He was a teenager when he signed on with Ashley’s Hundred, and for the next four decades the West was his home. Jim Bridger would cross the Rockies before most Americans even knew they existed, blaze trails that still carry his name, and guide the United States Army through country that had killed better men than the young soldiers who followed him. By the time he retired, the wilderness he had known as a young man was gone—fenced, mapped, and crisscrossed by railroads. But in the years of the fur trade, Bridger stood at the center of it all.
Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1804, Bridger was left an orphan by the age of thirteen. He was apprenticed to Philip Creamer, a celebrated gunsmith whose clients included William Clark, Andrew Jackson, and John C. Calhoun. In 1817, Bridger traveled with Creamer to the Potawatomi reservation, where the boy learned to live among Native Americans—the same people his family had feared when they first moved west.
Five years later, at seventeen, Bridger answered William Henry Ashley’s famous advertisement seeking one hundred enterprising young men to follow the Missouri River to its source and trap beaver. The fur trade was already old by then, but Ashley’s expedition defined the mountain man era. The recruits included Hugh Glass, Jedediah Smith, William Sublette, Jim Beckwourth, and young Jim Bridger. They traveled up the Missouri on keelboats, powered by men walking the length of the vessel and pushing long poles against the river bottom.
Grueling work. By the time they reached the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers in August 1822, they had lost men to desertion and watched the Assiniboine steal twenty-five of their horses. They built Fort Henry and began trapping. Bridger learned the trade quickly—how to read beaver sign, set traps in freezing water, and work a pelt for the St.
Louis market. But the Rockies were dangerous. The Blackfeet, who had driven earlier trappers from the region, killed four of Henry’s men in the spring of 1823. That June, a trade mission to the Arikara ended in disaster.
The tribe, angry over being cut out of the fur trade and provoked by rival trappers, attacked. Fourteen men were killed and another ten wounded before the survivors escaped downriver. Bridger was not present for the fight, but he returned with the reinforcements Jedediah Smith brought down from Fort Henry. In 1823, Bridger was one of two men left with Hugh Glass after the old trapper was mauled nearly to death by a grizzly.
Believing Glass would not survive, Bridger and John Fitzgerald took his rifle and supplies and abandoned him. Glass survived, crawling over two hundred miles back to Fort Kiowa. Whether the young man who left him was really Bridger remains uncertain—the evidence rests on a single account written years later that called him “Bridges. ” Bridger himself reportedly told a geologist that there was no desertion.
Whatever the truth, the incident did not damage his standing among the trappers. In 1824, the twenty-year-old Bridger was sent alone to follow the mysterious Bear River to its end. He rode through the Bear River Canyon and emerged beside a vast body of salt water—Utah’s Great Salt Lake. A French-Canadian trapper named Etienne Provost had seen the lake from a distance around the same time, so both men receive credit for the discovery, even though the local tribes had known about it for centuries.
The first mountain man rendezvous took place in 1825, when Ashley brought supply-laden pack mules to the Green River instead of forcing trappers to haul their pelts all the way back to St. Louis. That year, Bridger’s party brought in the largest catch—over three thousand pounds of beaver pelts. The following year, Bridger volunteered to scout a shortcut down the Big Horn River, riding a makeshift raft through Bad Pass Canyon and coming out soaked but alive.
The main party declined to risk their furs on the rapids and took the long way around. By 1830, Bridger had become a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. He had spent eight years in the mountains and knew the land and its people better than almost anyone alive. He still could not read or write, but it did not matter.
That same year, John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company moved into the Rockies, and competition between the two outfits became fierce. When a rival brigade began following his men into the best beaver country, Bridger led them on a wild goose chase deep into Blackfeet territory rather than reveal his trapping grounds. The winter of 1832 brought Bridger close to death. A Blackfeet warrior named Eagle Ribs, who had already taken eight scalps, advanced on Bridger’s camp under a peace pipe.
Bridger, suspicious, thumbed back the hammer of his rifle. Eagle Ribs heard the click, grabbed the barrel, and the two struggled. Two arrows slammed into Bridger’s back, and Eagle Ribs clubbed him over the head with his own rifle. Both sides opened fire.
Nine Blackfeet and no trappers were killed. The warriors pulled one arrow from Bridger’s back, but the arrowhead of the second remained lodged near his spine. It stayed there for two years until a missionary doctor named Marcus Whitman cut it out at the 1835 rendezvous, with Bridger lying flat on his belly, held down by companions, fortified by whiskey. He gave the arrowhead to the Scottish adventurer Sir Walter Drummond Stewart, who kept it in a castle for years.
The beaver trade peaked between 1830 and 1832, then began its decline. By 1838, it had collapsed. The prices were too low, the demand gone, and the beaver population had been wiped out in many areas. In 1839, Bridger traveled with the last shipment of pelts back to St.
Louis—the first time in seventeen years he had tasted bread. His trapping career was over. Adapting, as he always had, Bridger went into business with his old friend Henry Fraeb. In 1842, they built the first Fort Bridger on the Green River in what is now Wyoming.
Fraeb was killed the following year in a fight with a combined force of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Bridger then partnered with Louis Vasquez and built a new fort, which became a vital supply post for emigrants traveling the Oregon and California Trails. In 1846, the Donner Party arrived at Fort Bridger and asked about the Hastings Cutoff. Bridger described the road as a fine level route with plenty of water and grass, except for the desert.
A warning letter left by an earlier traveler, describing the route as too rough for wagons with women and children, never reached them. Some have accused Bridger of misleading the party for profit, but the evidence suggests his description was consistent with what other travelers reported. The Donner Party delayed too long, quarreled among themselves, and were caught in the Sierra Nevada by winter. Blame for the tragedy has fallen on many, but Bridger’s partner Vasquez, not Bridger, was later accused by James Reed of concealing the warning note.
In 1847, Bridger met Brigham Young and a party of Mormon pioneers and advised them on the Great Basin, correcting their maps and suggesting they test whether crops would grow before settling. The Mormons settled around the Great Salt Lake anyway. Within two years, Young had become convinced that Bridger was inciting the Indians against his people. Despite Bridger’s written denial and offers of friendship, the accusations grew.
In 1853, the church labeled Bridger a traitor and issued an arrest warrant. While he was away, Mormon forces attacked the fort, killed several trappers working his ferry, and destroyed his whiskey supply. Bridger traveled all the way to Washington to plead his case, but the fort was lost. The government eventually took it over and refused to pay him, and his family did not receive compensation until years after his death.
Bridger’s personal life was marked by tragedy. His first wife, a Salish woman named Kora, bore him three children before dying of rabies after being bitten by a wolf not long after giving birth to their daughter. His second wife, a Ute woman, died days after giving birth to a daughter. His third wife Mary bore him two sons before her own death in 1859.
Of seven children, Bridger outlived four. His eldest daughter, Mary Ann, had been sent to the Whitman Mission in Oregon for an education. In 1847, the Cayuse attacked the mission, killing Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and eleven others. Mary Ann was taken captive, survived, but died soon after being ransomed.
Through it all, Bridger kept working. He guided Captain Howard Stansbury’s survey expedition to the Great Salt Lake and the route that would become the Overland Trail. In 1854, he escorted the eccentric Irish baronet Sir St. George Gore on a hunting trip that slaughtered an estimated thirty thousand buffalo.
In 1857, he guided federal troops during the Utah War against Brigham Young’s theocracy, helping the army survive a brutal winter. In 1859 and 1860, he led Captain William Reynolds’s expedition toward the headwaters of the Yellowstone, repeatedly correcting the captain’s poor decisions, including saving the entire command by building a bullboat to cross the swollen Snake River after Reynolds refused his advice, lost a soldier, and failed with his own raft. During the Civil War, gold strikes in Montana brought a flood of prospectors across the Powder River country. The route they used, the Bozeman Trail, cut straight through Lakota and Cheyenne territory.
Bridger laid out a safer alternative—the Bridger Trail—that passed through Crow and Shoshone country instead. It was used by more travelers than the Bozeman in 1864, but the army insisted on protecting the more dangerous route. In 1866, Red Cloud refused to allow whites to use the Bozeman Trail “even if there’s a fire,” and war followed. Bridger, now in his sixties, served as chief of scouts for the Powder River campaign of 1865.
He rode out alone each morning, far ahead of the column, reading sign that younger men missed. His commanding officer, General Patrick Connor, distrusted him and threatened to kill him if he led the column into an ambush. Despite the tension, Bridger’s guidance brought Connor’s force through safely. The other two columns, led by inexperienced officers with poor scouts, fared much worse.
In the summer of 1866, Bridger scouted for Colonel Henry Carrington as the army built forts along the Bozeman Trail. Carrington ignored Bridger’s advice on where to build Fort Phil Kearny, choosing a location without convenient timber. The Lakota immediately began harassing the garrison. On December 21, 1866, Captain William Fetterman, who had boasted he could ride through the whole Sioux Nation with eighty men, led exactly that many soldiers over Lodge Trail Ridge against orders.
All eighty were killed. The Fetterman Massacre was one of the greatest military defeats the United States had suffered. One soldier later said that if Carrington and the officers had followed Bridger’s advice, far fewer men would have died, but they thought he was old and knew nothing about Indian warfare. Bridger’s health was failing.
A fall from a horse the previous year had weakened him, and his eyesight was beginning to fail. He took a discharge in September 1867, returned to duty in 1868, and guided troops in abandoning the forts along the Bozeman Trail after the army finally admitted defeat. Red Cloud’s War was the first war the United States military ever lost. Bridger was discharged for the final time on July 21, 1868, at sixty-four years old.
Nearly blind, Bridger retired to his farm outside Westport, Missouri, tending his orchard and telling stories to the neighborhood children. His claims about the wonders of Yellowstone, long dismissed as tall tales, were vindicated when the area was finally formally explored. A Kansas City newspaper even printed an apology to him. Jim Bridger died on July 17, 1881, at seventy-seven.
He had outlived three wives, four children, and most of his friends. The world he left behind was almost unrecognizable from the one he had entered—the buffalo were nearly gone, the Blackfeet were a shadow of their former power, and the land that had once been a wilderness was now crossed by railroads and telegraph wires. He had seen it all, from the keelboats of the Missouri to the coming of the telephone.
And he had been right about the mountains all along.