Hiker With a Cause Retraces Steps of Trapper Jedediah Smith

Stopping along the trail up Humbug Mountain, Al Le Page looked through a break in the trees at the rugged coastline stretching north and tried to envision mountain man Jedediah Smith scouting his route through the Oregon coast.

Dressed in homemade faux buckskins and modern hiking shoes, and munching on high-carbohydrate energy bars, Le Page is walking the newly designated Jedediah Smith Trail on the southern Oregon coast to connect the legendary fur trapper to the 21st century. It is one of the nation’s Community Millennium Trails.

As executive director of the National Coast Trails Assn., Le Page hopes to inspire people to follow in his footsteps as well as Smith’s to get closer to the land and the history and cultures that have shaped it since an entrepreneurial venture made Smith and his band the first white men to travel here 182 years ago.

“It’s a personal journey for myself, touching that history,” Le Page said as he paused in his 200-mile trek at Humbug Mountain State Park near one of Smith’s campsites. “It’s also an exploration of what exists today and an invitation to people to explore their own minds. What do they want to see on their coasts in the future?”

The motels, condominiums and pavement along U.S. 101 are a far cry from what Smith saw in the summer of 1828, when he and his band of 18 men passed though southwestern Oregon while driving 315 horses and mules from Mission San Jose in California to sell at the annual fur trading rendezvous outside Salt Lake City, Utah.

Born in Jericho, N.Y., in 1799, Smith got his start as a mountain man after floating a flatboat loaded with whiskey pickles down the Mississippi to New Orleans. On his way back north in 1822, he answered a newspaper ad in St. Louis for “enterprising young men” and joined a fur brigade heading up the Missouri just 18 years after Lewis and Clark.

Over the next eight years, looking for new beaver to trap, Smith became the leading expert of his day on the American West, said James C. Auld, who is writing the first biography of Smith since 1953.

Before he was killed by Comanche Indians in 1831 on a trading caravan to Santa Fe, Smith had become the first American to cross the Sierra Nevada and the Mojave Desert, travel overland to Los Angeles and explore California’s Central Valley. In the Dakotas, a grizzly tore off his left ear, which Smith ordered one of his men to sew back on.

“He was a gritty explorer who had an enormous ability to persevere and keep moving,” Auld said. “He was described by a Hudson’s Bay Company person as a sly and cunning Yankee.”

Based on entries in Smith’s journal, the trail starts at Wilson Creek near Requa, Calif., where Smith’s band reached the Pacific after crossing the mountains from the Sacramento Valley.

It ends outside Reedsport, Ore., where the Smith River empties into the Umpqua. Near this site some 200 local Indians, angry that two of their number had been humiliated during earlier trading sessions, nearly wiped out Smith’s party. Smith--who had been up the Umpqua in a canoe when the attack struck--and three of his men escaped to Ft. Vancouver, where the Hudson’s Bay Company helped them get their goods back, as well as Smith’s journal.

To get closer to Smith and his journey, Le Page is hiking the sections of the trail on the same dates that Smith did, starting June 23 at the mouth of the Smith River in California and planning to finish July 14, the date of the massacre.

On June 30, Smith wrote in his journal: “From a high hill I had an opportunity to view the country which Eastward was high rough hills and mountains generally timbered and north along the coast apparently Low with some prairae. In climing a precipice on leaving the shore one of my pack Mules fell off and was killed.”

At 1,700 feet, Humbug Mountain offers the best view for miles and may be the promontory Smith climbed. Pausing during his own hike up Humbug Mountain, Le Page gazed through a gap in the trees at the rugged coastline and pointed out the route he would take along the beach the next day to avoid the highway and rugged bluffs.

But Le Page’s desire to get close to Smith has its limits. As a strict vegetarian, Le Page did not want to wear actual buckskins. His fringed jacket, pants and shoulder bags are made of synthetic fabrics that look and feel like suede.

Other parts of his kit are more authentic. The black powder pistol he carries, for example, looks remarkably like a photograph of Smith’s. Le Page also carries a powder horn, a handmade skinning knife and the sort of trade goods Smith would have carried: a small mirror, a string of blue beads, brass thimbles.

As talismans, Le Page carries three copper pennies, two dated 1828 and the other 1826. He also has a bag of new golden Sacagawea dollars, which he hands out as gifts. At night he stays with supporters along the way. During the day he munches on energy bars.

That hasn’t kept him from connecting with the past. He gave a dentalia shell necklace to an elder of the Tolowah tribe in Northern California, rode horseback along the beach with descendants of pioneers and gave $10 and some energy bars to a guy calling himself Yukon Jack, who was walking up U.S. Highway 101, pulling a handcart loaded with suitcases, to pan for gold in the Rogue River.

Le Page and the National Coastal Trail Assn. hope someday to see the Jedediah Smith Trail as part of a 10,000-mile network of coastal trails encircling the nation.

“When you see the world at 3 mph versus 60 mph, it looks a lot different,” Le Page said. “With this trail, people can literally walk in the footsteps of history.”