America’s School Trust Library The Zybach Collection

The Zybach Collection · Jedediah Smith

The 1828 record

The journals, letters and reports the whole story rests on, and the shelf of later writing built around them.

The creator keeps 41 of these on his own site, in a folder he says himself “needs better organization.” This page is that organization: what each one is, in a sentence, who wrote it, and whether it is old enough that anyone may copy it. Every entry links to his copy.

13 of them are past copyright — published before 1929, or made by the United States government — and a reader may take them, print them and quote them freely. 28 are somebody else’s work and still in copyright: the Library names them, says where the creator hosts them, and stops there. It reproduces none of them and quotes none of them beyond a sentence.

The account given by an Umpqua chief

Almost everything in this series was written by the trappers, by the Hudson’s Bay Company, or by people working from their papers. One passage is not. On 11 October 1828 the Umpqua chief St. Arnoose came to McLeod’s camp with eight of Smith’s horses, and gave his understanding of why the attack had happened. McLeod wrote it into his journal that day.

It is printed here whole because it is the only account in this body of work that reaches back to the other side of the event, and because the creator’s own draft for the interpretive sign prints it under the heading below. It still comes to us at one remove: a chief spoke, a company officer wrote it down in his own words, and the words are his. It is not a statement by the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, who hold their own account; the Library has not been given that and does not speak for them.

Native Account of Event by Umpqua Chief Starnoose

By Alexander R. McLeod · 11 October 1828

October 11, 1828. Fine Weather--the Umpqua Chief with a Dozen of his tribe arrived, they have brought 8 horses restored them to their owner Mr. Smith -- had a conversation with this Leader, St. Arnoose, who has been in person on a visit to the Kellywasats after they defeated Mr. Smiths Party, and we enquired into the Cause that gave rise to that unfortunate affair, and the Old man Stated, that while Mr. Smiths people were busy fixing Canoes together by means of Sticks, to convey their Baggage over the Channel, an ax was missed and suspicion led to suspect the Indians of having embezzled it consequently to recover the Property an Indian of that tribe was seized tyed and otherwise ill treated, and only liberated after the Ax was found in the Sand, this Indian happened to be of Rank, of course much irritated at the treatment he met with, declared his intentions to his tribe, to retaliate on the offenders, but he was overruled, by an Individual higher in Rank and possessing greater influence, subsequently this same man wishing to ride a horse for amusement about the Camp took the liberty of mounting one for the purpose when one of Mr. Smiths men, having a Gun in his hand and an irritated aspect desired the Indian angrily to dismount, the Indian instantly obeyed, hurt at the Idea and suspecting the Man disposed to take his life he gave his concurrence to the Plan in agitation in which discussion, the Indians were much influenced by the Assertions of the other Party, telling them that they were a different people from us, and would soon monopolize the trade, and turn us out of the Country these Circumstances and harsh treatment combined caused their untimely fate, at a moment they least expected it. -- the property the Indians got is all disposed of along the Coast-

Bob Zybach, 1828 Umpqua Memorial sign draft, 20 October 2023, p. 5. The creator’s file. Transcribed from his draft; the ligatures in his PDF do not survive text extraction and have been restored. Nothing else is altered.

The cause St. Arnoose describes — a missing axe, a man of rank seized and tied, and then ordered off a horse at gunpoint — is the same cause the trappers’ own papers give. Rogers records the axe and the tying in his journal on 12 July; McLoughlin reports that “the quarrel originated about an axe.” Both passages are on the historical markers page, in the words the creator chose for the sign.

The primary sources

Ten items: what the men themselves and their employers wrote. Four of them are photographed manuscripts with no searchable text — the Library says so rather than pretending to have read them, and describes them from the creator’s own naming and dating. Two of the journals stop before the attack: Smith’s on 3 July 1828, Rogers’s on 13 July.

The reference shelf

Everything else in the folder: the standard editions, the scholarship, the ethnographies, the newspaper files and the encyclopedia articles the project worked from. They are listed here so that a reader can see what the memorial project read. The Library publishes none of them.

What is not here

Two of the works on this shelf are about the location of the site rather than the event: Lancaster Pollard’s 1944 edition of the surveyor Harvey Gordon’s account, and the 2014 reprint of it. They keep their entries above and their links to the creator’s copies, and the Library quotes nothing out of them. The same rule governs everything in this series.

Provenance

Where these are
The creator’s References folder
Described from
The files themselves, read on 4 September 2026; where a file has no text layer, from its title page image, its name and its folder date
Rights
13 works past copyright; 28 third-party works identified by reference only

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