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By Root 1602 0

of the sky. There was game—at times a ludicrous abundance of it—but there were no trees. To an easterner, no trees meant no possibility of agriculture. If the potential wealth of the land could be judged by the layers of fat on its inhabitants, it was worthwhile to note that the only fat Indians seen by Lewis and Clark were those on the Pacific Coast, sating themselves on salmon and clams. Reading their journals, one gets the impression that Lewis and Clark simply didn’t know what to think. They had never seen a landscape like this, never guessed one could even exist. Each “fertile prairie” and “happy prospect” is counterweighted by a “forbidding plain.” Louisiana, though penetrated, remained an enigma.

The explorers who followed Lewis and Clark were more certain of their impressions. In the same year the expedition returned, General Zebulon Montgomery Pike crossed the plains on a more southerly course, through what was to become Kansas and Colorado. There he saw “tracts of many leagues ... where not a speck of vegetable matter existed” and dismissed the whole country as an arid waste. “These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time as celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa,” wrote Pike. Major Stephen Long, who followed Pike a decade later, had a similar impression. Long referred to the whole territory between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains as the Great American Desert—a phrase and an image that held for almost half a century. The desert might have sat there even longer in the public mind, ineradicable and fixed, had not a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition by the name of John Colter noticed, in the rivers and streams tumbling out of the Rocky Mountains, a plenitude of beaver.

The settlement of the American West owed itself, as much as anything, to a hat. The hat was made of beaver felt, and, during the 1820s and 1830s, no dedicated follower of fashion would settle for anything less. Demand was great enough, and beavers east of the Mississippi were scarce enough, that a cured plew could fetch $6 to $10—at the time, a week’s wages. If one was reckless, adventurous, mildly to strongly sociopathic, and used to living by one’s wits, it was enough money to make the ride across the plains and winters spent amid the hostile Blackfoot and Crow worth the danger and travail. The mountain men never numbered more than a few hundred, but their names—Bridger, Jackson, Carson, Colter, Bent, Walker, Ogden, Sublette—are writ large all over the American West. Supreme outdoorsmen, they could read important facts in the angle and depth of a bear track; they could hide from the Blackfoot in an icy stream, breathing through a hollow stem, and live out a sudden blizzard in the warm corpse of an eviscerated mountain sheep. As trappers, they were equally proficient—so proficient that within a few years of their arrival in the Rocky Mountain territory, the beavers had already begun to thin out. But that was all the more reason for the more restless of them, especially those backed by eastern money, to go off exploring unknown parts for more beaver streams. And no explorer in the continent’s history was more compulsive and indefatigable than Jedediah Smith.

In 1822, when he joined the Rocky Mountain Fur Trading Company, Smith was twenty-two years old, and had never seen the other side of the Rockies. Within two years, however, he was in charge of an exploratory party of trappers heading into utterly unfamiliar territory along the Green River. They found beaver there in fabulous numbers, and Smith, feeling unneeded, decided to see what lay off to the north and west. With six others, he set a course across the Great Basin toward Great Salt Lake. The landscape was more desolate than anything they had seen. If the Great American Desert was on the other side of the mountains, then what would you call this? Game was pitifully scarce. The herds of buffalo had vanished, and the only creatures appearing in numbers were rattlesnakes and jackrabbits. The few human beings encountered were numbingly primitive. They built