Smith was a religious man, a Christian. His was an inner and unfailing courage not surpassed by that of any known Western man. Perhaps he sought Divine counsel in this his extremity; at least he lost neither courage nor calmness. He knew, of course, that there was a Columbia River somewhere; for this was in 1828, and by that time the Columbia was an old story. He knew that this great river was north of him, and knew that there were settlements near its mouth, as we shall presently understand. He further knew that the North Star pointed out the north. Alone, with his rifle as reliance, he made that tremendous journey northward which Frémont, with his full party, made in an opposite direction, on a parallel line farther to the eastward, only after untold hardship, though Frémont had men and animals and supplies. Sustained by Providence, as he believed, Smith at length accomplished his journey and reached the Hudson Bay post at Fort Vancouver. We may now see the strange commercial conditions of that time. We say that Jedediah Smith was the first to cross from the Rockies to the Pacific; but this, of course, means only that he was the first to cross at mid-continent. There had been others on the Columbia before Smith. The Hudson Bay factor, Doctor McLaughlin, a great and noble man, a gentleman of the wilderness, meets the wanderer as a friend, although he is in the employ of a rival company. He sends out a party to recover Smith’s lost packs of beaver at the abandoned camp far to the southward. Almost incredible to say, these men do find the furs. McLaughlin gives Smith a draft on London for twenty thousand dollars, it is said, in payment for these furs! Strange contrast to the treatment Ashley and his men accorded the Hudson Bay trapper, Ogden, some years earlier, when the latter was in adversity in the Rockies! Strange story indeed, this of the adventures of Jedediah Smith! Survivor of thirty of his men, escaped from a Spanish prison, robbed, nearly killed, after one of the most perilous journeys ever undertaken in the West, Smith emerges from this desperate trip across an unmapped country with twenty thousand dollars, and none of his men left to share it! In March, 1829, Smith started east from Fort Vancouver to find his partners, Sublette and Jackson. When he reached the Flathead country he was much at home, for he had been there before. Thence he headed to the Snake River, where he met Jackson, “who,” says our historian, naïvely, “was looking for him!” The ways of that time were, after all, of a certain sufficiency. Sublette he finds on the Henry Fork on August fifth, also much as a matter of course. Strange lands, strange calling, strange restoration after unusual and wild experiences—so strange that we find nothing in the life of Crockett to parallel it in valor and initiative, nothing in Boone’s to surpass it, nothing in Carson’s to equal it, and nothing in the story of any adventurer’s life to cast it in the shade.