Jedediah Smith was no man to waste time. He told his friends what he had found beyond the snowy range. By July thirteenth, 1827, he was ready with eighteen men of a new party to start back for California. Now he began to meet the first of his extraordinarily bad luck, the first of a series of misfortunes that must have stopped any man but himself. The Spaniards seem to have had some notion of Smith’s intentions, and they set Indians to watch the trails down the Virgin and the Colorado. These met Smith near the Colorado River and killed ten of his men. Almost destitute, Smith reached the Spanish settlements of San Gabriel and San Diego only to meet with further misfortune. His native guides—for now he had learned how to secure Indian guides—were imprisoned, and he himself was thrown into jail at San José. He was released on condition that he leave the country; which he proceeded to do after a fashion peculiarly his own. He traveled three hundred miles to the north and wintered on a stream now called, from that fact, the American Fork. All this time he was finding good beaver country, and the packs of the little party grew heavier and heavier. Why he did not now cross the Sierras and get back home again we do not know; but instead of going east, he struck northwest, until he nearly reached the Pacific Ocean. Thence he turned inland, and headed due north,—which meant Oregon. It is easy to-day, but Smith had no map, no trail, no transportation save that of the horse and mule train. All the time he and his party continued to pick up a greater store of beaver. At last, on July twenty-fourth, 1828, somewhere near the Umpqua River, they established a temporary camp. On that day Smith left camp for a time, and as he returned he met Indians, who fired upon him. He got back to the bivouac, only to find it the scene of one of those horrible Indian butcheries with which the trapper of that day was all too familiar. Ten men out of his new party had been killed on the Colorado. Here, about the camp in Oregon, lay fifteen more of his men, dead, scalped and mutilated. The horses were gone. Three of his companions had escaped, but these had fled in a panic, each on his own account. The discoverer, Smith, was there alone in the mountains, without map, without guide, without counsel. There was a situation, simple, primeval, Titanic! There indeed was the West!