This was indeed authentic traveling, authentic discovering, and upon this was based the first map of a vast region in what was really the West. After all this was done, the knowledge spread rapidly, we may suppose. This was how Carson’s friends learned of the Sacramento. This is how the discoveries of Frémont were forerun; for the latter, under Carson’s guidance, simply circumnavigated the vast region which Smith both circumnavigated and crossed direct. Readers would not receive the plain story of Jedediah Smith as fit for fiction. It would be too impossible. We might pause to tell the end of so great a man as this. At last Smith and his historic partners found the fur trade too much divided to be longer profitable. In 1830 the three went to St. Louis to take a venture in the Santa Fé trade, this being two years before Captain Bonneville sallied out into the West. Contemptuous of the dangers of the prairies, after facing so long those of the mountains, these three hardy Westerners started across the plains with a small outfit of their own. Far out on the Arkansas they were beset by the Comanches. Fighting like a man and destroying a certain number of his enemies before he himself fell, Jedediah Smith was killed. He met thus the logical though long deferred end of a life that had always been careless of danger. Gregg, in his “Scenes and Incidents in the Western Prairies” (the book later known as “The Commerce of the Prairies”), mentions the death of Smith, but of his life and character he seemed to have had but little knowledge. The historian of the Santa Fé trade was just starting West when Smith closed his own career. Smith was dead before Bonneville saw the Rockies. We see that he antedated Walker and Carson and Frémont. The fatal prairie expedition of these great fur traders, Smith, Sublette and Jackson, went on westward up the Arkansas with the mountain trader, Fitzpatrick, who was bound for a rendezvous far to the north of Bent’s Fort—the same Fitzpatrick whom Carson met above Bent’s Fort in one of his own expeditions. Now we may begin to see the trails of our trappers and adventurers interlacing and crossing, and can understand who were the real adventurers, who the actual explorers. Great and satisfying a figure as Jedediah Smith makes, we may not pause with him too long, and may not believe him to have been at the very first of things. He was the first to cross over the Rockies and the Sierras in mid-America, yet he was not the first white man to stand on the soil of the dry Southwest. Examine the older maps and you shall see along the Virgin and the Colorado the line of the old Spanish trail from California to the mission settlements of New Mexico.