Jedediah Smith: America’s Greatest Explorer Who Fought Off a Grizzly and Lived

Thanks for stopping by Shots Fired West — if you love true crime tales from the Wild frontier, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next outlaw story. The Grizzly Took His Scalp. Jedediah Smith Kept Walking West. About this video Before the wagon trains and the gold rush, one quiet, praying man from Ohio walked into country no American had ever mapped. Jedediah Smith answered a newspaper notice in 1822. Within a few years he had become one of the most important explorers in American history. A grizzly bear tore his head open, and he talked a friend through sewing it back together. He reopened the gap in the Rockies that would become the Oregon Trail. He crossed deserts and mountain ranges that had swallowed better-equipped men. This is not the clean, heroic version from the textbooks. It is the real story of the fur trade: the debts and the borders, the men who followed him, and the price they paid. Sit down for the long version. It is the one Hollywood never told. The history behind it Smith's story isn't legend. It survives in an unusual paper trail. His own journals, partly lost and partly recovered, record distances, rivers, weather and losses in a clerk's careful hand. Harrison Rogers, his company clerk, kept a daybook through the California journeys. James Clyman, who stitched Smith's wounds after the grizzly attack, wrote his own account decades later. British fur company officers at Fort Vancouver filed reports. Mexican authorities in California kept records of the American they were holding. Historians have spent more than a century cross-checking these sources against each other. A rediscovered nineteenth-century map still carries Smith's geography, copied by another man's pen. Where the sources agree, this film states the facts plainly. Where they conflict, it tells you so. The real record is grittier than the myth, and more human. Sources and further reading Dale L. Morgan, Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (Bobbs-Merrill, 1953) Barton H. Barbour, Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009) Harrison Clifford Dale, The Ashley-Smith Explorations and the Discovery of a Central Route to the Pacific, 1822–1829 (Arthur H. Clark, 1918) George R. Brooks, ed., The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: His Personal Account of the Journey to California, 1826–1827 (Arthur H. Clark, 1977) Maurice S. Sullivan, The Travels of Jedediah Smith: A Documentary Outline Including the Journal of the Great American Pathfinder (Fine Arts Press, 1934) Charles L. Camp, ed., James Clyman, Frontiersman (Champoeg Press, 1960 edition) Dale L. Morgan, ed., The West of William H. Ashley (Old West Publishing, 1964) William H. Goetzmann, "The Mountain Man as Jacksonian Man," American Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1963): 402–415 Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West, 1540–1861, Vol. 2 (Institute of Historical Cartography, 1958) William R. Nester, The Arikara War: The First Plains Indian War, 1823 (Mountain Press, 2001) About this channel This video is made for educational and informational purposes. Our goal is to widen people's knowledge of American frontier history and to give viewers valuable, carefully researched content that honors the people who lived it. Every script on this channel is written by a human. The visuals and storyboard are brainstormed and developed internally by our team. If you have family stories from the frontier or the old trails, please share them in the comments. They are part of this history too.