Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [15]
Two weeks after the rendezvous, Smith was, incredibly, on the way to California again, anxious to relieve the men who had remained on the Stanislaus and to trap out the beaver of the Sierra Nevada before someone else discovered them. His route was pretty much the same as the time before. While crossing the Colorado, however, his party was ambushed by a band of Mojave Indians; nine of the nineteen men survived, among them Smith. Fleeing across the desert, they finally reached southern California, where Smith left three wounded men to recover. The rest of the party then joined the trappers they had left the year before. (How they managed to find each other is a subject Smith passes over lightly in his diary.) Both groups, by now, were bereft of supplies. Selecting his two friendliest surviving men, Smith rode across the Central Valley to the missions at Santa Clara and San Jose to barter plews for food, medicine, clothing, and ammunition. As soon as the members of the party were sighted, they were dragged off to jail in Monterey. Bail was set at $30,000, an amount calculated to ensure that they would remain there at the governor’s whim. Smith’s luck, however, seemed to ricochet between the abominable and sublime; a wealthy sea captain from New England, who was holding over in Monterey, was so impressed by Smith’s courage that he arranged to post the entire amount.
Freed but banished forever from California, Smith gathered the remnants of his expedition, and they wandered up the Sacramento Valley, trapping as they went. It was by then the middle of winter, and the snowpack in the Sierra was twelve feet deep; crossing the range was out of the question. Smith decided to venture back toward the ocean. Crossing the Yolla Bolly and Trinity mountains, the party found itself in a rain forest dominated by a gigantic species of conifer they had never seen. Reaching the Pacific near the mouth of the river that now bears Smith’s name, they slogged northward through country which can receive a hundred inches of rain during six winter months. At the mouth of the Umpqua River, they stopped to rest. Smith went off to reconnoiter in an improvised canoe. While he was gone, a band of the Umpqua tribe stole into camp and murdered all but three of the men. Fleeing through the tangled forest beneath giant trees, two of the survivors found Smith, and they raced off together in the direction of Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. They arrived there in August of 1828, emaciated and in shock. Their last surviving companion straggled in after them; he had found his way alone.
The British, by then well established in Oregon, considered the attack ominous enough to demand a reprisal. An expedition was dispatched for the Umpqua Valley, where the marauding band was cornered; thirty-nine horses and Smith’s seven hundred beaver pelts were seized. Although the British were still smarting from the War of 1812, the commander refused to let Smith compensate him for his trouble; instead, he paid him $3,200 for the horses and pelts. He also offered the Americans a long rest at the fort, since it would take most of the winter for them to tell all their tales. In the spring of 1829, the assembled force of Fort Vancouver watched in disbelief as Smith and Arthur Black, the last of the four survivors who still retained their nerve, strode confidently through the gates and up the Columbia River, en route to the June rendezvous. “They are sporting with life or courting danger to madness,” remarked the commander, who never went out with fewer than forty men. Within twelve weeks, Smith and Black were back among their companions in Jackson Hole.
After six years of hair-raising adventures, Jedediah Smith