Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [14]
Smith’s party skirted Great Salt Lake and continued westward, becoming the first whites, and probably the first humans, to cross the Bonneville Salt Flats—a hundred miles of horrifyingly barren terrain. They then struck across what is now eastern Oregon, eventually reaching a British fort near the Columbia River. Sensing something less than a generous welcome (the British still wanted at least a piece of this subcontinent), the party turned around, and was back on the Green River by July of 1825, in time for the trappers’ first rendezvous.
The rendezvous was the first all-male ritual in the non-Indian West—a kind of Baghdad bazaar leavened by fighting, fornication, and adventure stories that would have seemed outlandish if they hadn’t, for the most part, been true. Trappers arrived from hundreds of miles around with their pelts, which they traded for whiskey sold by St. Louis entrepreneurs at $25 the gallon, for ammunition, and for staples such as squaws. There was usually carnage, inhibited mainly by the water the traders had added to the whiskey. At the Green River rendezvous, however, Smith and two of his partners, David Jackson and William Sublette, forsook the festivities for serious business. They had decided to take over the Missouri Fur Trading Company from its owner, General William Ashley, who had amassed a substantial fortune in an astonishingly short time. When the deal was consummated, Smith was given the assignment he coveted—to be in charge of finding new sources of pelts.
Within days of returning from Oregon, Smith was already heading out with a party of fourteen men from Cache Valley, Utah, in search of virgin beaver streams. They followed the languid Sevier River through the red-and-blond deserts of southwestern Utah, then jumped across to the Virgin River, which led them to the Colorado above the present site of Hoover Dam. Unknowingly, they were breaking the Mormon Outlet Trail, by which the secrets of successful irrigation would migrate to California and Arizona and be applied with such ambition that, within a scant century and a half, there would be proposals to import irrigation water from Alaska along the same route. By the time they reached the Colorado River, winter was already near; they had trapped only a few beaver, and didn’t feel like turning back. Anxious to find warmth and food, Smith decided to lead the party across the Mojave Desert toward the ocean coast. “A complete barrens” was his description, “a country of starvation.” After several exhausting days (they had to carry all their water), the explorers sighted two tall ranges to the west. They crossed the pass between them and found themselves in the Los Angeles Basin, at Mission San Gabriel Archangel in Spanish California. The padres’ reception was friendly, but the Spanish governor’s was not. Ever since hearing about the expedition of “Capitán Merrie Weather,” his attitude toward Yankees had tilted toward paranoia. Exiled from the basin, Smith led his party up the San Joaquin Valley and into the Sierra Nevada, where, along the Stanislaus River, they found beaver in urban concentrations. After a few weeks of trapping, Smith loaded hundreds of plews on horses, selected his two toughest men, and set off across the spine of the Sierra Nevada into what is now Nevada.
Of all the routes across the Great Basin, the one he chose is the longest and driest. U.S. Highway 6 now runs parallel and slightly south; the trip is so desolate and frightening that many motorists will not take it, even in an air-conditioned car loaded with water jugs; they go north, along Interstate 80, which stays reassuringly in sight of the Humboldt River. In six hundred miles of travel,