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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 no lodges, used the crudest tools, made no art. They subsisted, from all appearances, on roots and insects; a live gecko made a fine repast. Mark Twain, encountering some of the last of the wild Digger Indians half a century later, called them “the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen.” But they were, as Twain noted, merely a reflection of the landscape they found themselves in.
     
    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