Joe Walker

Joe Walker rode into the fur trade rendezvous of 1833 with six trappers and an escort of several hundred Shoshone Indians. The horses were hung with bells, beads, and ribbons, and the Shoshone women were adorned in similar finery. Shamans juggled and warriors in buffalo-horn and feathered headdresses made their horses prance and curvet. Walker rode at the head of the procession, a tall, powerful figure with a hawkish face and a rifle slung across his saddle. He was 34 years old and already a highly respected man among the trappers, fur traders, and Indian tribes of the far West.

The rendezvous that year was held on the upper Green River near the site of present-day Daniel, Wyoming. Some 350 mountain men and 500 Indians, predominately Shoshone, were gathered for the annual trade fair and grand debauch of the Rocky Mountain West. The tents and tepees extended for 10 miles along the river, and immense herds of horses grazed the surrounding plains. There was an unruly carnival atmosphere with impromptu horse races, wrestling matches, bragging contests, and a great deal of roaring drunkenness and random fornication.

Walker stood out among his fellow mountain men. He was calm, affable, and prudent, rather than wild and reckless, and he took his alcohol in moderation. He projected an air of alertness and complete self-assurance. He enjoyed Shoshone beauties and racing for money on fast stud horses, and sported finely made and ornamented buckskin clothing and feather-plumed slouch hats. The driving force of his life was travel and exploration, and it was to keep him on the move over immense distances for nearly 50 years. It is likely that Walker covered as many or more miles on horseback than any Euro-American.

While the trappers sold their beaver pelts and roistered away the proceeds, Walker spent the rendezvous assembling an expedition. Capt. Benjamin Bonneville, on leave from the U.S. Army, had asked him to explore the region west of the Great Salt Lake, which was still blank space and fiction on the maps of the day, and go all the way to the Mexican province of California, if possible.

The journey was known to be horrendous, crossing hundreds of miles of desert with no water or game then passing over an immense wall of perennially snowcapped mountains: the Sierra Nevada. Many trappers had died trying to reach California, but a few had made it — and they brought back stories of warm winter sunshine, willing Mexican girls, mission wineries that never ran dry, and vast herds of horses and cattle that could be bought cheap or easily stolen.

Walker rode out of the rendezvous with 40 men and 160 horses, then stopped at Bear River to hunt buffalo until each man had 60 pounds of jerky in his saddlebags. The trappers grumbled. Normally they scorned advance planning and carried no reserve food supplies. Picking up another party of about 20 trappers, they rode on to the Great Salt Lake, where Walker made a careful scout and debunked the last mythical American waterway, the Buenaventura, which was thought to flow out of the Great Salt Lake to the Pacific.

Riding west they entered the vast moonscape deserts of the Great Basin. Spotting a party of Bannocks, Walker had to restrain some of his men, who were eager to take their scalps (scalping was practiced by mountain men and Indians alike). Instead, he invited the Bannocks to sit down, gave them gifts, and asked them about the country further west. This was typical. Walker favored diplomacy with the tribes whenever possible and had no scorn or hatred for Indians. He married a Shoshone woman and chose to live his life more like her people than his own, spurning civilization and establishing himself as a kind of nomadic chieftain.

Taking the advice of the Bannocks, Walker led his party along a river so poorly supplied with vegetation that they named it the Barren; now we call it the Humboldt. Hungry-looking Indians stole from their camps one night. These were Paiutes, and the mountain men called them Diggers because they subsisted on grubs, worms, and roots pried from the earth with digging sticks. Walker gave orders not to shoot, but a few of his men disobeyed him and killed two or three of the thieves. This happened again the next day. Walker was furious because he knew what would happen next. The following morning they were surrounded by hundreds of Paiutes armed with bows and arrows.

Using sign language, Walker told the Indians to disperse or his men would shoot. The Paiutes laughed, saying they were too far away, and he realized they had never seen guns before. He put on a shooting exhibition to demonstrate, and still the Paiutes came closer. Walker gave orders to charge and, according to his clerk, 39 Paiutes were killed in the melee, with no losses in Walker’s party. The bloodthirsty massacre has come down as a stain on his reputation, but the initial threat was real. An Indian could shoot five or six arrows in the time it took a mountain man to reload his powder-and-ball rifle.

Where the Humboldt River gave out in the marshes of the Humboldt Sink, Walker turned south and led his men across the present-day Walker River Indian Reservation, past a large body of water now called Walker Lake, and the next night they camped at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. It was early October and the snow line was already halfway down the mountains. Their horses were thin and weak after crossing the desert, the buffalo jerky was gone, and the men were eating berries and insects.

Soon they were eating their horses. They spent the next month in frozen high-altitude hell, moving along the central crest of the Sierra Nevada, looking for a way down to the west. If that sounds like incompetence, try going up there. Take a look at all those peaks, crags, precipices, cols, crevasses, and snowfields a hundred feet deep. Now imagine getting more than 200 half-starved horses and 60 exhausted men through it. They called themselves mountain men, but they had no experience with alpine mountaineering, no suitable equipment, and they were improvising techniques as they went.

On October 20, 1833, they came upon a spectacle that stopped them in awe and wonder. They were standing on a mile-high cliff above Yosemite Valley, and they were the first white men to see it. They picked their way along a narrow ridge for five more days and then found a steep trail descending to the west. Lowering their horses on ropes, they made it down below the snow line, and the hunters brought in a deer and two bears, which the men devoured in a frenzy.

Coming down the western slopes, they started to revel in their journey, finding plenty of game and marveling at the immensity of sequoia trees. A few days later they reached the Pacific. Most of the men had never seen an ocean and they stood before it mesmerized. Then came a kind of winter vacation on the mission ranches, a balmy time of wine-soaked fiestas, señoritas, horseback races, and hunting.

Walker impressed the Mexican authorities, who offered him 30,000 acres of free land in Northern California if he would establish a colony of American craftsmen. Walker had no doubt that it would make him a very rich man, but instead he saddled up and rode east, finding an easier route across the Sierra Nevada, known today as Walker Pass, to rejoin his old wayfaring life.

When we think today of the mountain men, the first names that come to mind are Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith. Joe Walker may have been in the field longer than any of them, and among his contemporaries he was considered one of the best, a kind of genius at reading landscape, blazing trails, and leading men through dangerous places. Yet Walker has remained largely obscure. The main reason for this is that he didn’t like to brag about his achievements to newspapermen or anyone else, and he had a great talent for avoiding the sort of disasters that grabbed the attention of the Old West publicity machine.

Walker went on to guide the first wagon trains into California and the first gold seekers into northern Arizona. He traded horses, buying them from the Mexican ranches around Los Angeles and driving them east to Bent’s Fort, Colorado (1,100 miles); Fort Laramie, Wyoming (1,200 miles); and Missouri (1,800 miles). He hired on as a scout for several different army colonels and captains, including John C. Frémont, the self-proclaimed “Pathfinder,” who Walker later described as “the most complete coward I have ever known.”

Joe Walker was nearly 70 when he retired from the field. His failing eyesight had endangered a man’s life in Apache territory, and this was unacceptable. In nearly 50 years on the Western frontiers, only one man under Walker’s command had ever been killed by Indians — a phenomenal safety record that none of his contemporaries came anywhere close to matching.

He hung up his saddle at his cousin’s ranch in Contra Costa County, California. His eyesight was still good enough to read, and he spent many hours on the porch with books. A few journalists came and tried to get his story, but he remained terse and taciturn to the last, and at the age of 77 he died peacefully. The final task he set himself was the inscription for his tombstone. It began with his birth in Tennessee and ended with his greatest memory: “Camped at Yosemite Nov. 13, 1833.”