Page:History of California, Volume 3 (Bancroft).djvu/178

160. While attempting to ford the Umpqua River he was attacked by Indians, who killed fifteen of the company and took all their property. Smith, Turner, and two others escaped to Fort Vancouver. McLoughlin of the Hudson's Bay Company sent back a party with one of the survivors to recover the lost effects, in which they are said to have been successful. Jedediah Smith returned eastward by a northern route in 1829, and two years later he was killed by the Indians in New Mexico. I append part of a map of 1826 purporting to show 'all the recent geographical discoveries' to that date.

An important topic, perhaps connected indirectly with Jedediah Smith's visit, is the first operations of the Hudson's Bay Company's trappers in California. Respecting these operations before 1830, I have no original and definite information, except that contained in the statement of J. J. Warner, himself an old trapper, still living in 1884, and an excellent authority on all connected with the earliest American pioneers, although he did not himself reach California until the beginning of the next decade. Warner states