Jim Bridger
, byname of James Bridger, (born March 17, 1804, Richmond, Va., U.S.—died July 17, 1881, near Kansas City, Mo.), American fur trader, frontiersman, scout, the “mountain man” par excellence.
In 1812, Bridger’s father, a surveyor and an innkeeper, moved his family to an Illinois farm near St. Louis, Mo. The young Bridger joined his first fur-trapping expedition in 1822 (that of William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry, up the Missouri River), and for the next 20 years he passed repeatedly on foot through an enormous area whose boundaries were the Canadian border, the Missouri River, the Colorado–New Mexico border, and Idaho and Utah, constantly exploring new territory; he is believed to have been the first white man to visit (1824) Great Salt Lake and was among the first to explore the geysers and sights of the Yellowstone region.
In 1843 he established Fort Bridger, in southwestern Wyoming, as a way station for emigrants traveling westward on the Oregon Trail and as a fur-trading post.When Mormon “settlers” took over the fort, Bridger entered government service as a scout and guided numerous expeditions, including the invasion of Utah by Col.Albert Sidney Johnston in 1857–58 in the Utah War, and the Berthoud party that was trying to discover a direct route from Denver to Great Salt Lake in 1861. His knowledge of the territory and its Indian inhabitants (he had three successive Indian wives) was unrivaled.
Braving The Bighorn
His real fame came two years later in 1825, when he was part of an expedition bringing $50,000 worth of beaver furs back from rendezvous. He left the expedition while on the Bad Pass and entered Bighorn Canyon. Fashioning a homemade raft out of driftwood, he then made one of the most miraculous trips in frontier history.
Braving the turbulent waters of the Bighorn, he made the first recorded float of the river through the canyon. Much to the amazement of his fellow mountain men he emerged from the canyon unscathed.
Over the next three decades, Bridger was one of the great pathfinders in both exploration and enterprise in the west. In 1830 he became the first white man to see the Great Salt Lake. It was also during that decade that along with several of his trapping partners he bought control of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In 1843, he would build a trading post along Black’s Fork of the Green River, aptly naming it Fort Bridger.