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Show 19 Smith's southwest expedition of 1826-27 was one of the epic explorations of the American West. Hoping to find beaver and the Buenaventura, Smith and fifteen companions left the Salt Lake area on August 22, 1826. Marching south the party followed the Wasatch Range to its terminus eventually leaving the Great Basin and following the Virgin and Colorado Rivers. Then from a point just north of the Needles, Smith stuck west onto the Mojave Desert, back in the Great Basin, and eventually found his way to the southern California missions in November. By doing so he became the first American to reach California by an overland route. Working his way up the San Joaquin Valley, he searched the western ramparts of the Sierra Nevada Range for the Buenaventura River hoping to follow the legendary stream back to the Great Salt Lake. After several months of disappointment, the company traversed the Sierras at Eobetts Pass, again entering the Great Basin, and traveled eastward across the harsh interior deserts of the Basin to the shores of the Great Salt Lake. This return trip was one of the few expeditions in the Great Basin which duplicated any portion of the White Mountain trail still more than three decades away.4 Within a month Smith and company were off again for California. This time they detoured around the treacherous Virgin River canyon striking the river near the site of modern Mesquite, Nevada. At the Mojave villages on the Colorado,half of their eighteen men were massacred by the Indians. The survivors reached California by following Smith's route of 1826 across the Mojave Desert. On this expedition the company travelled the entire distance up the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys reaching Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River in the summer of 1828. After that year, trapping expeditions into the far western and central Great Basin ceased because of the failure to locate the Buenaventura and the absence of good fur-bearing streams west |