James Felix Bridger was born in Virginia in 1804, moved with his family near St. Louis and was an orphan by 13, apprenticed to a blacksmith and never taught to read. In 1822 he heard about William Ashley’s newspaper call for fur trappers and joined. In 1823, at 19, he was reportedly one of the two men, with John Fitzgerald, paid to stay with the mauled Hugh Glass, who left him in a shallow grave and took his rifle when they feared an Arikara attack; Bridger later denied it. In 1824 he floated the Bear River in a buffalo-hide bull boat to become the first person of European descent known to reach the Great Salt Lake region. He saw the geysers of Yellowstone, ran the Bighorn River rapids and in 1830 became a co-owner of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.
As silk hats killed the beaver trade, he and Louis Vasquez built Fort Bridger on the Oregon Trail in 1843. In 1846 he advised the Donner Party to take the Hastings Cutoff, describing a 40-mile waterless stretch that was really about 80 miles, a delay that left them trapped in Sierra Nevada snow. He married three Native American women: a Flathead woman, a Shoshone chief’s daughter and Mary Washakie. He scouted in the Utah War, the Raynolds expedition and Red Cloud’s War, and in 1864 opened the Bridger Trail west of the Bighorn Mountains. Bridger Pass, which he found in 1850, carried stagecoaches, the Pony Express, the Union Pacific and later Interstate 80. Blind by 1875, he died in 1881 at 77.
- He memorized ridgelines, watersheds and stars in place of written maps and spoke seven languages.
- His daughter Mary Ann was taken captive in the Whitman massacre and died soon after her release.
- His son Felix survived Civil War service in the Missouri artillery only to die of illness on the family farm.
- He told greenhorns of a petrified forest where petrified birds sang petrified songs.
- His box canyon tale ended with a Cheyenne war party closing in and the punchline: they killed me.
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