The legend of Jim Bridger, the quintessential American frontiersman whose life spanned the better part of the 19th century, is once again capturing the public imagination, but the true story of the man behind the myth is far more complex and fascinating than any Hollywood portrayal. Born in 1804, Bridger would go on to become one of the most influential figures in the exploration and settlement of the American West, a man who witnessed the transformation of a vast wilderness into a settled nation.
James Felix Bridger entered the world on March 17, 1804, in Richmond, Virginia, the son of James and Chloe Bridger. His parents operated both a farm and an inn, but in 1812, they made the fateful decision to move the family west. This was not a journey for the faint of heart, as the War of 1812 raged with Great Britain, and the frontier territories were considered dangerous and untamed.
The family traveled Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, crossing the Appalachians and boarding a flatboat bound for the Illinois territory.
The Bridger family eventually settled at Six Mile Prairie, just outside of St. Louis, where young Jim would spend the next decade of his life. Tragedy struck early, however, when his mother passed away in 1816, followed by his brother just months later, and then his father the following year.
At just 13 years old, Bridger found himself orphaned and forced to make his own way in the world. He went to work on a ferry before being apprenticed to a famous gunsmith named Philip Creamer, a man whose firearms were sought after by such notable figures as William Clark, John C. Calhoun, and Andrew Jackson.
It was under Creamer’s tutelage that Bridger learned the craft of gunsmithing, and in 1817, he accompanied his mentor on a 170-mile journey north to the Pawnee reservation, where they would tend to the tribe’s gunsmithing and blacksmithing needs. This experience gave Bridger his first real exposure to life among indigenous peoples, an experience that would profoundly shape his views and his ability to interact with Native Americans throughout his life. The irony was not lost on him that this was the same tribe his family had once guarded themselves against when he was a child.
In February 1822, a 17-year-old Bridger answered an advertisement in the Missouri Gazette that would change his life forever. William Henry Ashley was seeking 100 enterprising young men to follow the Missouri River to its source and be employed for one, two, or three years. This was the call that would assemble the legendary Ashley’s 100, a group that included such future icons as Hugh Glass, Jedediah Smith, William Sublette, Jim Beckwourth, and Thomas Fitzpatrick.
Together, these men would define an entire era of American history.
The expedition departed St. Louis on April 3, 1822, with Andrew Henry leading the first group, which included young Bridger. Their boat was piloted by the notorious Mike Fink, a legendary riverboat captain known for his toughness and heavy drinking.
The journey upriver was grueling work, with men using long poles to push against the river bottom, taking millions of steps between bow and stern. By mid-July, they had reached present-day South Dakota, where they faced lean times and scarce game.
The men finally reached their destination at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, not far from present-day Buford, North Dakota, where they erected Fort Henry. It was there that Bridger would begin his education as a fur trapper, learning the intricate skills of the trade. He would have to draw traps from the company clerk against his own account, then head out to search for beaver sign, looking for fresh mud on dams, broken ice indicating activity, and other clues that would lead him to the best locations for setting his traps.
The work was brutal, especially in winter when beaver furs were at their thickest and most valuable. Bridger would have to wade into freezing water, using a knife to cut a level bed in the bank about half a foot below the surface to set his trap. The traps themselves were made of iron, double-sprung with two jaws that would slam shut when triggered, weighing between six and eight pounds each.
A trapper might carry six to ten of these traps on his person.
The isolation these men experienced was profound. In 1822, there was essentially nothing west of St. Louis, Missouri.
The vast interior of what is now the United States, encompassing Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and the Dakotas, was devoid of towns, forts, stores, churches, and schools. The land was populated by hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples with their own rich cultures and traditions, but for the American fur trappers, this was unlike anything they had ever encountered.
Despite the hardships, the first winter of 1823 saw the men eating well. They consumed the majority of what they killed, dining on hearts, livers, tongues, hump fat from buffalo, and even marrow. One fur trapper specialty was to turn buffalo intestines inside out and add tiny bits of organ meat, creating a dish that was about as close to a carnivore diet as one could get.
During parts of the Lewis and Clark expedition, not far from this same area, men were ingesting an average of nine pounds of meat per day, around 6,000 calories, and still going to bed hungry.
The good times would not last, however, as the Blackfeet Nation, the great nemesis of the Rocky Mountain fur trappers, would prove to be a formidable foe. This powerful tribe controlled a vast swath of territory from present-day Edmonton, Alberta, down to Yellowstone, and from Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana all the way east to the Black Hills of South Dakota. They had already clashed with John Colter in 1808 and had taken out some of Henry’s men at the Three Forks the following year.
In the spring of 1823, the Blackfeet killed four of Henry’s men, and tensions continued to escalate. That June, disaster struck when Ashley sent a contingent of men to trade with the Arikara for desperately needed horses. The Arikara were already frustrated with the trappers, who were cutting them out as middlemen in the fur trade, and some members of a rival trapping company had recently killed two Arikara.
The situation exploded into violence, with 14 trappers killed and around 10 wounded before they could make their escape.
Bridger was not present for this fight, but when Jedediah Smith rushed to Fort Henry for reinforcements, Bridger was one of the men who returned with him. He would take part in the short Arikara War that followed, which saw Colonel Henry Leavenworth arrive with 230 men of the Sixth US Infantry, joined by 50 volunteers from the Missouri Fur Company, 80 of Ashley’s men, and 500 mounted Lakota warriors. The battle proved anticlimactic, with the Arikara slipping away under cover of darkness, but the trappers burned their abandoned village to the ground, ensuring further bloodshed in the years to come.
It was during this period that the famous Hugh Glass bear mauling incident occurred, and many believe Bridger was one of the two men left to care for the dying Glass. The story goes that Bridger and John Fitzgerald abandoned Glass, taking his rifle and supplies, believing he would surely die. But Glass survived, crawling 250 miles to Fort Kiowa, and reportedly forgave the young Bridger for his youth and hesitation.
Whether this was truly our Jim Bridger remains a matter of historical debate, with some evidence pointing to a different man named Bridges.
As the years progressed, Bridger’s skills and reputation grew. He would cross the South Pass, trap beaver along the Green River, and in 1824, he would make one of his most famous discoveries. While trapping on the Bear River, Bridger was sent to determine the river’s course.
He followed its winding path through the Bear River Canyon before emerging at a great body of water extending for miles. Dismounting and taking a sip, he was surprised to discover the water was salty. Utah’s Great Salt Lake had been discovered, though Bridger initially thought he had reached the Pacific Ocean.
The discovery of the Great Salt Lake was significant, though the local Native Americans remarked that they had known about the salty lake for a thousand years. Bridger and his companions continued to ply their trade, and in the summer of 1825, William Ashley took an overland caravan of 50 supply-laden pack mules west, setting up camp on Henry’s Fork of the Green River for the first ever Mountain Man Rendezvous. This innovation allowed fur trappers to stay out west year-round, with the market coming to them.
Bridger and his men had the largest haul that year, with over 3,000 pounds of beaver pelts. The rendezvous would become an annual tradition, growing larger and more raucous with each passing year. In 1826, the gathering was held in Cache Valley, where whiskey was present for the first time, contributing, as Jim Beckwourth noted, “not a little to the heightening of our festivities.”
As Bridger’s reputation grew, so did his responsibilities. By 1830, at the age of 26, he had become a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, joining Jedediah Smith, William Sublette, David Jackson, Thomas Fitzpatrick, and others. He was now a brigade leader, an eight-year veteran of the mountains with a proven track record.
He knew the land, knew the indigenous peoples, knew how to talk to them and when to fight, knew prime beaver country and how to find it, and knew how to lead men.
The competition with the American Fur Company, owned by John Jacob Astor, was fierce. In the fall of 1830, Bridger, Fitzpatrick, and Milton Sublette led a brigade of 80 men into Blackfeet country, trapping in the Three Forks region before wintering on the Yellowstone River. The following spring, they had 57 horses stolen by the Crow, which they tracked on foot and recovered.
They rode to the Powder River and from there to the head of the Laramie Fork, trapping beaver the whole way.
The 1831 rendezvous was again on the Bear River, but this gathering would prove problematic. Thomas Fitzpatrick, now a part owner of the company, was tasked with heading to St. Louis to secure supplies.
He was to meet with Jedediah Smith and return west in time for the summer gathering. Unfortunately, Fitzpatrick was two months late getting to St. Louis, and having not heard from him, Smith made an alternate plan to deliver goods via wagon train to Taos and then Santa Fe.
This would prove to be a significant ordeal that left the fur trappers in the Rockies empty-handed.
Mountain Man Joseph Meek described the situation, saying that those attending the rendezvous had “exhausted the stock of goods on hand. The camp was without blankets and without ammunition. Knives were not to be had, traps were scarce, but worse than all, the tobacco had given out, and alcohol was not.
In such a case as this, what was a mountain man to do?” After waiting for weeks with no sign of Fitzpatrick, the trappers left for their fall hunt, desperately undersupplied.
It was on this trip that the great Jedediah Smith lost his life in present-day Grant County, Kansas. Smith was scouting ahead of the wagon train when he encountered a Comanche war party. Family tradition states that Smith attempted to parlay with the warriors, but they opened fire.
He fought back, allegedly killing one of the chiefs, but was caught out in the open and outnumbered. When the caravan reached Santa Fe over a month later, they found Smith’s rifle, pistols, and other belongings already there, in the possession of Comanches who had traded for them with the same warriors who had killed him.
That winter of 1831 and 1832, Bridger and his men stayed with the Nez Perce and Salish peoples before setting out to trap on Henry’s Fork of the Snake River. They were not alone, however, as a brigade from Astor’s American Fur Company was close on their trail, looking to poach their beaver. Bridger was determined not to let them know where the prime beaver country was, even offering to split up the mountains, but the American Fur brigade refused and followed Bridger and his men all the way to the 1832 rendezvous.
The 1832 summer gathering was huge, with over a thousand Native Americans and 400 fur trappers coming together at Pierre’s Hole. The festivities were interrupted when the Gros Ventre, cousins of the Arapaho, showed up. They were sometimes friends and sometimes enemies of the Blackfeet, and judging by the fact that they brought their women and children, they likely did not come to pick a fight.
Sadly, they were mistaken for Blackfeet, and during a parlay, some of the mountain men opened fire, kicking off what is now referred to as the Battle of Pierre’s Hole.
Estimates vary, but there were somewhere between 150 and 300 Gros Ventre against several hundred fur trappers and their Salish and Nez Perce allies. Due to some initial hesitation, the Gros Ventre were able to throw up a quick fort of fallen timber, and by the time the trappers and their friends were ready to attack, their quarry was well dug in. The fight continued until a rumor spread among the trappers that this might be a ruse to open up the main rendezvous camp to attack from the Blackfeet.
Fearing for their supplies and families, they rushed back to camp, allowing the Gros Ventre to slip away. When everything was said and done, around 26 Gros Ventre men, women, and children were dead, along with a dozen trappers.
As the summer came to an end, Bridger once again led a brigade toward Blackfeet country, and once again, the American Fur Company followed. Bridger tried several tricks to shake them, leaving campfires lit while the men snuck away, splitting up and walking in streams to hide their tracks, but nothing worked. Finally, Bridger was left with no choice but to lead these interlopers on a wild goose chase, riding deeper and deeper into Blackfeet country while never stopping to set a trap.
The American Fur leader, Vanderburgh, eventually realized he needed to make some sort of profit and stopped following Bridger, only to be killed by a Blackfeet war party on the Madison River.
Bridger and his men set up on the Gallatin River, north of present-day Bozeman, Montana, where they had their own troubles with the Blackfeet. Bridger himself was nearly killed in an encounter with a Blackfeet leader named Eagle’s Ribs, a member of the elite Buffalo Society who had already taken eight scalps from unlucky fur trappers. During a parlay, a struggle ensued, and two Blackfeet arrows slammed into Bridger’s back.
Eagle’s Ribs grabbed Bridger’s rifle and struck him upside the head with it, a blow so forceful that Bridger later claimed he thought his neck was broken.
As Bridger lay in the dirt with two arrows protruding from his back, the Blackfeet seized his horse and a woman who was traveling with the brigade. She cried out, and her husband, a Mexican free trapper named Loretto, came running with their baby in his arms. At the sight of this, both sides ceased fire, and the Blackfeet, admiring Loretto’s courage, allowed him to hand the baby to its mother before returning safely to the trappers’ camp.
The warriors then departed, allowing the mountain men to rush to Bridger’s aid. They were able to pull one arrow out without much trouble, but the other was too deep. They removed the shaft, but the arrowhead remained lodged in Bridger’s back, dangerously close to his spine.
This was a bloody year in the West, with the Blackfeet and Arikara at war with the Americans, and even certain bands of the Shoshone and Crow had started taking fur trapper scalps. But things were about to get significantly worse for many of the tribes along the upper Missouri River. In 1837, a steamboat traveled up the Missouri with an infected passenger, and this patient zero unwittingly infected the Arikara and then the Mandan.
From there, it spread west like wildfire. This was a defining moment, as over 177,000 Native Americans succumbed to the outbreak, with some estimates double that number. It wiped out over 90 percent of the Mandan population, around 50 percent of the Arikara, and once it hit the Blackfeet, it would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 two-thirds of their population.
Never again would the Blackfeet be the formidable force they once were.
Despite the devastation, sporadic violence between the Blackfeet and trappers continued. Bridger and his men would have at least one more fight with this once-mighty tribe. The brigade came upon a trail of a Blackfeet camp that they estimated to be about three or four days ahead of them.
The following day, they found a lodge with several dead, pox-marked bodies inside. Looking to avoid trouble, Bridger changed course, but in doing so, he nearly had a mutiny on his hands. Relenting, the brigade continued to follow and soon located the village.
The fur trappers began preparing to attack, but Bridger refused to allow the men under his command to take part. Of course, he had no authority over the free trappers, and about 15 of them went ahead, creeping in close and opening fire on the surprised inhabitants.
According to Kit Carson, who was one of the attackers, “We were determined to try our strength to discover who had the best right to the country. We soon reached the village, attacked it, and killed 10 Indians, taking several scalps.” The Blackfeet would rally and chase the free trappers back to camp, where more shots were exchanged until finally all of the mountain men charged and, as one trapper put it, went “barrel to barrel.”
The Blackfeet broke off the attack and carried away what dead they could to mourn.
A similar situation was nearly repeated not long after when these same trappers came upon yet another Blackfeet village, a smaller one consisting of just around 50 lodges. The mountain men approached but were quickly taken aback at the sight of several Blackfeet emerging from their tepees, unarmed, skeletal, thin, and ravaged by disease. Their chief, Little Robe, flatly told Bridger that they were all dying.
Finally, the fur trappers extended some mercy. Instead of slaughtering these sick people, they called a peace.
The 1838 rendezvous was on the Popo Agie, with even more missionaries showing up. Also in attendance was a man named John Sutter, who would one day find his way to California and build Sutter’s Fort. A decade later, one of his workers would make a discovery that would absolutely change the course of US history.
At this point, the beaver fur trade was in serious decline due to both a lack of demand and an economic depression. There was even talk of no more rendezvous, as it was no longer financially viable to bring the supply wagons back and forth.
Consequently, many a seasoned mountain man was calling it quits, Kit Carson included. Not Jim Bridger, though, not yet. That fall, he led another brigade of men to the Wind River, through the Tetons, and over to Pierre’s Hole before dipping south for the 1839 rendezvous on the Green River.
It was there he discovered that the fur companies would not be hiring out any trapping brigades that fall. Beaver had petered out due to a myriad of reasons, and it was no longer worth it to spend your winters wading into freezing water in dangerous country. Just like that, the now 35-year-old Jim Bridger was out of a job.
Following the rendezvous, Bridger accompanied Andrew Drips back to St. Louis with the last haul of beaver pelts, later claiming that this was the first time he had tasted bread in 17 years. One can only wonder how Bridger felt leaving the clean air of the mountains and suddenly finding himself immersed in the hustle and bustle of the city.
The story goes that he crossed the river and went back to his childhood home, just to look around and reminisce. His parents were long dead, and so was his brother. His sister may or may not have still been alive, but historians have not yet uncovered her name, so her fate remains unknown.
City life was not for Jim. He got sick as a dog, all burnt up with a fever, and let it be known that he was raised to go back to his free life in the mountains. His former career as a fur trapper was no longer an option, however, at least not if he wanted to make money.
His once pristine mountains were quickly filling up with migrants and preachers, the damn lawyers and bankers sure to follow. Bridger would have to learn to adapt, and adapt he would. The only problem was that there were some Western newcomers hellbent on taking everything he would build, even if it meant going to war.
While still in St. Louis, Bridger met up with his old friend, the German trapper Henry Fraeb, and the two partnered up, combining their money and leading a group of men west to trap yet another season, just giving it one last shot. They had run-ins with the Lakota on the way west, crossing the plains on three separate occasions as the natives tried to extort the trappers for payment.
Each time, it was Jim Bridger who rode out to meet them and pacify them, calming everybody down and avoiding violence.
This is what stands out most when researching Bridger. While he was certainly capable of violence, he was not a violent man. He had killed when he had to, but he also knew how to diffuse and de-escalate.
He never went out of his way to pick a fight, nor did he seem to hold grudges, at least not against the American Indians. He knew them perhaps better than any other non-native who ever lived and was deeply familiar with their beliefs, customs, and practices. More often than not, he was able to talk his way out of trouble if given the opportunity.
Bridger and Fraeb attended the 1840 rendezvous on the Green River, the last official rendezvous, where Jim was reunited with his wife Cora and daughter Mary Ann. It is likely that Jim went with Fraeb and Joseph Walker to California that fall. If he did, they would have reached Los Angeles by February of 1841 and stayed there until mid-April.
Once back in the mountains, Bridger and Fraeb constructed Fort Bridger, the first Fort Bridger. There would ultimately be three of them. The idea behind this fort was to be a place for Bridger to trade with the various friendly tribes, as well as serving as a base of operations to keep a roof over the head of his wife and child while he was away.
That summer, Fraeb was killed during a fight with a combined force of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho not far from present-day Saratoga, Wyoming. He went down fighting, and according to fellow trapper Jim Baker, the German “was the ugliest looking dead man I ever saw, all covered with blood, rotten front teeth, and a horrible grin.” Also that summer, Jim sent his daughter Mary Ann to the Whitman mission in Oregon, started by the missionaries Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa.
A few months later, Jim and Cora welcomed another child, a boy they named Felix Francis Bridger.
All was good at home, but things were turning more and more violent on the plains as the various tribes got themselves all worked up for a number of reasons. Wagon trains were now passing through, headed to Oregon, and the various diseases were wreaking havoc. One thing to keep in mind when thinking about the so-called Indian Wars is how quickly things were changing for these people.
Whereas some tribes did not mind the fur trappers passing through on occasion, they were not happy with the wagon trains of immigrants and gold seekers now flooding their hunting grounds, and they sure as hell did not like seeing their loved ones die in slow deaths as their bodies were ravaged by disease.
Following Fraeb’s death, Bridger teamed up with another longtime friend, Louis Vasquez. He also abandoned his first fort and erected a new one about 40 miles or so south of Black’s Fork on the Green River. Finally, the third Fort Bridger was raised in 1843, pretty much in the same area.
This was Shoshone territory but technically also Mexico, in addition to being along an ancient Native trading route that would later be adopted by wagon trains headed west. This fort would allow Bridger to sell his wares and services to the pilgrims headed to the promised land.
Two double log cabins were built, as was a blacksmith shop, a trading room, and a stockade for the livestock. This also gave Jim a little peace of mind, knowing that Cora and young Felix were relatively safe within the fort’s log walls when he was out roaming. Then again, this was the American frontier in the 1840s, and you could only keep your family so safe.
That very year, a large war party of Cheyenne led by a renegade named Old River struck the fort. They killed a native woman and her child, in addition to a Salish man guarding the horses, and made off with 70 head before Jim could so much as level his rifle. They also hit the nearby Shoshone, killing a few of them and making off with an additional hundred horses.
At the same time, Jim was also having financial problems. He was in debt and had not made any real money since 1838. As such, he was finding it hard to secure credit for the supplies he would need to trade with the passing wagon trains.
Yet despite not making a profit, he still trapped beaver, his bread and butter. And yes, it was still dangerous. He led 13 men to work the waterways of the Salt Lake Valley in the spring of 1844 and lost two killed to the hostiles.
Luckily, more immigrants than ever traveled west that year, and the hardworking Bridger was able to make a little money. At least his blacksmith shop did brisk business, and he and Vasquez kept plenty of horses to trade to the travelers. Usually, the deal was that he would swap out one of his well-fed mounts for two skinny pilgrim nags.
He and Vasquez also took to keeping various livestock on hand, up to a hundred, including oxen, cattle, goats, and sheep.
Late that summer, Bridger would lead some men south to present-day Arizona to trap the land they called Coyote, and even further south to the Gulf of California. Not stopping for the winter, they traveled north from there up to present-day Utah, passing through the desert as they did so. In late 1845 or early 1846, another daughter was born to Jim and Cora, Mary Josephine.
Sadly, Cora would die not long after. The story passed down to the family was that Cora was bitten by a wolf and inflicted with rabies. She went mad and disappeared into the wilderness, never to be seen again.
One can only imagine there is much more to the story than that, but unfortunately, that is all we have to work with.
This is also around the time that a man by the name of Lansford Hastings paid Fort Bridger a visit. The Oregon Trail came out of Independence, Missouri, and led west through modern-day Nebraska and Wyoming, past Fort Bridger, before swinging northwest through what is now southern Idaho, where Fort Hall was located, and then on into Oregon. The California Trail branched off from the Oregon at Fort Hall, Idaho, and snaked southwest along the Humboldt River through what we now call Nevada and then on to the Golden State.
This land speculator Hastings had what he called a shortcut. It was not, in all actuality, as it added 20 miles, but whatever.
This shortcut went straight due west from Fort Bridger, linking up with the California Trail not far from where Elko, Nevada, now stands, thus bypassing the need to go north to Fort Hall. The only problem was that this route, also known as the Hastings Cutoff, meant that you had to pass over the Wasatch Mountains and travel a good 80 waterless miles through the Great Salt Desert. It was a journey that had previously been taken, and although arduous, it was possible.
That said, those of you over the age of 40 might remember the old Oregon Trail computer game and how you had to carefully choose what time of the year to embark on your journey. If you started too early, there would not be enough water or maybe too much water with the river swollen from snowmelt. Start too late, and you would get caught up by the snow and also have a hard time finding game.
Likewise, in real life with the Hastings Cutoff and California Trails, you had to time your travels just right, or you would get stuck up there in the mountains and freeze to death. Enter in the Reed and Donner parties out of Illinois. They, along with their employees, arrived at Fort Bridger on July 27, 1846, with plans to take the Hastings Cutoff.
Our very own Jim Bridger advised the travelers as to the condition of the trail that lay ahead. “Mr. Bridger informs me that the route we designed to take is a fine level road, plenty of water and grass, with the exception of the desert,” wrote James Reed in a letter home shortly before his doomed party set out to their fate.
Furthermore, a member of their wagon train, Edwin Bryant, had previously ridden on ahead and noticed how rough the cutoff truly was. He left a note at Fort Bridger telling the Donners and Reeds not to take the trail. He thought it would be too hard for wagons, especially with so many women and children.
Well, the Donner Party did not receive this note of warning, and after confirming with Bridger, they went on ahead. We all know how that turned out.
So why was Bridger not more honest about the dangers that lay ahead, and why did he not deliver the note of warning telling the travelers to take another route? Jim knew every inch of every possible trail that these pilgrims could have taken, and he knew damn well the conditions of the Hastings Cutoff. You would think that he would talk them into going up north to Fort Hall and thus making it through to California before the snow began to fly, or at the very least, just be honest about what lay ahead.
So what the hell happened?
There are some who think that this was greed, the idea being that if more people used the Hastings Cutoff, it would mean more business for Fort Bridger and thus more money in Jim’s pocket. Historian and author Jerry Enzler disagrees. Enzler contends that Bridger’s description of the road was accurate.
A cartographer named Thomas Jefferson was in a party ahead of the Donners, and as he was mapping out the route, he described the desert portion as “road good, a level plane,” followed by “the journey is attended with some hardships and provocation, nothing however but they can be overcome. The most difficult portion of the whole journey is the passage of the California mountains, particularly the descent on the western side.”
Enzler also states that Bridger was well known to give extensive commentary whenever asked about various routes or trails, and entire maps, accurate maps, had been created based solely on Jim’s words. The idea that all he said about the cutoff was that it was a fine level road does not jive with his normal mode of communication. It is more likely that Bridger expanded on the trail a good deal, but Reed simply did not jot down Jim’s every word in that letter.
Furthermore, the idea that he would have withheld pertinent information to these travelers for his own personal gain would have been out of character.
As for the warning letter, it remains a mystery. Years later, James Reed would blame Louis Vasquez, Bridger’s partner, for concealing the note in order to secure more business for the fort. But it does not appear that he ever cast any suspicion towards Jim himself.
Per Jerry Enzler, speaking of the Donner Party, “They set out too late. They took too many breaks. They had plenty of money but did not hire an experienced guide to keep them moving.
They banished James Reed, and they stayed and rested for five days before trying to cross the final summit.” He then cites Sam Brannan as saying the party consisted of people who, by quarreling and fighting among themselves, delayed time until they got caught in the mountains and could not extricate themselves.
Finally, you have Reed himself, who admitted, “The disasters of the company to which I belong should not deter any person from coming who wishes to try his fortune. Our misfortunes were the result of bad management. Had I remained with the company, I would have had the whole of them over the mountains before the snow would have caught them, and those who have gotten through have admitted this to be true.”
It is possible that Jim could have misled these people for his own monetary gain, but once again, this does seem to be in direct contradiction to how he normally conducted himself.
In 1847, Jim was bound for Fort Laramie when he saw a large party approaching not far from Little Sandy. This group, as it turns out, was 143 members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, led by Brigham Young. Jim ended up pitching camp early and invited Young and some elders over to talk.
He advised them at length on the Great Basin area and corrected their maps, showing that the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake were indeed two separate bodies of water. He described the natives that called the area home and advised the pilgrims to ascertain whether or not they could grow wheat or corn before putting down roots.
When they went their separate ways the next morning, Young asked if Bridger would guide them, but Jim had business to attend to at Fort Laramie and would not return in time to do so. All in all, a good first impression. As time went on, even more Mormons would come, most of them stopping at Fort Bridger along the way.
The rest is history. As we all know, the area around Great Salt Lake is now Mormon Central. The only problem was that for some damn reason, Brigham Young just flat out did not like Jim Bridger.
As quickly as just a year after their meeting, Young was spreading lies and claiming that Jim had set the Indians upon he and his flock. Bridger found out about this and sent Brigham a letter that he had dictated, which read: “I am truly sorry that you should believe any reports about me having said that I would bring any Indians or any number of Indians upon you or any of your community. Such a thought never entered my head, and I trust to your knowledge and good sense to know that if a person is desirous of living a good friendship with his neighbors, he would not undertake such a mad project.
I am desirous of maintaining an amicable friendship with the people in the valley, and should you want a favor at my hand at any time, I shall always think myself happy in doing it for you. From your friend and well-wisher, James Bridger.”
Once again, there you have Jim Bridger the diplomat, trying to diffuse the situation. So where did Brigham Young get these wild ideas, and what was it that caused him to turn on Bridger? Brigham Young and his flock were indeed having problems with the natives, namely the Ute, and some Ute had already been killed by the Mormons, which sure as hell was not helping matters.
Furthermore, the Ute were well armed. Perhaps Young figured that it was Bridger who provided the Ute with said firearms. Maybe he did.
Jim had been trading arms with the indigenous for quite some time. But did he ever arm anyone knowing that they were then going to use the guns to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Americans? Highly doubtful.
Bridger’s partner Vasquez had also been in contact with the church leaders, helping to advise them. He wrote a note of his own saying that he knew that they had killed some Ute and that Jim had gone to winter with the tribe, but once he saw how worked up they were, he returned to Fort Bridger. Perhaps the paranoid Young did not appreciate these fur traders knowing so much about he and his people’s business, and for whatever reason, he got it into his head that it was Jim who stirred up the natives, something for which there is absolutely no evidence.
To further highlight Young’s insanity, in 1849, Vasquez wrote Brigham and warned him that the Bannocks were upset and planning to raid the Salt Lake area. Brigham read this letter out loud in a counsel and then weirdly proclaimed, “I believe I know old Bridger is death on us, and if he knew 400,000 Indians were coming against us and any man were to let us know, he would cut his throat. Bridger is a backhanded man that can’t be understood.”
You have to love extreme paranoia coupled with fundamentalist cult-like views, a winning combination that always ends well.
From there on, things only continued to worsen. In 1850, on the same day that California was admitted to the Union, Utah became a territory, largely in part to the Mormons who had been settling there over the previous couple of years. Brigham Young became the first governor of this territory and began enacting laws already laid out in their own little Mormon Constitution.
This is when they really started coming at Bridger hard. First, they had given him a tavern license, which allowed him to sell liquor at his fort, as if Bridger needed such permission. They then revoked the license in 1853 before issuing an arrest warrant for Jim with further claims that he was inciting the Ute and providing them with arms and ammunition to use against Americans.
In short, Jim Bridger was being charged with treason, which back in those days was a hanging offense.
But what it really boils down to, according to historian Fred Gowans, is Brigham Young’s growing desire to control the Fort Bridger Green River area and that the Mormons were not content to see this lucrative business go to the enrichment of the mountain men. It was not just the fort. Jim had a ferry set up on the Green River as well that was earning money, manned by some of his former fur trapping buddies.
The Mormons wanted the ferry and the fort and the money that both were generating more than they wanted Bridger himself. He was just an excuse.
Finally, Young sent his army of Mormons up there, and while Jim was gone, they attacked the fort, killing a few fur trappers working on the Green River Ferry and destroying all of Bridger’s whiskey supply in small doses. It is worth noting that not everybody took this lying down. A month prior, the Mormons had attempted to seize the ferry on Green River, but 50 former mountain men raised their rifles, so the saints went back to Salt Lake City with their tails tucked between their legs, only to return with a much larger force.
Word got to Bridger that his fort had been seized and that he was a wanted man, so while he did return to the area, he laid low and camped out in the hills.
The clever man he was, he was still able to somehow communicate with his wife, who just so happened to still be in the fort. Good luck to any Mormons attempting to flush Bridger out of those hills. If he did not want to be found, it was not going to happen.
We are talking about a man who piloted fur brigades and trapped beaver and died on elk all over the entirety of Blackfeet territory for years without losing his hair. Instead of calling down the thunder, Jim traveled all the way to Washington DC to complain to his representatives in person. Old Broken Hand Fitzpatrick, now an Indian agent, was traveling to the capital to help finalize the Treaty of Fort Laramie, and Bridger accompanied him.
Sadly, Fitzpatrick would succumb to pneumonia while there, dying with Jim by his side.
Although Bridger was able to speak with the government about his problems with the Mormons, all this did was end up pissing off Brigham Young even further. In the end, it was all for naught. The Mormons took Fort Bridger, and short of going to war, Jim had to ride it off as a loss.
The church would eventually give him some money for his troubles, but not anything near what the fort or the land it was on was worth. The government did get involved, but all they did was take the fort over for themselves. They claimed to be leasing it from Bridger, but when it came time for payments, they balked, saying that Jim could not provide sufficient proof that he was the owner of the fort bearing his name.
This would be a long legal battle, and it would take years following Jim’s death for his family to ever receive any sort of compensation.
During this entire 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇, Bridger was not sitting around twiddling his thumbs. The events described took place over several years. Jim encountered Brigham Young and the first Mormon pilgrims in the summer of 1847, and it would be in the spring or summer of 1849 when Young declared that Bridger was “death on us.”
It would be another four years after that, in 1853, when the church labeled Jim a traitor, and that following summer in August when Bridger was away on business was when they seized the fort. This was a process, and Bridger was a busy man at the time, both in his personal and professional life.
If you will recall, Jim’s first wife Cora passed away in either 1845 or 1846 after giving birth to Josephine. That made three kids for Bridger: the first daughter, Mary Ann, who was sent to live at the Whitman Mission near present-day Walla Walla, Washington; the boy, Felix; and finally, little Josephine. Somewhere around 1847 or 1848, Bridger would marry for a second time to a young lady that some sources say was named Chapita.
Not to be confused with the Chapita that was married to the famous Ute Chief Ouray. We do not know anything else about Jim’s Chapita. She was likely still a teenager when she and Bridger married, and they would only have one child, a girl named Virginia.
But unfortunately, Chapita would pass away a few days later from complications.
Shortly thereafter, Bridger got hitched to his third wife, a Shoshone girl that he called Mary, and it was not long before she and Jim welcomed a baby boy into the world, naming him John. All total, Bridger would have seven children that we know of. His firstborn, Mary Ann, was 12 years old in 1847 and had been living with Marcus and Narcissa Whitman for the past six years.
They had basically adopted her. She was referred to by Narcissa as her little girl, sometimes affectionately called her little half-breed. It appears that Mary Ann had a good life there.
As far as the historical evidence shows, Narcissa made her dresses by hand as well as dolls. She was receiving an education and had two nurturing adults that cared for her.
The Whitman mission was in Cayuse country in southeastern Washington. Tensions were on the rise, and then the plague struck the Cayuse in the form of a measles epidemic. One source states that half the tribe died, and a good deal of them were children.
The Cayuse, in their anger, attacked the Whitman mission. They killed both Marcus and Narcissa along with 11 others and took over 50 captives, one of which was Bridger’s daughter Mary Ann. Fur trapper Joe Meek also had a daughter there as well, Helen, and she likewise was taken captive.
Unfortunately, she and another child would die in captivity due to illness. Mary Ann Bridger survived, though some sources say she may have been used, but she was ransomed back a month following the massacre. During the process of getting her back to civilization, she also became ill and soon passed away.
Ironically, it was one of Bridger’s former rivals, Peter Ogden and the Hudson’s Bay Company, who secured the release for these hostages. Bridger would not even find out until visited by Joe Meek, who was on his way to Washington to demand justice. Interestingly enough, Meek’s cousin Sarah was the then First Lady of the United States and wife of President James K.
Polk. Perhaps Meek thought he could pull some strings. Once again, this is not one of those Hollywood endings.
Tragedy struck first to the Cayuse people at large and then to the Bridger and Meek households. A war with the Cayuse ensued, leading to many a death, and in 1850, five Cayuse men were publicly hanged for their part in the massacre. There were no happy endings or peaceful resolutions for any involved, just grieving parents and orphan children.
But so goes history.
Despite losing a daughter and despite Brigham Young breathing down his neck, Jim Bridger still had to earn a living. Enter Uncle Sam, or at least the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. A Captain Howard Stansbury and his 16-man expedition of cartographers, illustrators, scientists, and soldiers were tasked with surveying the Great Salt Lake, evaluating the Mormon and Oregon Trails, and hopefully finding a likely route for a transcontinental railroad.
A daunting task that would need a capable guide, and who more qualified than Jim Bridger? After all, he had been roaming these so-called unexplored areas for over the past 25 years.
All in all, it was a very frustrating experience for Bridger, babysitting these wet-behind-the-ears pilgrims in such a fashion. Not only was he mad at himself for taking the job, but he swore that he would never guide for the Army again, an oath that would not last very long. As Jim would once more accompany Stansbury in the fall of 1850, this time to another possible railroad crossing over the Continental Divide, now known as Bridger Pass, about 20 miles southwest of Rawlins, Wyoming.
This was a trip full of memories for Bridger. One evening, they camped just two miles from the spot his longtime friend Henry Fraeb fell to the Lakota, and the following day, they came to where Jim’s current business partner Vasquez, along with 14 other traders, were once in an hours-long battle with the same tribe.
Needless to say, Jim ordered the men to keep their rifles handy, and sure enough, as they pressed east not far from Cheyenne Pass, Bridger spotted the natives tracking him. What he did next shows how effective Bridger was at keeping his scalp all those years. He could size up a situation and he knew when to run, when to make a stand, when to fight, and when to talk.
This was a time for talking. Bridger the diplomat, noticing that the warriors were keeping their distance, shouldered his rifle and approached alone and on foot, signing for the Lakota to come out and talk. As he neared, they did, and as it turned out, they were Oglala and Cheyenne.
Bridger invited them to camp, and here they came, a-galloping, shaking hands all around and looking to trade. After doing a little business, Jim then began entertaining his guests, using a mixture of what Lakota and Cheyenne he knew coupled with sign. Jim took to telling his legendary stories, and in no time flat, these hardened warriors of the prairie were doubled over in laughter.
Given a different scout or even a different approach, who knows things could have turned out much differently.
The expedition soon reached Fort Laramie, and Bridger’s job was done, at least for this go-around. The trail they had just blazed, one known by the mountain men for decades and the indigenous for centuries, would now be dubbed the Overland Trail. About a year later, Jim would return to Fort Laramie to attend the Horse Creek Treaty, the largest assembly of Native Americans up to that point.
Among the tribes in attendance were the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara, Arapaho, and the Shoshone. Which is why Bridger was there. He was looking out for the interest of his in-laws, the Shoshone, and a certain chief, Washakie himself.
In the summer of 1852, Bridger would send Felix and Mary Josephine to St. Louis in order for them to be enrolled in Catholic school. He reckoned on this being a much safer way for his children to receive an education, and this is also about the time that the problem with the Mormons all came to a head, so he was likely looking to keep them clear of potential harm.
Bridger would eventually move his entire family to Westport, Missouri, where Kansas City now stands, and in the winter of 1853, he sent Virginia to join her siblings at school in St. Louis as he traveled to DC with Broken Hand Fitzpatrick.
With Fort Bridger out of the picture, Jim and Vasquez planned a new trading post along the Santa Fe Trail, and they both bought land outside of Westport. Financially, they did all right. Jim even bought a mercantile store, selling all manner of goods to travelers and citizens alike.
This business appears to have been located at 504 Westport Road, and per KC History. org, it is possibly the oldest still extant building in Kansas City. A Google search shows that it is now home of Bridger Westport, the number one hip-hop club in Kansas City.
A building that was once owned by Jim Bridger is still around, and you can go there and get your bump and grind on.
In 1856, Bridger was able to send a fourth child, John, aged four, to St. Louis for schooling, and he took a job himself as a guide for the eccentric Irish adventurer Sir St. George Gore, the eighth baronet of Gore Manor in Northern Ireland.
What a piece of work this Gore guy was. He set out with Bridger as his guide, with 40 servants, cooks, stewards, wine servers, taxidermists, secretaries, even people who just made fancy special flies for his fishing rigs. 170 horses, oxen, and mules pulled 21 carts and six wagons full of three tons worth of equipment, ammunition, a giant tent, chairs, the entire leatherbound works of Shakespeare, a bathtub, and an assortment of expensive greyhounds and foxhounds.
One of the wagons carried nothing but guns. You have to wonder what Bridger must have thought, especially considering that the baronet would sleep till noon every day.
Sadly, during this trip, Jim would receive news that his son John had passed away in St. Charles of diphtheria, and as such, Bridger cut the job short to return home to his remaining family. That summer of 1855, Jim returned to scouting for Gore.
He was doing his level best to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 every animal he could find, just for the sake of killing. Some estimates put the number of buffalo slaughtered by the Irishman at an astounding 30,000, along with thousands of deer, elk, and over 100 grizzlies. His guides would either stampede the buffalo directly in front of Gore, or he would just post up on a hill and wantonly drop one after another after another.
So much so that an Indian agent complained to the government, but unfortunately, no action was taken. Gore would not return home to the Emerald Isle until 1857.
Following this job, Bridger would go to work guiding for the nation’s leading geologist, Ferdinand Hayden, and topographer Governor K. Warren, exploring the Yellowstone River and taking important geological samples and specimens. Other than Warren and Hayden nearly coming to blows, everything went swimmingly.
Not so much down Utah way, however. Old Brigham Young was still down there in Salt Lake City, crazy as ever, making his holy proclamations and ruling like a theocrat. Actions that caused President Buchanan to go ahead and appoint a non-Mormon to the position of Utah Territory Governor.
He knew Young would never go for this, so the new governor, Alfred Cumming, was to be escorted by the US military, which was guided by none other than Jim Bridger.
The Utah War was a complex 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇. Brigham Young declared martial law, and Mormons prepared for war, even briefly toying with the idea of a weapon of mass destruction. A guy named Uriah Brown invented what he called Liquid Fire, and the plan was to have this stuff piped into the canyons and released on the invading US military.
In the end, not much came of this so-called war. Despite Young’s boasts, as soon as the military showed up, he stepped down and relinquished power to the US-appointed governor. The Mormons lost a lot of their federal power but still remained in control of the local governments, courts, etc.
, and the nation at large considered the entire ordeal a joke. Buchanan’s Blunder, they called it.
The troops, under the command of a Colonel Edwin Alexander, had departed Leavenworth, Kansas, in mid-July 1857, much later in the season than they should have, considering the slow plodding pace of oxen-drawn wagons and the terrain they would have to cross. Two months later, in late September, Bridger was guiding the troops through the South Pass in Wyoming and down the Mormon Trail, Salt Lake City bound. With just over 400 miles to go, they could be expected to arrive no later than the end of October.
This would not be the case, however. For whatever reason, the expedition halted at Ham’s Fork, over 150 miles northeast of the Great Salt Lake. They were beginning to face Mormon resistance, but mostly it was just bloodless harassment, with Porter Rockwell and his legionnaires firing off guns in the air out of rifle distance and yelling insults.
The less-than-stellar Colonel Alexander called a counsel, and Jim Bridger proposed an alternate route. They would turn northwest to the Bear River, take the Oregon Trail to present-day Idaho, and then come into Salt Lake City from the north. This would take twice as long, yet the colonel agreed, I suppose out of concern with Mormon resistance.
The troops were soon mired down in a nasty snowstorm. They turned back, and the entire column was stopped for 10 days. At this point, a Johnston arrived and took over command, but it was too late.
Winter had struck with a vengeance, and the Army soon suffered more harassment at the hands of Mormons, as well as the lack of supplies. All the while, Bridger was busy trying to just keep everybody from freezing and starving to death. Needless to say, the Army did not make it to Salt Lake City for many months to come.
It was a big waste of money and manpower, and Brigham Young ended up stepping down anyway. Still, one has to think that old Jim got at least a little satisfaction out of seeing Young humbled.
In 1859, Bridger was once more hired by the US military, this time to guide an expedition to the headwaters of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, an area that despite being heavily traveled by mountain men and Native Americans, had not officially been mapped or scientifically explored since Lewis and Clark passed through over five decades prior. They were also under orders to determine the feasibility of wagon roads in the Powder and Big Horn River areas and to map out the territory of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho and figure out “the proper routes by which to invade their country and conquer them.” The leader of this expedition, a Captain William F.
Raynolds, was often at odds with Bridger, thinking that his maps were better than those in the old trapper’s brain. Time and again, Captain Raynolds would propose a route that Jim had to correct him on.
In the spring of 1860, Bridger rejoined Captain Raynolds not far from Fort Laramie and led the way west to the Wind River area, where once again Raynolds ignored his scout’s advice and damn near got his men froze to death. After more than a few unsuccessful attempts at crossing the Divide, Raynolds finally stopped being hard-headed and took Bridger’s advice, using what is now known as Union Pass to cross over. Then came the Snake River, which was dangerously swollen due to snowmelt.
This obviously not being Bridger’s first rodeo, he suggested making a bull boat to cross over with. The captain, in his wisdom, rejected this idea and instead ordered his men to search for a good location to ford, a choice that cost the life of one of his corporals who was swept away by the current, his body never to be seen again.
Instead of now taking Jim’s advice on the bull boat, Raynolds ordered his men to construct a raft, because Raynolds knows best. When the raft was completed, the captain tried to cross the river in it, guided by a rope, and surprise, surprise, he was unsuccessful. Finally, after two days wasted and one soldier dead, Captain Raynolds put his bruised ego to the side and asked Bridger to please go ahead and make that bull boat.
Jim did so, and all the men were able to cross over without a single issue. A bull boat is fabricated using a wooden frame or hoop of sticks, often willow, over which a green buffalo hide is stretched. The one Bridger slapped together on this occasion measured 12 and a half feet long by three and a half feet wide and made 17 successful crossings, each passage only taking two minutes.
Jim would then lead the men over Togwotee Pass to Pierre’s Hole, and by July 3rd, they had reached Fort Benton without making it to present-day Yellowstone National Park. Believe it or not, even in the year of Our Lord 1860, the world at large was still in denial about the wonders of Yellowstone. This fabled area was first described to Lewis and Clark by various tribes, but they themselves did not pass through.
However, a few years later, John Colter observed at least one geothermal feature in the northeastern portion of the park and described it as a place of fire and brimstone. Colter’s Hell, as folks took to calling it, was dismissed as just a fish tale. Then came Jim Bridger and numerous other trappers, and they too told stories of what they saw: the boiling mud and steaming rivers, a mountain of glass, and petrified trees with petrified birds singing petrified songs.
It was not until 1869 that the area was formally explored with the Cook-Folsom-Peterson Expeditions. Turns out there were geysers and there were steaming rivers, and while the petrified birds singing petrified songs did not exist, the petrified trees certainly did. To be honest, Bridger and his fellow trappers could tell some whoppers.
Jim especially, if he felt like you did not believe him, he would really start laying it on thick. There was the story that Bridger told about being surrounded by a hundred or so Cheyenne warriors, or Lakota, or Blackfeet, or whatever tribe Jim felt like inserting. He would tell his spellbound audience that the angry warriors chased him into a box canyon that offered zero chance of escape, and to make matters worse, he was all out of shot for his rifle and completely surrounded.
Jim would then pause, a long pause, until someone inevitably would blurt out, “And what happened then?” To which Bridger, straight-faced, would stoically reply, “Well, them Injuns killed me.”
Then there was the camping spot that Jim claimed was one of his favorites, right up against a bald flat face of a mountain. He had the echo of the canyon timed to return at six hours, so just before turning in at night, Bridger would yell out, “Time to wake up!” And sure enough, six hours later, his own echo would return to work as an alarm clock.
And it was not just the forest and the birds that were petrified. There was a certain place where Bridger claimed that a Crow medicine man had put a curse on everything that crossed it to be petrified, even gravity. As proof, Jim claimed to have ridden his horse over petrified air.
The animal, thinking that he could just do this everywhere, tried again on his own to show off to some other horses and fell to his death. Of the ordeal, Bridger allegedly said, “He was a good logical horse. Only thing that he didn’t know was that in most places the law of gravity isn’t petrified.”
So yeah, for your common pilgrim from back east who had a hard time even believing that the Rocky Mountains were as big as reported, these crazy stories coming out of the mouths of these wild, long-haired mountain men was just a bridge too far. Before the Raynolds expedition was complete, Bridger interceded in two would-be fights with the indigenous, both times calming hot tempers and avoiding bloodshed, just a pattern that continuously repeats itself. The dude just knew how to talk to the natives.
In the spring of 1861, Jim went to Denver and met up with his longtime buddy Jim Beckwourth with the idea of getting together a group of old trappers to go hunting gold. They ought to have known more than anyone else where the likely deposits were. The only reason they had not prospected before, according to Jim, was that in the old days, “Beaver was the best paying gold.”
First, though, the coach and mail service hired Jim to lay out a direct stage route from Denver west through the Rockies, which he did. The new road cut more than 200 miles off the Overland route, but it never materialized, and as far as I know, he and Beckwourth never did go panning for gold.
Turns out there were more pressing matters at hand. Gold would soon be discovered along Grasshopper Creek in southwestern Montana. The boom town of Bannack sprung up quickly as hopefuls flooded the area looking to strike it rich.
Likewise, about 80 miles west, where gold was struck at Alder Gulch, resulting in another boom town called Virginia City. It was like the California Gold Rush all over again, only this time the would-be miners were crossing right through the middle of Sioux territory in order to get to the diggings. As you can guess, the Lakota were not too happy about these developments.
They and their allies struck back hard, closing down the new trail and causing the Army to send in Brigadier General Patrick Connor with orders to “make vigorous war upon the Indians and punish them so that they will be forced to keep the peace.”
And guess who the United States Army would call upon to guide such an operation? Jim Bridger. But would he be up to the task?
The man was nearing 60 years of age at this point. In the summer of 1854, a second lieutenant, John L. Grattan, led a detachment of infantry into a combined Brule and Oglala Lakota village just east of Fort Laramie.
It seems a visiting Miniconjou had killed a stray cow belonging to a passing wagon train, and its owner demanded justice. Chief Conquering Bear offered up a horse as way of compensation, but the cow’s owner wanted money, and the US Army wanted an arrest, something that old Conquering Bear could not do. Not only did he have no authority over a member of another band, but it would have also been rude.
The Miniconjou in question, after all, was Conquering Bear’s guest.
The entire 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 was to be handled by the Indian agent per the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and he was due to arrive in just a few days. Despite the short wait, the Army decided to act. Second Lieutenant Grattan marched his 30 men, including a very drunk and rude French interpreter, into a camp containing an estimated 1,200 warriors and tried to arrest the alleged thief.
The resulting battle, known as the Grattan Massacre, saw the lieutenant and nearly a dozen of his troops almost immediately cut down. Warriors led by an up-and-coming Oglala in his early 30s named Red Cloud overtook and finished off the remaining soldiers as they attempted to retreat. The whole bloody mess was over in a matter of minutes.
A year later, several hundred soldiers under the command of Brigadier General William S. Harney would attack a Brule Lakota camp near present-day Lewellen, Nebraska. This Battle of Blue Water, aka the Harney Massacre, saw over 80 Lakota killed, half of which were women and children.
An additional 70 prisoners were taken, almost all of whom were women and children. Some historians point to this event and the Grattan Massacre as being the impetus to the violence that would dominate the Great Plains over the next 25 years. Toss in a couple of broken treaties along with a few more massacres, and you better believe things were about to get real bloody.
By the spring of 1862, the Army once again came calling on Old Jim Bridger, this time to guide Colonel William Collins and his men as they attempted to protect the telegraph and relay stations from hostile Lakota. By all accounts, Bridger got along well with the rank-and-file soldiers he worked with, often teasing or just taking the piss out of the younger troops. A store sutler at Fort Laramie during this time remembered that Jim was always very open to questions and that he answered all inquiries as honestly as he could, that he was both a great listener and a conversationalist.
However, it was noted that Jim had very little patience for willful ignorance. Anytime somebody would say something that he felt was out of malice or just downright meanness, Bridger would simply curl up his mouth in a sneer and walk away.
Per his biographer Jerry Enzler, Jim did not like to sacrifice his feelings, intelligence, or personal pleasure when “it was such an easy matter to walk away from a damn fool.” A lesson that would serve us all well to follow. Do not waste your breath or your time arguing with a damn hardheaded fool.
Just do like Bridger and walk away. Colonel Collins’s teenage son, Casper Collins, whom Casper, Wyoming, is named after, traveled often with his father and was amazed at how many languages Bridger could speak. Per young Casper, Jim could talk a little French, Spanish, Shoshone, Crow, Bannock, Salish, Nez Perce, and Ute, and of course he was fluent in the universal sign language of the plains.
In the summer of 1864, Bridger himself would guide a train of some 400 wagons across his trail, only to be absolutely amazed at the sight of the boom town of Virginia City, a place that was merely an untouched wilderness the last time he was in the area. Jim returned to Fort Laramie in August and was badly injured after being thrown from a horse. Keep in mind he is now 60 years old.
Fort Laramie records show that he was transported to the fort hospital, but this incident would not slow Bridger down, at least not yet. By mid-September, he was guiding yet another wagon train up the Bozeman Road, and contrary to what you may read, his trail did prove to be more popular than the Bozeman. All total in 1864, it is estimated that 2,500 men and scores of women and children utilized the Bridger Trail as opposed to just 1,500 via the Bozeman.
Sure, the Bozeman Trail offered more water and grazing for the animals, but at what cost? Still, people are hardheaded, and despite the dangers, and despite the Lakota now beginning to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 travelers, the gold miners persisted, as did the military, hoping to offer up protection. All of this just causing unnecessary strife.
And then further south in Colorado, Chivington and his men executed the Sand Creek Massacre. This, coupled with the aggravation of the Bozeman Trail and other recent instigations, would ignite a full-on war as the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota vowed to defeat the whites and drive them from their territories altogether. Wagon trains raided, relay stations burned, men and women killed, children taken.
The small town of Julesburg, Colorado, was sacked, 14 soldiers from Fort Rankin were killed, and thus the Powder River Campaign of 1865 began.
Jim had done his level best to stop things from getting out of control by introducing the Bridger Trail, but it was no use. The war was on, and the Army would now need a reliable guide. As such, Bridger would report to Fort Laramie in April of 1865, where to his absolute disgust, he was greeted with the sight of a Cheyenne warrior’s rotting corpse hanging from a noose.
The dead man, a fellow named Big Crow, had been captured for his alleged role in the attack on Julesburg. Then, when some of his fellow tribesmen killed a soldier a mile or so west of Fort Laramie, General Patrick Connor ordered that Big Crow be taken to the location of the soldier’s death and strung up.
The troops did as ordered, quickly erecting the gallows and placing Big Crow on the bed of a wagon, noose around his neck. They then drove the wagon out from underneath the Cheyenne, but he was quick enough to use the damn rope to shimmy up the crosspiece of the scaffolding. Eventually, a soldier had to climb up and wrestle with Big Crow until they both fell, and of course, the condemned man finally succumbed to the noose, and they just left him there hanging as a warning.
A few weeks later, Bridger would guide a Colonel Thomas Moonlight and his 500 horse soldiers toward the Big Horn, hoping to locate a large camp of Cheyenne. They found sign but ultimately returned to Fort Laramie without a fight. Upon arrival, Jim noticed two more natives, this time Lakota, who had been placed under arrest with orders to hang and be left hanging just like Big Crow.
Bridger warned against this, saying that such a public and disrespectful display would only cause more deaths, but his word fell on deaf ears, and these new prisoners soon joined Big Crow, rotten and swaying right out there in the open.
By late July, the military was ready for a big push. General Connor split his force of 2,500 plus men into three groups, with Bridger now chief of scouts, personally guiding for Connor and his 800 soldiers and 185 wagons as they departed Fort Laramie. The Powder River Campaign was interesting in that the military utilized a large force of volunteers, the largest group of volunteers in fact ever deployed against the hostiles at least up to that point.
In addition to General Connor’s force, you also had 1,400 Missourians under Colonel Nelson Cole, 600 Kansans under Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Walker, and Captain Frank North and his Pawnee Scouts.
Each morning, the now 61-year-old Jim would rise early, have a cup of strong black coffee and a bit of jerky, and confer with the general. He would then ride out far ahead of the column alone, as his fellow scouts rode the flanks. At night, Jim would return well after dark, have him another bite to eat, and then turn in.
Rinse and repeat. I do not want to diminish the skill or grit of the US fighting man of that day and age, but for the most part, many of these young troopers and volunteers would have died out there on the prairie if left to their own devices. They would get lost, drink some bad water, or not notice hostile sign and be cut down.
This is not a reflection on them so much as their lack of experience out west. Bridger, however, an old man, will survive in such an environment alone on a daily basis with the same ease that you and I toss a load of laundry in the washer.
Per one unnamed soldier serving in General Connor’s command, “I knew scores of hunters, scouts, and trappers of great and less repute, none of whom were worthy to sit at the same table with Jim Bridger. To me, the simplicity, the kindliness, and absolute trustfulness of his character marked him as a man above the common.” And yet another remembered, “Bridger seemed to know every foot of the way in the country we went through.
He was a very shrewd man and rather rough. He understood the way of the Indians very well and seemed to be able to make friends even with the warriors.”
We are also left with the following tantalizing detail as to Bridger’s firearm of choice during the campaign, with a soldier describing it as an “extraordinary double-barreled rifle with which he could plug the center at 500 yards off, and he was one of the most unassuming men I ever saw, but when he said anything he meant it.” Now, I am no firearms expert, but I did consult with my buddy Garrett Levi from the 11 Bang Bang YouTube channel. This is just a guess, but Garrett thought possibly Jim could have been carrying a London-made Purdey Express rifle, most likely in .
50 caliber. It may have even fired a . 58 or even a .
62 caliber, but slugs that heavy would drop pretty damn fast to be hit in the center at 500 yards. Then again, Garrett points out that these side-by-side double-barreled Express rifles were also proofed to take extremely hot charges of powder, which I reckon would aid in reaching out and touching something at a great distance. These bad boys were expensive, however, and similar rifles could be made by local gunsmiths for a bit cheaper.
Now, these young soldiers and volunteers Jim was guiding during the Powder River Expedition, they thought the world of him. He was already a damn legend by the time any of them were born. Jim’s boss, however, General Patrick E.
Connor, did not share the same fond sentiment. The Irish-born officer was a veteran of not only the Civil War but the Mexican-American and the Seminole Wars, and he was not brand spanking new to the American West either. It was he and his men in 1863 who committed the lesser-known Bear River Massacre.
This occurred not far from present-day Preston, Idaho, and saw hundreds of Shoshone slaughtered, numbers vary but possibly somewhere between 250 and nearly 500, and as usual, many of those killed were women and children.
This may have partly been the reason why Connor disliked Bridger. He knew the old man was close with the Shoshone and as such, he often suspected Jim of being treacherous. There was one incident when, as they were about to enter into a canyon, the general turned to Bridger, patted his holstered sidearm, and threatened, “Jim, if you lead me into an ambush, by God you’re the first who’s going to die.”
“Damn paper collar soldier” is what Bridger referred to him as. One has to assume that the general was the beneficiary of many of Jim’s scowls.
Another reason Connor may not have cared for the mountain man was because Bridger was often sympathetic with the plight of the natives. He believed that they were actual humans, and in many ways, Jim had more in common with the Native Americans, both in habits and beliefs, than the soldiers that he now guided. Connor could not understand that.
As far as their actual engagements with the hostiles, Bridger did locate a column of smoke that Captain Frank North and his Pawnees then determined was an Arapaho village. Most sources do not list Jim as being involved in the battle that followed, except for one frontiersman and teamster, Finn Burnett, who stated that Bridger led the column to the camp.
This fight, known as the Battle of Tongue River, saw the Arapaho put up a tough resistance despite many of the warriors being away at the time raiding the Crow, as they tended to do. The men covered the women and children as they retreated before following suit. The Arapaho then regrouped and counterattacked, causing General Connor and his force to retreat.
All in all, it is considered a US victory, with the soldiers only losing one dead and six wounded, along with one dead Native American scout. The Arapaho lost somewhere between 30 to 60, something dead, and yes, of course, per usual, some of them were women and children.
Once back at Fort Laramie, Jim was reunited with his son Felix, and according to a witness, was very displeased to see his son “in the ranks of a common soldier.” Whether Bridger’s mood was due to his son’s actual rank or simply the idea of him out there putting his neck on the line for the Army is anybody’s guess. And just to further drive home the type of guy that Jim was, as he returned from Laramie, he hitched a ride part of the way in the back of a mail wagon with two soldiers who had just mustered out.
For the trip, here he was, this living legend, riding in the back of this wagon with these two young men probably over half his age, and Jim was simply just one of the boys. They piled up hay six inches deep and placed their blankets over it and made a trip out of it. Along the way, they stopped at a roadhouse, and the owner recognized Bridger immediately, inviting him in for a meal in a room on the sleeve.
Jim did not budge, though, saying that he was traveling with these two soldier boys and he bunks where they bunk and he will eat what they eat. And just like that, all three received room and board for free. That is just the type of guy that Bridger was.
He did not put on no airs. He was not better than you or above you. Jim was just making his way in this world like all the rest of us.
Jim would return home to Westport, but not for long. There was a large council held at Fort Laramie in the summer of 1866 with 21 separate bands of Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne coming in to discuss a treaty. But they could not agree on most of the chiefs, and they left in disgust, with Red Cloud saying that he would never allow the whites to use the Bozeman Trail, not even if there was a fire.
And by the way, Bridger’s road to the gold diggings was almost completely dismissed by the military at this point. For whatever damn reason, they were determined to use the Bozeman Trail and protect the prospectors using it at all costs, despite it being the much more dangerous route. You just could not stop the damn fools from crossing Lakota and Cheyenne land.
This was one of the things that Red Cloud was so angry about. The tribes just did not want anybody passing through.
Enter in Colonel Henry Carrington. He was tasked with heading into the heart of Lakota territory and raising a couple of new forts for the purpose of defending the travelers along the Bozeman. Bridger was called in to scout for the colonel, and they set off from Fort Laramie on June 17, 1866.
700 mostly untried and poorly equipped men, along with 226 mule teams, headed straight into the hornet’s nest. And as would be a continuing trend, Jim’s advice largely went ignored. Despite Bridger picking out a prime location for a new fort, the colonel instead chose a spot on the Little Piney, just east of the Big Horns in present-day Johnson County, Wyoming, an area that had ample grass and water but no timber, at least not any conveniently close by, which posed its own unique set of problems.
This new fort was quickly erected and dubbed Fort Phil Kearny, named after the popular Union general who was killed in action a few years before at the Battle of Chantilly. By mid-July, the Lakota had already made their presence known, sneaking away with over 170 head of livestock from the new installation. 20-some-odd soldiers gave chase, which is exactly what the warriors wanted them to do.
In the end, two soldiers and one teamster were dead, with five wounded. The following day, the Lakota stole an additional 34 mules from a wagon train on the Big Horn River.
About a week later, Bridger was guiding a Thomas Burrows from Fort Phil Kearny to Fort Reno when he came across quite a bit of Indian sign pointing towards Crazy Woman Creek. Investigating that night, Jim found what remained of a small detachment of soldiers who had been attacked earlier that day. 10 enlisted men, along with five officers, three women, and several children.
Lieutenants Templeton and Daniels had ridden ahead to hunt for buffalo when they were attacked, with Daniels being killed. A wounded Templeton made it back to the wagons and circled them, and the fight was on. The chaplain for Fort Phil Kearny, Reverend David White, was present, and as several people began praying, he grabbed a rifle, supposedly saying, “There is a time for praying and a time for fighting.
Now stop praying.”
They put up a fight indeed, until they were down to just a few rounds per man, at which point they had some hard decisions to make, namely who would be the designated hitter for the women and children. You have likely heard the old trope about saving that last bullet for yourself, the idea being that a quick death is better than what would await you if you were taken prisoner by the hostiles. The same consideration was given to women and children back in those days, and I get it, but man, not a job I would have liked to have had.
Luckily, that evening around dusk, before any drastic measures were taken, the beleaguered holdout spotted a solitary rider coming straight towards them. Old Jim Bridger himself. The scout entered into the encircled wagons among cheers and let the survivors know that help was on the way.
Noting that Captain Burrows had initially dismissed Jim’s claims of Indian sign, had Bridger not pushed on to investigate, God only knows what would have happened to those soldiers and civilians.
In August, Carrington sent Bridger to scout out an area for an additional fort, this one to be on the mouth of the Big Horn, just a few miles from where Jim had rafted Bad Pass over four decades prior. Dubbed Fort C. F.
Smith, this post was about 100 miles northwest of Fort Kearny in present-day Montana. As the post was being constructed, Jim was also tasked with shortening the road from there to Virginia City, leading a small wagon train as he did so. Along the way, they came upon three dead miners, all riddled with arrows.
Once in Virginia City, Bridger agreed to speak with the Montana Post and once again asserted that he and his buddies could end these hostilities in no time flat if just given the means, yet another dig at the way the Army was handling business.
Bridger also took the time to call on his old friends the Crow, surprised to find out that they had already been paid a visit by Red Cloud and his people. Not only had Red Cloud and his Sioux visited the Crow, but they were making the rounds to all the tribes, past enemies included, attempting to form an alliance and drive the whites out for good. And some among the Crow were interested, either in fighting for the Sioux or the whites, whichever side could assure them that they would regain control of the Powder River Country.
Bridger talked some of the Crow leaders into coming in with him to Fort C. F. Smith to speak with the commander, and he also rushed ahead to send news both to Carrington and the commander of Fort Laramie, Major James Van Voast, letting them know that they needed to act fast, as the hostiles were assembling on the Tongue and meant to do what Jim described as mischief.
Van Voast especially doubted the old trapper, saying that he “exaggerates about Indians.”
Jim then returned to Fort Smith, having shortened the road to Virginia City by 20 miles and securing the loyalty of the Crow for the moment at least. By October, he was headed back to Fort Kearny at the request of Carrington. Earlier, I did mention the lack of timber around Fort Kearny.
This meant that wood-cutting details had to be sent out miles away, and whenever they left the safety of the fort, they were attacked almost as a daily occurrence. The horizon sparkled from the glint of signal mirrors. The enemy was waiting on them at all times, as the soldiers’ every move was watched and reported.
Skip ahead to November 3rd, 1866. Captain William J. Fetterman arrives with an additional 63 troops and immediately begins boasting about whipping the entire damn Sioux Nation.
Others there at Kearny echo his sentiments, namely a Captain Frederick Brown and Lieutenant Francis Grummond. Fetterman receives permission to conduct an ambush shortly after arriving. He leaves a few mules picketed outside the fort as a trap, but the Lakota do not take the bait, instead opting to make off with a herd of cattle about a mile away.
There is more dissent in the ranks of Fort Kearny. Accusations are levied. Tensions are high.
By this point, the soldiers have withstood something like 50 attacks and lost around 20 men, including civilians. There were continued urgings for something to happen. Somebody needed to take the offensive, to bring the fight to the hostiles.
In early December, this was attempted. A wood detail came under attack about four miles away from the fort, and Captain Fetterman was sent to help with a company of cavalry. Even Colonel Carrington mounted up, looking to lead by example as he set off with a squad of mounted infantry.
His plan was to circle his detachment around and cut off the Lakota retreat. During all this excitement, Lieutenants Grummond and Bingham, along with several soldiers, were separated from the main force and attacked. Grummond made it out alive, but Bingham did not.
His body and that of a sergeant were found hours later, heavily mutilated. An additional four soldiers were wounded as the Lakota led them into an ambush.
The tactic was simple. You lure your prey away with an easy target, perhaps one or two warriors who take off running. The soldiers would pursue, only to top a hill or round a corner, and oh boy, now you are surrounded.
Seems easy enough to train against, but it just happened over and over again. Hell, it is a tactic still used by guerrilla fighters to this day. Of this, Carrington admitted that the war with the natives required “the utmost caution.”
As far as Bridger was concerned, he voiced his own opinion, saying that these soldiers did not know anything about fighting Indians. And let us face it, he was right.
Following the end of the Civil War, a majority of your experienced troops mustered out. These young soldiers heading west were mostly raw recruits on their first deployment and poorly trained at that. Some of the men, NCOs, or the officers like Fetterman were accomplished combat veterans, but fighting Johnny Reb down in Georgia was a whole lot different than facing the Great Plains warriors.
Like fighting apples when you are used to punching oranges.
Once again, word came that the Crow were becoming wishy-washy, so Bridger was sent back to talk with them. He arrived at Fort C. F.
Smith in late November, and his stories were once more doubted by those in command. Just an aging mountain man living on his past accomplishments. Even the government back east was blind to the threat, or at least they claimed to be.
In the State of the Union Address of 1866, President Andrew Johnson boasted, “Treaties have been concluded with the Indians who have unconditionally submitted to our authority and manifested an earnest desire for a renewal of friendly relations.” I guess nobody told Crazy Horse or Red Cloud, because they had an earnest desire all right, but it was not for a renewal of friendly relations.
Things finally came to a head on December 21st, 1866, when Bridger was still at Fort C. F. Smith.
Once more, the soldiers were lured outside of Fort Kearny to once again come to the aid of a wood detail. Captain Fetterman is often quoted as saying, “Give me 80 men and I will ride through the whole Sioux Nation.” Whether or not he truly uttered these words is debatable, but on December 21st, he got exactly 80 men.
Fetterman and his command were given explicit orders to not cross or pursue hostiles over Lodge Trail Ridge. They did so anyway and were summarily slaughtered, each and every damn one of them. This fight, the Fetterman Fight, also known as the Fetterman Massacre, was at that time one of the greatest defeats the US military had ever suffered.
Colonel Cook blamed Colonel Carrington, with Carrington then passing the buck onto the now-dead Fetterman. A lot of accusations were thrown about, lots of finger-pointing, and I will get to all of that in detail when I cover the Lakota Wars. Fact of the matter is, many mistakes were made by many different people.
If the Army had just steered the prospectors towards Bridger Trail instead of insisting on the Bozeman, perhaps things would have been different. Likewise, if the military had built Fort Phil Kearny where Bridger recommended, instead of miles away from their only source of timber. And what if the military commanders had paid closer attention to Jim’s advice when it came to fighting the hostiles?
You learn from those who know, right?
Per one soldier, “James Bridger was with us all the summer of 1866 up until late in the fall. If Colonel Carrington and the officers had followed the advice of Bridger, I do not think there would have been nearly as many of our men killed. He told the officers not to follow the Indians and to send more men on escort duty, but they thought he was old and did not know anything about Indian warfare.”
Can somebody who was in the military please explain this to me? Like, what is the thought process here with officers when there is a guy like Jim Bridger, clearly experienced? The man had been living out there at this point for what, 45 years, and he was still alive.
He may have not known how to read or write. He may have looked like an old farmer, but the man was a damn survivor. Why would you pay no heed to his words?
Like, why? What have you learned in a book that is better than what this man has already in his head? Yeah, it just frustrates me.
By this point, Bridger’s health was starting to decline, though. So I do not know, maybe that had something to do with it. That fall, he took from the horse a while back was catching up with him, as was old age, and he was not able to get around as quickly as he once could.
Also, his eyesight began failing him. He was joined at Fort C. F.
Smith by Mitch Boyer, a young mixed-blood man, his father a French fur trapper and his mother a Santee Sioux. Mitch was sort of a prodigy of Jim’s, soaking up all that knowledge and experience. He is another guy I would like to cover on a future episode.
In June, Bridger returned to Fort Kearny, blazing yet another trail as he did so, known as Bridger’s Cutoff, a route that found its way onto military maps that very summer. He was also joined by his friends the Crow, and by the end of the month, there were more than 1,800 of them camped around the fort. Still, not everybody welcomed Bridger.
The new commander of the Mountain District, Colonel John Smith, said that the old scout was not needed and furthermore paid no heed to rumors about attacks, a silly comment considering that the Lakota then proceeded to conduct several raids on and around the fort, culminating in the famous Wagon Box Fight on August 2nd of 1867.
Jim Bridger, still not feeling his usual self, took a temporary discharge in September to “recuperate” from what was described as an enfeebled condition. But he returned to duty in the spring of 1868 and guided three companies in building a road from the new Fort Fetterman to Medicine Bow. Red Cloud’s War was winding down, but it was a total loss for the Army, the first war ever lost by the US military.
The Army would end up abandoning the Bozeman Trail completely, along with the forts that they had built, including Kearny.
From May to July of 1868, Bridger assisted in these efforts, guiding General Henry Morrow along with over 200 wagons, just doing what he had always done. Keeping an eye out for ambushes, choosing safe spots to camp, steering men and animals clear of poisonous water, finding safe river crossings, you name it. Per Finn Burnett, “He seemed to never forget a trail that he had ever traveled, or the distance between streams or watering places, whether good water or bad, and also whether or not there was wood, and if there was good feed for the stock.
So we always knew what sort of camp the one ahead would be and what kind of country we would travel over in order to reach it.”
On July 21st, 1868, at 64 years of age, Jim Bridger was finally discharged from military service for the final time. Still was not ready to retire, though. Oh no.
In February of 1869, Bridger offered up the idea of him becoming the new Indian agent to the Crow. His nomination was formally approved by General Sherman, but ultimately the job went to another younger man. Meanwhile, Jim’s eyesight was progressively worsening.
He was far from destitute, however. Bridger had barely even touched the money that he received from the Army, and over the years he had acquired a few properties around Westport and New Santa Fe, which he now began selling for a profit. Except for one.
In April of 1872, he deeded his 287-acre farm to his daughter Virginia, charging her a whopping $1 and the “love and affection I bear towards her as my daughter.”
Now nearly blind, Bridger stayed close to home and tended to his prized apple orchard, often sending bushels of apples to his neighbors. His claims about Yellowstone were also vindicated. The area was finally officially explored, the geysers and other wonders discovered, and even the Kansas City Journal printed an official apology to Jim Bridger.
Editor Robert Van Horn wrote that he “heard from Bridger’s own account of those wonders and had written it out for publication but had suppressed it because some of his friends laughed at it as utterly incredible.”
Jim’s son Felix died in 1876, just 25 days after Custer and his men, including Bridger’s prodigy Mitch Boyer, were wiped out up there on the Greasy Grass. James was 72 years old when he buried Felix. He had already outlived three wives and four children and many, many of his friends.
Of the remaining three kids, you had Virginia, Mary Elizabeth, and his youngest, William. By the late 1870s, Bridger could only recognize people by the sounds of their voices, but he still got around with a heavy walking cane and even went riding his favorite horse on occasion. He would tell Virginia to go saddle Old Ruff for me, I feel like riding the farm.
And he would, letting Ruff pick his way, with his dogs trailing behind. If Jim ever got turned around, something that never happened when he was younger, he would just sit there on the horse waiting while the dogs ran back home barking to fetch help.
Bridger still loved to tell stories. He would walk to town, often feeling his way with his cane, and one of the locals claimed that Jim could still out-talk seven men. Even the children would come and sit on the porch and listen to his yarns.
“I shall always remember Bridger’s kindly blue-gray eyes,” said a woman who was around 10 or 12 when she knew the old trapper. “I would often go see Mr. Bridger.
He was always very hospitable and liked to have the children of the neighborhood come to see him. His son Bill played the violin, and the whole neighborhood used to come to dance at the Bridger home. I often saw him riding on horseback or walking over his land, feeling his way along with his stick, accompanied by two or three of his foxhounds.
If they startled a rabbit, the old man would get greatly excited and halloo the hounds onto the chase.”
Despite his age and eyesight, Jim was anxious as ever to live out west, declaring that he would not stay east for another day if he could only have use of his eyes. Often while sitting on the porch, Bridger would stare towards the west and say, “I wish I was back among the mountains again. You can see so much further in that country.”
On July 17, 1881, the great Jim Bridger passed on to the other side at 77 years of age. A life, I think, that was well-lived. One that saw a tremendous, almost unbelievable amount of change.
When Jim was a young man first going up the Missouri River, the entire Western half of what is now the United States was a wilderness. There were no stores, no post offices, no doctors, no lawyers or teachers or police officers. When Bridger was a child, there were founding fathers and veterans of the American Revolution still alive.
Thomas Jefferson would not die until Jim was in his 20s. When Bridger did head west, the Great Plains teemed with millions upon millions of shaggy bison, and by the time he died, these animals were all but extinct. Likewise with the indigenous, both friends and enemies.
The Blackfeet are a perfect example. They were the top of the walk, the baddest of the bad, a formidable foe that put many of Jim’s pals under. Yet by the time Bridger departed the mountains, they were but a nub of what they once were, decimated by disease and plagues and economy and government they did not understand.
Even the Lakota were done, despite their last hurrah from the mid-1860s to the late 1870s. By the time of Bridger’s passing, Crazy Horse was gone, Red Cloud was on the reservation, and even Sitting Bull would finally surrender just two days after Jim’s death. Bridger passed through modern-day Denver before there was so much as a law court or a nail driven.
Likewise with Casper and Jackson and Billings and Bozeman. From Bismarck to Salt Lake City, Jim Bridger saw it all when it was still wild and free and untamed. Yet at his passing, all of these lands were crisscrossed by railroad tracks, fencing, and barbed wire.
It had all been parceled out, claimed, dug up, and built upon. Church bells now rang in lieu of beaver tails slapping the water, and prisons and jails sprung up where the only law once was what a man could enforce with his own fists and rifle and blade.
A man who could neither read nor write, who once helped power a keelboat up the Missouri River with pure muscle and guts, saw the coming of the steamboat, the telegraph, and even the damn telephone. Hell, Jim Bridger even outlived Billy the Kid by a total of three days. His son William would pass away from consumption six years later in 1887, and daughter Mary Elizabeth died in 1922 from heart trouble.
Virginia lived the longest, not dying until 1933. In fact, she lived long enough to go see the movie The Covered Wagon in a theater, where her father was portrayed by actor Tully Marshall. Virginia was not happy with it, though, as the movie Jim Bridger was a heavy drinker who lived with two Indian women at the same time.
“Pa was never like that,” Virginia scoffed, before filing a million-dollar lawsuit against the production company, a suit that was ultimately overturned due to Jim already being long dead.
The Bridger estate was finally paid for Fort Bridger, a whopping $6,000. And that is about all I have got on the great Jim Bridger. What a life.
I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you learned a little something. I know I did. Thank you so much for listening.
I know I say this all the time, but it means the world to me. It really does.