page_title: Jedediah Smith
section_title: First trip to California, 1826–27
hierarchical_section_title: Jedediah Smith / Second Rendezvous of 1826 / First trip to California, 1826–27
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: Smith and his party of 15 other men left the Bear River on August 7, 1826, and after retrieving the cache he had left earlier headed south through present-day Utah and Nevada to the Colorado River, finding increasingly harsh conditions and difficult travel. Finding shelter in a friendly Mojave village near present-day Needles, California, the men and horses recuperated and Smith hired two runaways from the Spanish missions in California to guide them west. After leaving the river and heading into the Mojave Desert, the guides led them through the desert via the Mohave Trail that would become the western portion of the Old Spanish Trail. Upon reaching the San Bernardino Valley of California, Smith and Abraham LaPlant (who spoke some Spanish) borrowed horses from a rancher and rode to the San Gabriel Mission on November 27, 1826, to present themselves to its director, Father José Bernardo Sánchez, who received them warmly.
  The next day, the rest of Smith's men arrived at the mission, and that night the head of the garrison at the mission confiscated all their guns. On December 8, Smith was summoned to San Diego for an interview with Governor José María Echeandía about his party's status in the country. Echeandía, surprised and suspicious of the Americans unauthorized entrance into California, had Smith arrested, believing him to be a spy.  Accompanied by Abraham LaPlant, Smith's Spanish interpreter, Smith was taken to San Diego, while the rest of the party remained at the mission. Echeandía detained Smith for about two weeks, demanding that he turn over his journal and maps.   Smith asked for permission to travel north to the Columbia River on a coastal route, where known paths could take his party back to United States territory. Upon intercession of American sea Captain W.H. Cunningham of Boston on the ship, Courier, Smith was finally released by Echeandía to reunite with his men.  Echeandía ordered Smith and his party to leave California by the same route they entered, forbidding him to travel up the coast to Bodega but giving Smith permission to purchase needed supplies for an eastern overland return journey. Smith boarded the Courier sailing from San Diego to San Pedro, to meet his men.
  After waiting for almost another month for an exit visa and then spending at least two more weeks breaking the horses they had purchased for the return trip, Smith's party left the mission communities of California in mid-February 1827.  The party headed out the way it had come, but once outside the Mexican settlements, Smith convinced himself he had complied with Echeandía's order to leave by the same route he had entered, and the party veered north crossing over into the Central Valley.  The party ultimately made its way to the Kings River on February 28 and began trapping beaver.  The party kept working its way north, encountering hostile Maidus.  By early May 1827, Smith and his men had traveled 350 miles (560 km) north looking for the Buenaventura River, but they found no break in the wall of the Sierra Nevada range through which it could have flowed from the Rocky Mountains. On December 16, 1826, Smith had written in a letter to the United State ambassador plenipotentiary to Mexico his plans to "follow up on of the largest Riv(ers) that emptied into the (San Francisco) Bay cross the mon (mountains) at its head and from thence to our deposit on the Great Salt Lake" and appeared to be following that plan.  They followed the Cosumnes River (the northernmost tributary of the San Joaquin River) upstream, but veered off it to the north and crossed over to the American River, a tributary of the Sacramento that flowed into the Bay.  They tried traveling up the canyon of the South Fork of the American to cross the Sierra Nevada, but had to return because the snow was too deep. Unable to find a feasible path for the well-laden party to cross and faced with hostile indigenes, he was forced into a decision: since they did not have time to travel north to the Columbia and make it in time to the 1827 rendezvous, they would backtrack to the Sta
caption: The exploration of the West by Jedediah Smith. The branch of the Sacramento River that is labeled as pointing northeast is now known as the Pit River.
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