In many ways Joseph Walker typified America’s 19th-Century mountain man. Described as a “bearded bear of a man who weighed more than 200 pounds,” he possessed great physical strength, endurance and fortitude, combined with the quintessential trapper’s personality traits of restlessness, individualism and aversion to authority.
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It was late July 1833 when Walker led his 60-man party away from the annual beaver trappers’ rendezvous and out of the Rocky Mountains. The men rode horses with pack mules, having brought no wagons with them. They followed the Bear River south to where it flowed into the Great Salt Lake, before Walker turned the expedition west into the vast salt flats and arid desolation of the Utah Desert. They successfully reached the Humboldt River and followed it to its sink. Pushing on, Walker passed two lakes in present western Nevada, later named Carson and Walker, after Christopher “Kit” Carson and Joseph Walker.
The passage across the Sierra Nevada required almost super-human effort, with many of the men — strong and loyal as they were — close to outright rebellion. The terrain became so steep that their terrified horses and mules had to be lowered over sheer precipices by ropes secured around trees and rocks. By this point the men were surviving on a diet of horse and mule meat, but the company finally reached San Jose. They then crossed over the Coastal Range where the trappers got their first look at the Pacific Ocean. Historians have credited Walker and his men with being the first white men to peer into the waterfall grandeur of Yosemite Valley, but recent research by California State University, East Bay professor Scott Stine indicates that Walker’s route was actually north of the valley rim.
Walker spent the winter of 1833-34 at Mission San Juan Bautista in California. That spring the company prepared to return to the Rocky Mountains where they would rejoin U.S. Army Capt. Benjamin Bonneville at the fur-trading rendezvous on the Green River. Walker had joined Capt. Bonneville as a partner on a commercial beaver-trapping expedition into the Rocky Mountains in 1832. Realizing that he could not safely pass again over the perilous Sierra route, Walker offered local Indians trinkets in return for guiding his band around the snow-covered mountains. They made their way over a mostly ice-free, low-elevation pass that today bears Walker’s name. Walker led his men north through the Owens Valley and then retraced their steps across the high desert to the Humboldt River and east to the Rockies. Walker Pass is located on State Route 178 in the Southern Sierra Nevada off Highway 395.
The next winter found Walker trapping the Yellowstone country, but at the 1835 summer rendezvous he turned over his furs to Capt. Bonneville and quit his position with him to become a free trapper. Walker spent five years living with the Snake Indians. He married a woman from the Snake tribe and they had several children.
By the early 1840s, emigrant wagon trains were beginning to push west and they needed experienced mountain men to guide them. In 1841, the 36-member Bartleson-Bidwell Party had reached California but failed to get the wagons through. That party had followed Walker’s 1833 trail down the Bear River and then east to the Humboldt River to California, crossing south of Lake Tahoe near Sonora Pass.
In 1843 while trapping with Louis Vasquez, the partner of noted mountain man Jim Bridger, Walker met an emigrant train heading for California. The man in charge was Joseph Chiles, a neighbor of Walker’s back in Missouri and a former member of the Bartleson-Bidwell group. Chiles had returned home in 1842, but now he was back the following year leading a company of 50 pioneers, all intent on getting their wagons and trade goods to California. Chiles’ wagons carried heavy mill-irons needed to build a gristmill on property he owned in Napa Valley. When Walker told him about the new route across the southern end of the Sierra, Chiles offered him $300 to guide them through.
Due to a lack of supplies, Chiles decided to split the party. He would lead the bulk of the men on horseback around the northern Sierra to obtain food at Sutter’s Fort (Sacramento). Chiles would then meet Walker, whose party consisted of a few men, and women and children, at the Humboldt Sink or the San Joaquin Valley, depending on circumstances. Chiles’ men crossed into California near Mount Shasta and arrived half-starved at Sutter’s Fort in November 1843. It was too late to cross the Sierra to rendezvous with Walker at the Humboldt Sink, so Chiles’ led the men to the San Joaquin Valley to look for Walker’s group.
Walker, meanwhile, had successfully followed close to his 1833 trail along the Humboldt River and past the sink, reaching present-day Owens Valley in mid-November. There the livestock gave out and all the wagons were abandoned. Walker ordered everyone to cast aside all but absolute necessities. Chiles’ burdensome mill irons were buried in the alkali sand with the hope that they could be retrieved at a later date. Trudging along next to their remaining livestock, Walker led the rag-tag, foot-sore group over his new pass and into California where they finally came across Chiles at Sutter’s Fort. The long journey had turned into a financial fiasco, but no lives were lost and many of the emigrants went on to great personal success.
Walker’s adventures continued when he became a trail guide for John Frémont in 1845. During that expedition, Frémont named Walker Lake and the Walker River for the mountain man who had first seen them more than a decade before.
Walker’s life was full of danger, drama and risk, yet through it all he maintained the respect of those who met him. In July 1846, Walker traveled to Fort Bridger near the Green River in what is now Wyoming to conduct some trading and make money. Established as a fur-trading outpost by mountain men Bridger and Vasquez in 1842, it soon became a vital stop for outfitting pioneer wagons trains heading to California or the Oregon country.
There were 2,700 emigrants on the trail rolling west during the summer of 1846, with 1,500 of them intent on reaching California. It was a sharp change from the year before when a similar number traveled overland to the Pacific Coast, but only 260 of them took the California Trail over Donner Pass. The majority followed the Oregon Trail to start farms and sawmills in the Pacific Northwest.
As a principle supply and outfitting station, Fort Bridger was often overrun with apprehensive young families and large herds of restless cattle. There were also many Native Americans peacefully encamped near the fort, which only added to the jitters of the greenhorn pioneers. Fort Bridger was a vital stop on the California Trail before reaching present-day Nevada, an important place to get news and advice on the route ahead.
Stay tuned for the conclusion in Part III in the next edition and at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
