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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, Smith’s party crossed three small inconstant streams. That they survived at all is a miracle. “My arrival caused a considerable bustle in camp,” he wrote in his diary after arriving in time for the second rendezvous on the Bear River in Utah. “A small cannon, brought up from St. Louis, was loaded and fired for a salute.... Myself and party had been given up for lost.”
     
    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,