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In his time on the borderlands, Jed Smith had absorbed an irrefutable truth foreign to most easterners—that there was no single, amorphous mass of "Indians" inhabiting the North American West. Each of the scores if not hundreds of tribes and moieties scattered across the continent had its own customs, its own ritual beliefs, its own often violent views toward outsiders, particularly whites. And each expected to be dealt with on its own terms. In this case, however, any difference was moot. The Comanche and Kiowa had long ago formed a military alliance that had evolved into the most feared and powerful entity across the Southern Plains. Riding and fighting as one, they had cowed first the Spanish and then the Mexicans and had even driven off the mighty Apache. Presently, with wagon traffic increasing on the thin ribbon of trail connecting St. Louis to Santa Fe that bisected their lands, they had begun to wage war on the trespassing Americans.

Jed Smith had sharpened his battle instincts to a fine edge in lethal confrontations with peoples as disparate as the Arikara and Blackfeet, the Mojave and Arapaho. He recognized when it was time to flee, time to fight, time to negotiate. The band he now studied sat atop stout, well-watered ponies that would easily overtake his own hobbling horse. To run would be futile. And given their number, combat, even if he could find cover, appeared equally bootless. Which left talk.

Jed Smith drew his long-barreled Creamer rifle from its elk-skin scabbard, balanced it across the rise behind his saddle horn, and spurred his mount forward. It was his only play.

PART I

THE HUNTER

—SAM WALTER FOSS, THE COMING AMERICAN

CHAPTER ONE

"ENTERPRISING YOUNG MEN"

It must surely have seemed a sight to the tall, young northerner. A hunter by trade, he had passed through a variety of hamlets, villages, and even blossoming boomtowns in his twenty-three years of meandering west. But nothing had prepared Jedediah Strong Smith for the bustling city of St. Louis, a virtual metropolis looming high over the western bank of the Mississippi River.

It was a chilly April morning in 1822 when Smith, likely alighting from a packet that had ferried him from the green fields of northern Illinois, traversed the narrow riverside boulevard the locals referred to as "Under the Hill." The street, slippery with mud and horse shit, was teeming with a cross section of humanity—shallow-shaft Ozark lead miners in greasy overalls cashing in company scrip for kegs of rum; restive Indiana farmers bound for the loamy fields opening up along the Boone's Lick Road abutting Osage Indian territory; peddlers and storekeepers clad in colorful broadcloth frock coats beckoning customers to inspect their wares; and quarrelsome former soldiers of the Republic still wearing their patched and tattered uniforms as they poured to and from the chockablock taverns and bordellos.

Smith passed weathered wooden stalls and narrow storefronts stocked with imports craved by those the fur trade had newly made rich—shimmering cut glassware, handcrafted leather shoes and boots, casks of cognac and wine. There was also a plethora of Black slaves, surely more people of color than he had ever seen, wearing coarse homespun and conversing in pidgin French as they loaded their owners' carts with bar iron and plow molds.

The river itself was clogged with pirogues and keelboats and even the occasional paddle steamer—an invention so newfangled that children and even some adults flocked to the mud flats to watch the wide-bodied vessels labor through the swirling ochre currents. Between and around the larger craft, rough and weather-browned men maneuvered simpler dugout canoes, constructed from hollowed-out cottonwoods disgorged into the Mississippi from its confluence with the Missouri River twelve miles to the north. The canoes rode low in the water, piled with bundles of beaver pelts and buffalo hides, which their wild-eyed pilots were eager to exchange for powder and lead, for tobacco and smoked pork and flour, and especially for the whiskey and rum carried west down the Ohio River or borne north from Natchez and New Orleans.*

Jed Smith was no stranger to water, having grown up along the shores of both Pennsylvania's Lake Erie and Ohio's Sandusky Bay. At the age of thirteen he had signed on as an apprentice seaman on a Lake Erie freighter hauling trade goods between Montreal and what were then the western American borderlands. Yet the sight of the Creole rivermen gracefully steering their sleek vessels to transport hotheaded duelists out to the sandbar in the middle of the river doubtlessly remained a marvel to a naïve country boy. It was on that "neutral" spit of sand nicknamed "Bloody Island," allegedly subject to neither Missouri nor Illinois law, where aggrieved combatants—prone to quarreling over the affections of the soiled doves of the local sporting houses—would attempt to blow each other's brains out with their finely crafted Wogdon and Barton flintlock pistols.