The trappers cut the lines

arrived November 1826

Smith, one of Ashley’s men out of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, took a party south-west from the Great Salt Lake to the Colorado and across the Mojave to Mission San Gabriel — the first overland arrival in California from the east.

why it is Nevada’s The southern approach runs below Nevada rather than through it, which is why the return trip matters more here than the outbound one.

the note said Smith reaching California in 1827

Smith arrived at San Gabriel in November 1826. 1827 is the return — and the return is the Nevada event.

crossed May 1827; reached Great Salt Lake 3 July 1827

Refused permission to stay, Smith went back east with two men: over the Sierra Nevada at Ebbetts Pass, past Walker Lake, and straight across the open centre of what is now Nevada to the Great Salt Lake.

why it is Nevada’s The first documented transit of the Great Basin by a non-Native, and the first eastward crossing of the Sierra. He proved there was no Buenaventura River — and nobody believed him for another seventeen years.

the note said “crossing at Tahoe”

The crossing was at Ebbetts Pass, well south of Lake Tahoe. No outsider saw Tahoe until Frémont on 14 February 1844 — seventeen years later.

9 November 1828

Peter Skene Ogden, running the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Snake Country brigade, came onto a river flowing west across northern Nevada and followed it some 330 miles to the sink where it vanishes into the desert.

why it is Nevada’s The single most consequential geographic fact in Nevada’s history. This is the only continuous westward water route across the Great Basin, and every wagon that crossed the state for the next thirty years followed it.

the note said “Ogden — Humboldt River”

It was not called the Humboldt when he found it. Frémont put that name on his 1845 map, honouring Alexander von Humboldt, who never saw the place. The attribution of the intervening names — “Unknown River”, “Mary’s River” — between Ogden and Frémont is genuinely muddled in the sources and should not be stated flatly either way.

November 1829 – January 1830

Antonio Armijo left Abiquiú on 7 November 1829 with sixty men and a mule train, trading New Mexican blankets for California mules, and got the first commercial caravan through to San Gabriel. His scout Rafael Rivera detached near present-day Mesquite, was gone thirteen days, and rejoined the caravan at the mouth of Las Vegas Wash on 7 January 1830 — having found the springs. Armijo sent his diary from Santa Fe on 14 May 1830 and it was printed in Mexico City in the Registro Oficial del Gobierno on 19 June 1830.

why it is Nevada’s Correct the name and the whole prehistory of southern Nevada reorients. The Old Spanish Trail was not old and was not Spanish — it was a New Mexican trail, opened by New Mexican merchants sixty years after Spain’s missionaries had failed to find a way through, and eight years after Spain had ceased to rule anything here. Southern Nevada’s first documented crossing does not point back to Madrid or to the California missions. It points to Santa Fe. And the trail watered at spring-fed grass flats the traders called las vegas — the meadows — which is why there is a city there.

the note said “the Old Spanish Trail”, and Rivera credited only by tradition

A New Mexican trail, per the Clark County historian’s framing — the conventional name misattributes it to Spain twice over. And Rivera is better sourced than this page previously allowed: Armijo’s own diary records the thirteen-day detachment and the rejoining on 7 January 1830. Published Mexico City, 19 June 1830; Hafen and Hafen translation. It is the only Mexican-era text that crosses Nevada ground.

left July 1833; reached the San Joaquin November 1833

Joseph Walker, leading a detachment of Bonneville’s expedition, went down the length of the river to the sink, struck west, and forced the Sierra in a 23-day crossing that killed most of his pack animals. He returned in 1834 over the lower pass that now carries his name.

why it is Nevada’s The first east-to-west Sierra crossing, and the route: down the Humboldt, over the mountains. That is the California Trail. Walker did not find a road so much as prove one was survivable.

the note said 1831

1833. Walker left the Great Salt Lake rendezvous in July 1833 and was in the San Joaquin Valley by November — the 1831 date is two years early.