James Felix Bridger was born in Richmond, Virginia, in March of 1804, into a world he would outlive by nearly eight decades. His parents, James and Chloe, ran a farm and an inn, but in 1812 they packed up their young family and moved west, traveling Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio River into the Illinois Territory. It was a dangerous journey even then, with war against Britain raging and the frontier still marked by violence. The family eventually settled at Six Mile Prairie near St.
Louis, where Jim’s mother died when he was twelve, his brother soon after, and his father the following year, leaving the boy an orphan at thirteen. Jim went to work on a ferry before being apprenticed to Philip Creamer, a renowned gunsmith whose clients included such men as William Clark, John C. Calhoun, and Andrew Jackson. Under Creamer’s tutelage, Jim learned the trade and traveled with his mentor to the Potawatomi reservation to repair the tribe’s firearms.
It was his first sustained exposure to Native American life, and it shaped the way he would deal with indigenous peoples for the rest of his days. In February of 1822, at seventeen, Bridger answered a famous advertisement placed by William Henry Ashley in the Missouri Gazette, seeking one hundred enterprising young men to follow the Missouri River to its source and trap beaver. That expedition, known to history as Ashley’s Hundred, would launch the careers of Hugh Glass, Jedediah Smith, Jim Beckwourth, and many others, including Bridger himself. The fur trade had already been running for two centuries, but these men would define the mountain man era.
They departed St. Louis in keelboats, which were powered upstream by men walking from bow to stern, driving long poles into the river bottom for hours on end. By mid-July they reached present-day South Dakota, where game was scarce and men deserted rather than continue into hostile territory. By August they arrived at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers and built Fort Henry.
The work was brutal. Trappers drew supplies from the company clerk against their own accounts, then ranged into the wild looking for beaver sign—fresh mud on dams, slides where the animals entered the water, broken ice along streams. In winter, when the fur was thickest and most valuable, they waded into freezing water to set steel traps baited with castoreum, then skinned and stretched the pelts onto willow hoops to dry. The men lived entirely off the land, eating the hearts, livers, tongues, and hump fat of the buffalo they killed, and they considered beaver tail—mostly fat and gristle—a delicacy, for it was the fat their lean diets craved.
The greatest threat came from the Blackfeet, who controlled a vast territory from present-day Alberta down to Yellowstone and east nearly to the Black Hills. They had driven Andrew Henry out of the Three Forks years before, and they attacked the new expedition in the spring of 1823, killing four of Henry’s men. That June, Ashley sent a party to trade with the Arikara for horses, but the tribe was already angry at the trappers for cutting them out of the fur trade and for the killing of two of their people by a rival company. The resulting fight left fourteen trappers dead and ten wounded before the survivors escaped.
Bridger, who had not been present, returned with Jedediah Smith and a reaction force, taking part in the short Arikara War that followed. Colonel Henry Leavenworth brought 230 infantry, along with volunteers and five hundred mounted Lakota warriors, but the campaign ended anticlimactically. A treaty was negotiated, the Lakota went home, and the Arikara slipped away under cover of darkness. The trappers burned their abandoned village, but the revenge killings that followed made the Missouri no longer safe, forcing the trappers overland into the Rockies.
It was on that overland move that the famous bear mauling of Hugh Glass occurred. Glass was horribly torn by a mother grizzly and left with two men, one of whom was supposedly the young Bridger, with orders to bury him when he died. The pair abandoned Glass, taking his rifle and supplies, but the tough old trapper refused to die, crawling and stumbling 250 miles back to Fort Kiowa. He later confronted Bridger, forgiving him, according to the story, for his youth and hesitation.
Historians still debate whether it really was Bridger who deserted Glass, and Bridger himself later said there had been no desertion at all. The verdict remains uncertain. During the winter of 1824–25, Bridger made his most famous discovery. The trappers were working the Bear River, and some believed it might be the fabled Buenaventura, a water route to the Pacific.
They talked the twenty-year-old Bridger into following the river to its end. He rode through the Bear River Canyon and emerged beside a great body of water extending beyond sight. When he dismounted and tasted it, he found it salty. He had reached the Great Salt Lake, though he initially thought it was the Pacific Ocean.
A French Canadian trapper named Etienne Provost may have seen it slightly earlier, so both men receive partial credit for the discovery. To sell their furs without traveling all the way back to St. Louis, Ashley began holding an annual rendezvous in the mountains, starting in 1825. The market came to the trappers, allowing them to stay in the wilderness year-round.
That first year Bridger’s brigade brought in over three thousand pounds of beaver pelts, the largest haul of any group. The gatherings grew wilder as whiskey arrived, and the mountain men, free trappers, and Native tribes came together each summer to trade, drink, and celebrate before returning to the dangerous work of trapping. By 1830, the twenty-six-year-old Bridger, now a proven leader, became a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company alongside Tom Fitzpatrick, Milton Sublette, Henry Fraeb, and Jean Baptiste Gervais. He could neither read nor write and would never learn, but he had a vast knowledge of the country, the tribes, and the beaver.
The following year, Jedediah Smith was killed by Comanches in present-day Kansas, and the company lost one of its greatest men. In 1834, Bridger married for the first time. His bride, sometimes called Cora, was a Salish woman, and she accompanied him on his trapping expeditions and bore him three children. That same year, the competition with the American Fur Company, backed by John Jacob Astor’s money, drove the Rocky Mountain Fur Company into debt and forced it out of business.
Bridger, Fitzpatrick, and Sublette formed their own company, but the beaver trade had already peaked. By the late 1830s, the demand for beaver felt hats was falling, and the beaver populations were depleted. Kit Carson and many other trappers left the mountains, but Bridger trapped on. In the winter of 1834–35, he was nearly killed in a fight with the Blackfeet, taking two arrows in the back.
One arrowhead lodged near his spine and stayed there for a year until the missionary doctor Marcus Whitman cut it out at the 1835 rendezvous, with Bridger held down and fortified by whiskey. The 1840 rendezvous on the Green River would be the last official gathering. By then, the beaver had petered out. At thirty-five, Bridger was out of a job.
He returned to St. Louis for the first time in nearly two decades, later claiming he tasted bread for the first time in seventeen years. But city life made him sick, and he quickly returned west, partnering with his old friend Henry Fraeb. In 1842, they built a trading post on the Green River in present-day Wyoming, near the junction of the Oregon and California Trails.
It would become known as Fort Bridger. Fraeb was killed the following year in a fight with the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, and Bridger partnered with Louis Vasquez, relocating the fort to a better spot on the Blacks Fork of the Green River in 1843. The fort became a vital stop for the wagon trains heading west, where Bridger traded horses, supplies, and blacksmithing services to the emigrants. In the harsh summer of 1846, a group of Illinois travelers known as the Donner Party arrived at Fort Bridger, planning to take a shortcut called the Hastings Cutoff.
Bridger assured them the route was a fine, level road with plenty of water and grass, except for a desert stretch. A warning note left at the fort by an earlier traveler, urging them not to take the cutoff, never reached them. The Donner Party pressed on, became trapped in the Sierra Nevada snows, and suffered one of the most infamous disasters in American history. Some later blamed Bridger’s greed for misleading them, but historians have pointed out that his description of the road matched other accounts of the time and that his practices were otherwise known to be honest.
The party’s own members admitted their misfortunes came from bad management and quarreling, not from bad directions. In 1847, Bridger met Brigham Young and the first Mormon pioneers near the Little Sandy, advising them on the Great Basin and the lands around the Great Salt Lake. Young asked him to guide them, but Bridger had other business. Despite this friendly start, Young soon became suspicious, believing Bridger was stirring up the tribes against the Mormons.
Bridger sent a letter denying the claims and asking for friendship, but the accusations continued. By 1853, the Mormons had labeled him a traitor, seized his fort, destroyed his whiskey, and issued an arrest warrant for him. Bridger traveled to Washington to complain, but it did little good. The Mormons took Fort Bridger, and the government eventually took it over for itself, leaving the aging trapper to fight a long legal battle that would not be settled in his family’s favor until after his death.
Tragedy stalked Bridger in those years. His first wife Cora died around 1846, reportedly after being bitten by a rabid wolf and disappearing into the wilderness. His daughter Mary Ann had been sent to the Whitman Mission in Oregon for an education, but in 1847 the Cayuse, devastated by a measles epidemic and angry at the missionaries, attacked and killed Marcus and Narcissa Whitman along with eleven others. Mary Ann was taken captive and ransomed back a month later, but she fell ill and died on the way home.
Bridger married again, to a Ute woman who died shortly after giving birth to their daughter Virginia, and then a third time, to a Shoshone woman named Mary, who bore him two more children before she too died. Of his seven known children, four would die before him. Despite his grief, Bridger continued to work. He guided Captain Howard Stansbury’s expedition surveying the Great Salt Lake, led the eccentric Irish baronet Sir St.
George Gore on a hunting trip that killed an estimated thirty thousand buffalo, and scouted for the army during the Utah War of 1857–58. He served as a guide on expeditions into the Yellowstone country, which he had explored as a trapper decades earlier, telling stories of geysers and steaming rivers that easterners dismissed as tall tales until the area was formally explored in 1869. The Kansas City Journal later printed a formal apology to Bridger for having suppressed his account of the region’s wonders as utterly incredible. When gold was discovered in Montana, prospectors flooded through Lakota and Cheyenne territory along the Bozeman Trail, igniting what became known as Red Cloud’s War.
Bridger developed an alternative route through Crow and Shoshone country, called Bridger’s Trail, which proved more popular than the Bozeman in 1864. But the army insisted on using the more dangerous Bozeman Trail and protecting it with new forts. Bridger scouted for Colonel Henry Carrington, who ignored his advice on where to build Fort Phil Kearny, choosing a location miles from timber, forcing woodcutting details to travel into constant ambush. Bridger warned the officers not to follow the Indians and to send more men on escort duty, but they thought him old and out of touch.
On December 21, 1866, Captain William Fetterman and eighty men pursued decoys over Lodge Trail Ridge, in direct violation of orders, and were wiped out to the last man. It was then one of the worst defeats the United States Army had ever suffered. One soldier later said that if Carrington and his officers had followed Bridger’s advice, far fewer men would have died. By this time, Bridger’s health was failing.
He had been thrown from a horse years before, his eyesight was deteriorating, and he could no longer move as quickly as he once had. He took a temporary discharge in September of 1867 to recuperate, then returned to guide troops in 1868 as Red Cloud’s War wound down. The army abandoned the Bozeman Trail and its forts, having lost the first war it ever fought against Native Americans. On July 21, 1868, at sixty-four years old, Bridger was discharged from military service for the final time.
Almost completely blind, Bridger retired to his farm near Westport, Missouri, tending his apple orchard and riding his favorite horse, letting the animal find the way. He could recognize people only by their voices but still loved to tell stories, walking to town with his cane while neighborhood children sat on his porch to listen. He often stared west and said he wished he were back among the mountains, where a man could see so much further. On July 17, 1881, Jim Bridger died at seventy-seven years old.
Two days later, Sitting Bull surrendered. In the course of Bridger’s life, the wilderness he had known—teeming with bison and ruled by indigenous nations—had been crisscrossed with railroads, barbed wire, and telegraph lines, parceled out, and built upon. He had outlived three wives, four children, and most of his friends, and he had seen the West change from a place of beaver streams and tribal territory into a land of towns, churches, and prisons.
His claims about Yellowstone were vindicated, his estate was eventually paid six thousand dollars for Fort Bridger, and his descendants lived on into the twentieth century, long after the world he knew had disappeared.