Jim Bridger

James Bridger was born in Richmond, Virginia, and lost both parents within a few years of the family's move to a farm near St. Louis, leaving him an orphan by thirteen. He went to work at a blacksmith's forge, hammering horseshoes and boat fittings, and never spent a day in a schoolroom. He never learned to read or write. What he had instead was an ear: over decades on the plains he picked up half a dozen Native languages plus French and Spanish, fluent enough to trade, negotiate, and marry into three tribes. In 1822, at eighteen, he answered a newspaper notice for "enterprising young men" and went up the Missouri River with William Ashley's fur-trapping brigade, and did not really come back east again.

Bridger trapped for eleven years, discovering the Great Salt Lake along the way and, by his own account, tasting the water and guessing he had reached an arm of the Pacific. In 1830 he became a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company -- when the beaver market collapsed, he switched from trapping to supplying the travelers replacing the trappers. In 1843, with Louis Vasquez, he built a trading post on the Green River in present-day Wyoming. Fort Bridger became a resupply stop on the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails, then an army post. Into his sixties he guided surveyors, wagon trains, gold-seekers, and the military through country with no maps, found a pass that shortened the Oregon Trail by roughly 61 miles, and described Yellowstone geysers that most listeners assumed he had invented.

Bridger built a reputation as a supplier of information nobody could verify, which is a dangerous thing to be. Tales piled onto him that he never told -- a petrified forest where birds sang petrified songs, a stream that froze so fast a campfire kept burning through the ice -- until separating what he witnessed from what got attached to his name became close to impossible. He married three times, all to Native women, and buried two: one to fever, one in childbirth. Two of his six children died before he did, one killed during the Whitman Massacre. He was among the trappers, by some accounts, who left the mauled Hugh Glass to die and lied about it -- asked directly late in life, he denied being there, and no witness ever placed him there. By 1875 he was blind.

He spent his last years crippled by rheumatism and blindness on his daughter Virginia's farm near what is now Kansas City, and died there in 1881, largely forgotten by the country he had helped open. The forgetting did not last. His name now sits on a mountain range, a national forest, a wilderness area, a mountain pass, and towns in three states -- more American geography than almost any other single trapper claimed. Fort Bridger survives as a Wyoming state historic site built on the ruins of his trading post. The tall tales that once obscured him became, eventually, the reason he is still discussed: historians treat him less as a reliable witness than as the West's first unreliable narrator.

Jim Bridger's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Rocky Mountain Fur Company company
  Partnership that organized trapping across the central Rockies 1830
• Fort Bridger building
  Trading post with Louis Vasquez on the Green River, later an army post 1843
• First reported sighting of the Great Salt Lake discovery
  By a person of European descent, on record 1824
• Bridger Pass discovery
  Shortcut later used by the Union Pacific Railroad 1850
• Bridger Trail discovery
  Route to the Montana goldfields that avoided Sioux conflict on the Bozeman Trail 1864

• March 17, 1804 aged 0 Born in Richmond, Virginia
• 1817 aged ~13 Orphaned within a few years of the family's move near St. Louis Apprenticed to a blacksmith soon after. Never attended school.
• 1822 aged ~18 Joins William Ashley's fur-trapping expedition up the Missouri River He was eighteen.
• 1824 aged ~20 Becomes the first person of European descent on record to see the Great Salt Lake
• 1830 aged ~26 Co-founds the Rocky Mountain Fur Company
• 1843 aged ~39 Builds Fort Bridger with Louis Vasquez on the Green River
• 1850 aged ~46 Finds Bridger Pass, shortening the Oregon Trail by about 61 miles
• 1864 aged ~60 Blazes the Bridger Trail to the Montana goldfields
• July 17, 1881 aged 77 Dies blind and rheumatic on daughter Virginia's farm near Kansas City, Missouri

• Jedediah Smith 1799–1831
  Mountain man and fur trapper who was the first American to enter California by an overland route. partnered with
• John C. Frémont 1813–1890
  Explorer and military officer whose five expeditions mapped much of the American West. guided
• Kit Carson 1809–1868
  Frontiersman and scout who guided John C. Frémont and became a legend of the American West. fellow scout
• Brigham Young 1801–1877
  Religious and territorial leader who directed Mormon migration and settlement in the American West. clashed with