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Exploring the West Before 1847
Fred R. Gowans
By 1847, when the Mormon pioneers arrived in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, Spanish, French, and American fur traders, trappers, immigrants, and government explorers had accumulated and made available to the public a significant amount of data about the region. The discovery in the 1970s of the journal of Juan Maria Antonio Rivera in Madrid, Spain, has convinced most scholars that Rivera's journey of 1765 into the Moab area of east-central Utah represents the first documented exploration of the region.
In 1776, Spain launched the now celebrated Dominguez-Escalante Expedition. One expedition member was Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, whose map is the first cartographic representation of Utah's geography. Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante journeyed almost 2,000 miles, traveling through large portions of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. The padres' daily journal furnishes extensive information concerning present-day Utah.
Jules Remy, who visited Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, in 1855, reported that he was shown a cave located on the shore of the Great Salt Lake; the cave contained the following inscription: "Lecarne 17--." It appears that even French traders, possibly from St. Louis or Canada, had pushed their trading frontier to the Great Basin. Certainly, records in both Spanish and French archives suggest that there were other documented accounts of 18th-century activities in the Utah area that have remained elusive but that may someday be found.
In 1808, George Drouillard presented William Clark a map of the upper Missouri country that reveals there was trade between the Crow Indians and the Spanish settlements of the Southwest. This map presents the possibility of Spanish traders traversing the Great Basin and central Rockies while conducting trade with various tribes.
The Overland Astorians, under the command of Wilson Price Hunt and representing John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company, left St. Louis en route to the Oregon country with aspirations of securing control of the fur trade in that region. Hunt left five men near present-day Rexburg, Idaho, with orders to explore and trap the area. The account of their wanderings during the years 1811 and 1812 discloses their presence in the Bear River country of northern Utah and southwestern Wyoming.
The failure of Andrew Henry and William Ashley (Henry-Ashley Company) to open trade relations with the Indians on the upper Missouri River in 1822 and 1823 forced the partners to send their engages to the Rocky Mountains in search of furs. Jedediah Smith, in command of a portion of the men, crossed South Pass in March 1824 and established a unique commercial system that enabled the fur companies to prosper in those remote regions and allowed their men to provide the most extensive exploration of Utah prior to the arrival of the Mormons. During the next 16 years mountaineers would add the physical geography of present-day Utah to their knowledge of the landscape of the American West and would record in journals, letters, and maps their impressions of this new land. In 1825, Etienne Provost, representing prominent Santa Fe merchants, and Peter Skene Ogden's Hudson's Bay Company Snake River Brigade were also trading and trapping along the Wasatch Front of Utah.