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Such doings made small sense to Smith, who was descended from a family that had arrived in New England not long after the Pilgrims alighted near Plymouth Rock. Across the generations, his forebears—farmers and artisans—had retained the pious, God-fearing traditions of those early English religious dissidents. One distant relative had earned eighteen shillings a year using his trumpet to summon his New Hampshire neighbors to church each Sunday. And family lore had it that another had praised the Lord for his miraculous survival after a freak eddy had pulled his canoe over Niagara Falls. Like his ancestors, Smith believed that only those whom God elected would receive His grace, and that his righteous deity watched closely to determine who would be saved and who would be damned come Judgment Day. The young man would live his life accordingly.

So it occurred that in the wake of the American Revolution, Smith's father, also named Jedediah, married the Connecticut-born Sally Strong. The newlyweds moved to the Susquehanna Valley village of Jericho in southern New York State. There the elder Smith and his brother-in-law opened a general store that catered to the river folk settling farmsteads along the long watercourse for which the green vale was named. Jed Smith was the fourth child, and second son, born to Jedediah Sr. and Sally in January 1799; his mother, a dutiful wife of the era, fulfilled her primary obligation by giving birth to five more sons over the ensuing fifteen years.

Young "Diah," as his family called him, spent his childhood exploring and hunting squirrel, wild turkey, and whitetail deer through the long, green valley's thick stands of soaring oak, boxelder, and fragrant sassafras, which lent the rolling hills a year-round scent of sweet lemon and cinnamon. The Iroquois had long since abandoned the Susquehanna woodlands, but a fascination with the Indians who decades earlier had called the land their home fired the boy's imagination. His ears perked whenever Jedediah Sr. told the story of his great-great-uncle being killed by the Narragansetts during King Philip's War. And as young boys of the era were wont to do, he no doubt scoured the pea vine and clover that carpeted the forest floor, searching for old arrowheads and shards of the clay pots in which the tribe's women had boiled the venerated "three sisters" of the earth—corn, squash, and beans.

When Jed was twelve his father again caught the westering fever and relocated his growing clan to Pennsylvania's Erie County, hard by the eponymous lake. It was here that Jed not only honed his hunter's and boatman's skills but also met a family that would have a lasting effect on his life. The Simons of Erie County's North East Township were what passed for aristocracy on the nascent United States' western frontier. When Jed's favorite sister, Eunice, married Solomon Simons, the son of the pioneer physician Dr. Titus Gordon Vespasian Simons, a bond between the families was formed. It grew even stronger when Dr. Simons's daughter Louisa wed Jed's older brother, Ralph, such that the two families moved as one farther west into northern Ohio.

Dr. Simons had taken an avuncular shine to young Jed, and he began complementing the schooling the boy received from a succession of Methodist circuit riders in reading, writing, and ciphering, as arithmetic was called. He also added a smattering of Latin to the curriculum. When the doctor thought Jed was ready—around the time that British troops were setting fire to the White House during the War of 1812—he gifted him with a newly published leather-bound book detailing the adventures of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their momentous twenty-eight-month cross- country expedition to and from the Pacific.

Jed Smith cherished the chronicle, studying the narrative by candlelight, and came to recognize that his treks through the Susquehanna woods and along the craggy shore-scree of Lake Erie and Sandusky Bay were but toddler's steps compared to the epic accomplishments Lewis, Clark, and their Corps of Discovery achieved. Legend has it that along with a family Bible, Smith carried that book with him for the rest of his life in his kit bag, called a "possible sack," as it contained everything a hunter or trapper could possibly need.

Now, a decade later and with that possible sack slung over his shoulder, he found himself hiking up from the St. Louis waterfront to the heights of the city proper, where the capacious municipality rivaled only his brief visit to New Orleans two years earlier.

* * *

Although dubbed the "Mound City," the chain of ancient Native American temple hills and knolls that had once occupied the path Jed Smith now trod through St. Louis were mostly gone, leveled by the New Orleans-born half brothers Auguste and Pierre Chouteau when they laid out the town's grid. It was Auguste Chouteau's father, the French explorer Pierre Laclède Liguest, who in 1764 had selected St. Louis—which he named in honor of France's King Louis IX—as the flood-proof high ground for his fur-trading post. Where feather-and bead-clad members of the Illini Confederacy, a loose affiliation of a dozen or so Native American tribes, had once met to hold religious ceremonies and trade marts, Smith now shared street space with women in flamboyant sun bonnets promenading before finely built houses, many of them constructed of the famed St. Louis clay pressed and kilned into red bricks that were already being exported to Boston and New York.