And the In the earliest days of Spring, 1824, sometime between late February and early March,

Jedediah Smith and his group of about a dozen fur trappers

became the first recorded white men to travel westward through South Pass in

South Western Wyoming. The Pass which would be used by countless travelers over the coming decades,

was a wide gap in the Rocky Mountains that was tame enough for people to move through on foot,

on horseback, or on wagons.

Smith's small group was about halfway through a year-long journey that had started on the Missouri River in Central Montana,

and then followed the river to modern day North Dakota and down to South Dakota. Warriors that devastated the Ashley Henry Fur Company, which employed Jedediah Smith and

other soon to be famous mountain men like Hugh Glass, Jim Bridger, and Bill Sublet.

From Old Fort Kiowa near the current town of Chamberlain, South Dakota, Smith's group had

headed straight west across the Badlands, the Black Hills, the High Desert of Wyoming, the Big Horn Mountains, and finally to the Wind River Mountains

south of the Grand Teton's and Yellowstone National Park, 50 years before the park was created.

In what is now eastern Wyoming, Jedediah Smith had survived a grizzly bear attack that happened

around the same time as his friend Hugh Glass was attacked by a grizzly a couple hundred miles to the north.

Smith fared better than glass and was back in the saddle just ten days after suffering

gory injuries to his head. Smith and his group had finished crossing

the high desert, then the big horns, and had camped for the winter with the Crow Nation at the

base of the Wind River Mountains.

In February 1824, they continued their journey westward.

A Crow Elder told them how to find South Pass, and now the pioneering American Trappers were at the Green River in the southwest

corner of Wyoming.

Jedediah Smith, the 25-year-old leader of the group laid out his plan.

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