352 JAMES O'MEARA
Joseph R. Walker, the discoverer of "Walker's Pass" through the Sierra Nevada chain, leading from the great basin into Tulare valley, was born in Knox County, near Knoxville, Tennessee, in the closing year of the last century.
His father had emigrated only the year before from Rock- bridge County, Virginia, and his new home in Tennessee was at that time barely an outpost of civilization, with an old block house, or fort, for the protection of the few settlers from the Indians.
At the age of nineteen years, Jo Walker, as he was com- monly called, moved with the family to Fort Osage, Jackson County, Missouri.
His father had died, and his brother, Joel Walker, two years his senior who died in Santa Rosa township, Sonoma County, about two years ago and himself were the main support of his widowed mother and sisters.
In 1821 he made his first steamboat trip on the "Expedi- tion," the first vessel of the kind that ever ascended the Mis- souri so far up as Council Bluffs; and the event was so im- pressed and retained in his memory, that he could narrate the details of it down to the close of his life.
One circumstance of the trip was the unskilled manner of loading the boat, by which she was made to draw only two feet of water forward, while aft she drew six feet.
But this great difference in the draft enabled them to make landings at low banks and shores with better facility than had she been on "even keel," as the boatman's phrase is.
Rafts and broadhorns were then the ordinary means of river navigation on the "Big Muddy" and the novelty of a steam- boat trip, in connection with the wonderfully increased speed of from six to eight miles per hour the best time for the crack steamboats of those waters in that early period of steam navi- gation had allured young Walker to the treat.
He had early developed a fondness for adventure and moun- tain life, and his home in the sparsely settled regions of his
