At age 23, Jedediah Smith went to St. Louis and enlisted with General William H. Ashley as an employee of the Rocky Mountain Fur Co. In 1823, while with Ashley and a party of 90 trappers, traders, and boatmen camped near Aricara villages five miles upstream from this site, he survived an attack by the previously friendly Aricara Indians. After the bloody encounter, the group regained their boats and drifted downstream, and when the boatmen and some others refused to try to pass the villages, Ashley sent word to his partner, Major Andrew Henry, on the Yellowstone to warn him of the Aricara's treachery. Smith volunteered for the mission, offered what Hugh Glass described as a powerful prayer for his slain companions and for success, recorded as the first act of Christian worship in South Dakota, and successfully crossed the unknown wilderness despite the danger of hostile Indians. Impressed by his speed and success, Ashley made him captain in the motley army of trappers, traders, and Indians that served as an auxiliary to Col. Henry Leavenworth's 6th Infantry in its August attack on the Aricara. In 1826 Ashley sold his interests in the Rocky Mountain Fur Co. to Smith, Jackson, and Sublette, and in that partnership Smith helped chart the way for American expansion from the Missouri River to the West Coast. While searching for new beaver streams, he discovered the central route from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, became the first white man of record to cross the Black Hills, opened the South Pass later used by immigrants, was the first to traverse Nevada, Utah, and the Sierra, the first American to go overland to California, and the first white man to explore the Pacific hinterland from Mexico to Canada. His explorations took him to the Great Salt Lake, and after selling his interest in the partnership he turned to the Southwest, where, while searching for water for his party, he was killed by Comanche arrows at age thirty-two at a scooped-out mudhole on the Cimarron. A Methodist who carried a Bible everywhere, he practiced Christian life among the rough men around him, wrote humbly of his spiritual needs, was regarded as a Christian gentleman whose religion was an active principle, and was remembered as a brave, daring, pious frontiersman and explorer.