How Jedediah Smith Opened the American West
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Jedediah Smith’s story reads like the birth of the American West itself: bold, unforgiving, and full of faith. In an age when few dared to leave the safety of the frontier, he ventured across mountains and deserts no American had ever seen. He charted new routes to the Pacific, endured attacks and near starvation, and still pressed forward. His journals and maps became blueprints for westward expansion, turning one man’s determination into a nation’s destiny. Here to tell the story is Roger McGrath.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:14.1 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. |
| 0:22.5 | Just decades following the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, trailblazers called |
| 0:28.3 | mountain men headed west. Here to tell the story is Roger McGrath, author of Gunfighters, |
| 0:34.0 | Hallyman, and Vigilantes. Violence on on the frontier. Take it away, McGrath. |
| 0:40.9 | By 1821, 24 U.S. states have been established, and the population is something around 9.6 million. |
| 0:49.8 | The country's border expands to the Missouri River, and beyond that border lies a vast western |
| 0:57.0 | territory of brutal wilderness shrouded in myth. |
| 1:01.0 | Conquerant requires extraordinary men. |
| 1:04.0 | One of the greatest of these is Jedediah Smith. |
| 1:09.0 | He was the first to come overland in the California. is Jedediah Smith. |
| 1:14.0 | He was the first to come overland into California. |
| 1:17.5 | He's the first known person to cross the Sierra Nevada. |
| 1:21.6 | The first man to recognize the significance of the South Pass. |
| 1:24.9 | Smith's discoveries, beyond the Missouri, |
| 1:27.3 | surpassed those of even Lewis and Clark. |
| 1:28.3 | Here's Jim Hardy, Director of the Fur Trade Research Center. |
| 1:33.3 | Without men like Jedediah Smith and particularly his trails, we wouldn't have had an Oregon trail. |
| 1:41.3 | We wouldn't have had a gold rush because the roots to California, Oregon, |
| 1:46.3 | wouldn't have been there yet. Smith embodies the character of America, frontier grit, |
| 1:52.4 | Oregon individualism, survival. Jedediah Strong Smith is born the fourth of 12 children on January 6, 1799, in South Central New York State, |
| 2:08.6 | to parents who descend from the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts. |
... |
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