Joseph Walker - Museum of the Mountain Man

Joseph Rutherford Walker was well known in his day, and his accomplishments earned him contemporary recognition as a mountaineer in the ranks of superior men with the skills to successfully lead journeys of exploration, trapping and emigration throughout the West. His exploits, combined with his longevity, stand as proof of his competence. Walker’s accomplishments were dramatic, but were achieved without as much tragic drama as some of his fellow explorers. Sometimes successful leadership does not make for hair raising tales, thus Joe Walker’s successes might explain why he is not as well-known today as some of his contemporaries.

_{Joseph Rutherford Walker (1798-1876). Image Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. MES35219.}

Walker is primarily known for two things: the possibility that he led the first party of Americans through the area that became Yosemite National Park, and for an 1837 sketch by Alfred Jacob Miller, which, along with additional Miller paintings based on that sketch, project Walker’s strength of personality across nearly two centuries. In the story of Joe Walker, Yosemite and Miller’s image are just a small fraction of his story as a western frontiersman.

Walker’s family was of Scots-Irish and English descent, his mother and father both born in Virginia. In the 1790s, his father, a Revolutionary War veteran, relocated the growing family to Tennessee, where Joseph Walker was born in 1798. Joseph grew up among the hills of what would become Roane County, in eastern Tennessee, an environment that provided Joseph with schooling in backwoods skills that put him in good stead during his later life in the West. In 1814, at the age of fifteen, Joseph and his older brother, Joel, enlisted in a local militia unit that took part in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the culmination of the Creek War.

In 1819, Joe moved to Fort Osage, Missouri Territory, with his now-widowed mother and immediate family. He became a member of a trapping expedition into Spanish New Mexico which was arrested and incarcerated by local authorities. After his release, he remained in the area, trapping clandestinely out of Taos, and became involved in early Santa Fe trading ventures which followed the Mexican Revolution. By 1825, when the US Government undertook laying out a route for the Santa Fe Trail, Walker was experienced and knowledgeable enough to be hired as a scout and hunter.

Returning to Missouri, Walker was elected sheriff of Jackson County, in 1827. This county, with its seat in the growing town of Independence, was already the jumping off point for both the Santa Fe Trail and the mountain fur trade. Joe served as sheriff for two years before again being drawn to the far west.

In 1830, Captain Benjamin Bonneville was planning a temporary leave from the Army to mount a fur trading expedition to the Rocky Mountains. He met Walker and was impressed enough to hire him as his field bourgeois for the venture that departed in 1832. Joe guided Bonneville into the mountains, trapped for a season, then headed to the 1833 summer’s rendezvous, where he recruited forty men for a trip to California. During a November, 1833, crossing of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, his party passed near, or within sight of, Yosemite Valley. In subsequent accounts of this journey, Walker has popularly been given credit for leading the first Americans to see the valley. This expedition was chronicled in the diary of his clerk, Zenas Leonard.

After leaving Bonneville’s service, Walker became a trapping brigade leader for the American Fur Company (AFC). In 1837, Alfred Jacob Miller sketched, A ‘Bourgeois’ of the Rocky Mountains, preserving the likeness of Walker and his Shoshone wife as an iconic image of the Rocky Mountain fur trade.

In the mountains, Joe Walker became known for being steady, competent, and having an encyclopedic knowledge of Western geography, along with a fine-tuned intuition of how unexplored lands might lay. In the 1840s, this reputation saw him engaged as a pilot along the emigrant trails, and as a scout to help the “Pathfinder,” John Fremont, find his way. Walker was still guiding in 1862, when he led a group of miners from Colorado Territory, to what became Prescott, in modern Arizona, earning him the title as one of Arizona’s founding fathers. Eventually, Walker settled in Contra Costa County, California, where he died in 1876.

A member of the Prescott group recorded a comment about Joseph Walker that neatly sums up his life as a western frontiersman, “Captain Walker does not follow trails. He makes them.” Other skilled mountain men, such as Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson, may be better known in modern popular culture, but no mountaineer outshines Joseph Walker.