John Smith, Trader

John Smith

Harper’s Weekly, May 11, 1867

Quick Facts

Significance:

John Smith, one of Bent, St. Vrain & Co.’s best traders, was known to the Cheyenne's as Gray Blanket, supposedly because gray blankets were a conspicuous item in Smith’s trading stock.

Place of Birth:

Frankfort, Kentucky

Date of Birth:

1810

John Smith, one of Bent, St. Vrain & Co.’s best traders, was known to the Cheyenne's as Gray Blanket (poma), supposedly because gray blankets were a conspicuous item in Smith’s trading stock.

Born in Frankfort, Kentucky in 1810, Smith had as a young man apprenticed to a St. Louis tailor, but he fled that staid vocation about 1830, joining a party of traders bound “for the mountains.” 

According to Lewis Garrard, Smith lived and traded with the Blackfeet and Lakota before drifting south to the Arkansas, where he befriended the Cheyennes and married a Cheyenne woman. 

He began his employment as a trader for Bent, St. Vrain & Co. about 1838, becoming “such an adept in the knowledge of the Cheyenne tongue, and such a favorite with the tribe, that his services as trader were now quite invaluable to his employers.” Garrard tells us that in addition to Cheyenne, Smith spoke Blackfoot, Lakota, “French like a native, Spanish very well, and his mother tongue.”

It was Smith’s mastery of the Cheyenne language, however, that was truly legendary. One of Fremont’s men in 1843 noted that Smith spoke “the purest Sheyenne.” Lieut. James Abert proclaimed that Smith spoke the “Chey[e]nne language better, perhaps, than any other white person in the country,” which language was “considered one of the most difficult of any of those spoken by our Indian tribes.” And it was these linguistic skills, claimed old frontiersman Uriel Higbee, that made Smith such a successful trader. “[H]e could not bee Beting [beaten] in [the] indian trade,” Higbee roughly scrawled in a letter to researcher Francis W. Cragin in 1903. “He could Discount the Chyans talking the langagy [language].”

Uriel Higbee claimed that Smith played the fiddle left handed. Garrard does not mention Smith as a fiddle player, although he does write that the trader’s “voice was capable of some little harmonious modulation,” and that the two sang numerous songs while sharing a Cheyenne lodge at Big Timbers. Theodore Talbot, a member of Fremont’s second exploring expedition, met John Smith at Fort Platte near the mouth of the Laramie River in 1843. “A fiddle was brought fourth in the course of the evening,” Talbot wrote in his journal, “and it was a pleasant sight to see a party of fine, stalwart, young men merrily dancing away dull care.” Was Smith the fiddle player?  

Content adapted from Mark L. Gardner's 2004 NPS Historic Resource Study:  "Bent's Old Fort on the Arkansas."