During the 1920s, Maurice S. Sullivan traced descendants of Smith's siblings and found two portions of the narrative of Smith's travels, written in the hand of Samuel Parkman who had been hired to assist in compiling the document after Smith's return to St. Louis in 1830. The narrative's impending publication had been announced in a St. Louis newspaper as late as 1840, but never happened. In 1934, Sullivan published the remnants, documenting Smith's travels in 1821 and 1822 and from June 1827 until the Umpqua massacre a year later, in "The Travels of Jedediah Smith", giving a new documented perspective of Smith's explorations. Along with the narrative, Sullivan published the portion of Alexander McLeod's journal documenting the search for any surviving members of Smith's party and the recovery of his property after the Umpquah massacre. The "Dictionary of American Biography", Volume 17, edited by Dumas Malone, published in 1935, contains an article on Smith authored by Joseph Schafer. The next year, the first comprehensive biography of Smith: "Jedediah Smith: Trader and Trail Breaker" by Sullivan was posthumously published, but it was Dale Morgan's book, "Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West", published in 1953, that established Smith as an authentic American hero whose explorations were overshadowed by the Lewis and Clark Expedition.