By Daryl Morrison
Holt-Atherton Department of
Special Collections
University of the Pacific Library
Archives Corner 

The most frequent request asked of the Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections is to supply a photograph of Jedediah Strong Smith. Those who understand the history of photography and the early demise of Jedediah Smith know that a photograph of the stalwart mountain man is an impossibility. The 32 year old veteran mountain man died on the Cimarron on May 27, 1831, when he was attacked by Comanche Indians. Although early experiments in photochemistry and the camera obscura were centuries old, the invention date of photography is considered to be 1839. This was the year two principal inventors of the art, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre in France and Fox Talbot in Great Britain, made their techniques known to the public. Daguerre introduced his photographic technique using a silver-coated copper plate and the resulting photographs were named after him— the daguerreotype. Yankee ingenuity embraced the technique very quickly and the very first American daguerreotype was made in 1839. Samuel B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, was one of the first to bring daguerreotype technology to America. [Floyd and Marion Rinhart, The American Daguerreotype, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981.]

The photographic studios were operational on the East Coast in cities like New York as early as 1840-41. They were viable businesses by 1843-44. Daguerreotypes quickly replaced the miniature painted portraits. St. Louis, the bustling fur-trade center and jumping-off-place for the western frontier, developed quickly in a boom city economy. Photography probably reached St. Louis about 1843, four years after the birth of photography, and still twelve years after Jedediah Smith’s death. American heroes such as Davie Crockett and Jim Bowie are other major historical figures that were never documented by photography due to their early demise at the Alamo. [Conversation with John McWilliams, photograph collector and dealer, Stockton, October 1998.]

Without a photograph of Jedediah Smith, what images can we offer researchers looking for illustrations of Jedediah? There are photographs of his brothers and sisters. Photographs of three brothers, Peter, Ira, and Benjamin, and three sisters, Sally, Betsy, and Eunice are to be found in the Smith Bacon Family Papers. One can speculate on the similarities or differences so surprisingly evident one way or the other in families. We leave it to the researcher to ponder if Jedediah’s brothers’ images resemble Jedediah Smith (of course the siblings are much older in years than Jed’s young adulthood).
A sketch identified by author Maurice Sullivan who had access to family papers is said to be a picture of Jedediah Smith “made by a friend from memory, after Smith’s death.” The sketch appeared in Sullivan’s The Travels of Jedediah Smith, a documentary outline (Santa Ana, CA The Fine Arts Press, 1934). It is this sketch (see below) that has been used by several artists to develop their own inventive images of Smith in modern paintings and sketches rendered by artists imagining how Jedediah Smith might have appeared. Several of these have been given over the years to the archives at the University of the Pacific or appeared in The Pacific Historian.

Examples of sketches and paintings of Jedediah Smith