page_title: Jedediah Smith
section_title: Death
hierarchical_section_title: Jedediah Smith / Death
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Santa Fe Trail-
context_page_description: Jedediah Strong Smith, was an American clerk, transcontinental pioneer, frontiersman, hunter, trapper, author, cartographer, and explorer of the Rocky Mountains, the North American West, and the Southwest during the early 19th century. After 75 years of obscurity following his death, Smith was rediscovered as the American whose explorations led to the use of the 20-mile-wide South Pass as the dominant point of crossing the Continental Divide for pioneers on the Oregon Trail.
  Coming from a modest family background, Smith traveled to St. Louis and joined William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry's fur trading company in 1822. Smith led the first documented exploration from the Salt Lake frontier to the Colorado River. From there, Smith's party became the first United States citizens to cross the Mojave Desert into what is now the state of California but which at that time was part of Mexico. On the return journey, Smith and his companions were likewise the first U. S. citizens to explore and cross the Sierra Nevada and the treacherous Great Basin Desert. In the following year, Smith and his companions were the first U.
context_section_description: Having no response from Eaton, Smith joined his partners and left St. Louis to trade in Santa Fe on April 10, 1831.  Smith was leading the caravan on the Santa Fe Trail on May 27, 1831, when he left the group to scout for water near the Lower Spring on the Cimarron River in present-day southwest Kansas. He never returned to the group. The remainder of the party proceeded on to Santa Fe hoping Smith would meet up with them, but he never did. They arrived in Santa Fe on July 4, 1831, and shortly thereafter members of the party discovered a comanchero with some of Smith's personal belongings. It was relayed that Smith had encountered and communicated with a group of comancheros just prior to his approaching a group of Comanche.  Smith tried to negotiate with the Comanche, but they surrounded him in preparation for attack.
  Most likely, the death of Jedediah Smith occurred in what was then Northern Mexico Territory, south of present-day Ulysses, Grant County, Kansas.  According to Smith's grand-nephew, Ezra Delos Smith, there were 20 Comanches in the group. Smith attempted to conciliate with them, until the Comanches scared his horse and shot him in the left shoulder with an arrow. Jedediah fought back, ultimately killing the chief of the warriors. The version written by Austin Smith in letter to his brother Ira four months after Smith's death says that Jedediah killed the "head Chief," but nothing about any other Comanche being wounded or killed.  Josiah Gregg wrote in 1844, that Smith "struggled bravely to the last; and, as the Indians themselves have since related, killed two or three of their party before he was overpowered."  Smith stated that his grand-uncle had fought so valiantly that the Comanche believed "he had been more than mortal, and that he could be immortal it would be better to propitiate his spirit; so they did not mutilate his body, but later gave it the same funeral rites they gave its chief"  Austin Smith, Jedediah's brother, who along with another Smith brother, Peter, was a member of the caravan, was able to retrieve Smith's rifle and pistols that the Indians had taken and traded to the comancheros.
caption: The Santa Fe Trail.
exif: {}