To describe Joseph Rutherford Walker as a typical frontiersman would be to label Abraham Lincoln a typical president. Walker was a man of many firsts: The first to guide a government survey party assigned to map the Santa Fe Trail; the first to find a navigable route over the Sierra Nevada Mountains to California; the first to lead an emigrant train over that route; the first white man to set eyes on the Yosemite Valley; and the first to discover the gold that initiated Arizona as a territory in


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