent the time discussing in Spanish what they would do with this trespassing American. Smith did his best to stay calm, hailing the Comanche with a smile and signing to them in the universal sign language of the plains that he was merely passing through and hoping to slake his thirst, for himself and his horse. He searched the faces of the warriors who surrounded him.
The Comanche looked different than any other tribe he had encountered. They were shorter and stockier than their Northern Plains counterparts, with little of the cosmetic adornments of their peers, no war bonnets or breastplates. They cut a stark, terrifying figure even for the most experienced traveler. In accordance with their reputation, none returned Smith’s smile or salutations.
For a few tense seconds, the two parties stared silently at each other. Then the Comanche began to encircle Smith, moving into their positions while taunting his horse, trying to spook it into throwing its rider. Smith still attempted to broker some kind of peace, hoping to trade his valuables for safe passage back to his party. But it quickly became clear the Comanche were not interested in any deal.
As they had Smith half surrounded in a crescent formation, a shot rang out from a Comanche rifle. A lead ball tore into Jedediah Smith’s right shoulder. The noise startled his horse, causing both animal and rider to wheel about 180 degrees. Smith had laid his Kentucky rifle across his lap before being accosted, and as his horse turned, he managed to shoulder the weapon and return fire, killing one of the warriors, whom later accounts would describe as a chief.
As the warrior’s body slumped from his mount and thudded to the hard Kansas dirt, Smith reached for one of the two single-shot pistols tucked in his belt. In the seconds it took to accomplish this, the remaining Comanche warriors, now enraged by the killing of one of their own, pounced upon him and knocked him off his horse. As soon as he hit the ground, Smith knew he was going to die. The Comanche had built their empire on the Southern Plains largely because of the immense buffalo herds that roamed there.
To kill the large, aggressive, and fleet-footed animals, they employed twelve-to-fourteen-foot spears that could stab a buffalo from a distance, striking under the ribs to inflict maximum damage to internal organs. The same tactic was employed against human enemies. From atop their stout ponies, the remaining Comanche drove their lances into the torso of America’s most legendary, accomplished mountain man. The attack was swift and unspeakably violent as the Comanche mocked and clubbed the dying man.
The only mercy was that it was all over in a matter of seconds. As his body lay lifeless, covered in blood and plains dust, the Comanche strapped their dead compatriot to his horse, took Smith’s horse, his guns, and his valuables, and left him to the buzzards and the summer sun. His body would never be found. Days later, the comancheros encountered the Sublette-Jackson party on the Santa Fe Trail.
There, they produced Smith’s pistols and rifle to his grief-stricken younger brother Austin. The comancheros had traded with the Comanche for the items after the murder, acquired the Comanche’s side of the story, and corroborated it with their own eyewitness accounts. These accounts were relayed back to Smith’s elderly widower father in Ohio in a letter from Austin Smith. The letter read: “Your son Jedediah was killed on the 27th of May on his way to Santa Fe by the Comanche Indians.
His party was in distress for water and he had gone alone in search of the above river which he found. He was then attacked by 15 or 20 of them. They succeeded in alarming his horse, not daring to fire on him as long as they kept face to face. As soon as his horse turned they fired and wounded him in the shoulder.
He then fired his gun and killed their head Chief. It is supposed they rushed upon him and dispatched him. ”
An obituary was published that fall in the Illinois Intelligencer, but no mention of his death was made in his adopted hometown of St. Louis.
His memoirs and maps would not be published, and his legacy would be largely forgotten by the public for the better part of a century and a half. Jedediah Smith never married and had no children. In his brief thirty-two years, he had pursued his intentions of wealth and security with an intensity unheard of in American history. The remainder of his party on the Santa Fe Trail, including Sublette, Jackson, and Austin Smith, all found water and eventually made their way safely to Santa Fe.
Austin would pursue his own successful career in mercantilism, and Sublette and Jackson would continue on to California to return with a large herd of horses and mules to trade in Santa Fe and Missouri. In the entirety of 1831, the only lives lost on the Santa Fe Trail were those of the unfortunate Mentor at the hands of the Pawnee and Jedediah Smith at the hands of the Comanche. One of the most expansive and interesting lives in American history was snuffed out, a stranger in a strange land, in the wrong place at the wrong time.