An iconic trailblazer, frontiersman, and trapper of the Old West, Jim Bridger’s name became synonymous with the Oregon Trail and the opening of Montana and Wyoming, among other regions, to exploration and settlement. Born in Virginia, Jim Bridger’s family moved west in 1812 to Illinois near St. Louis, where his father decided to farm. Ten years later Jim joined his first major fur-trapping venture, the Ashley-Henry Rocky Mountain Fur Company expedition up the Missouri River. Bridger spent the next two decades crisscrossing a broad swath of the American frontier from the Canadian border in the north to New Mexico in the south, and from the Missouri River in the east to the mountains of Idaho in the west. The amount of territory that he covered was legendary, to say the least, and all the more impressive in light of his traveling afoot through uncharted and often hostile territory. Jim Bridger came to know the native peoples of these regions quite well, owing to his marriages to a succession of Native American wives.
Numerous legends about Jim Bridger captured the popular imagination. One such story told of how in 1823 a young Jim Bridger was the first soul known to have risked the treacherous whitewater of the Bighorn River, delivering a load of furs downstream on a driftwood raft he lashed together himself. By all accounts, his compatriots were shocked that he survived, to say nothing of the fact that he emerged from the river virtually without a scratch. Bridger has long been supposed to have been the first European American to glimpse the Great Salt Lake of Utah; he witnessed and recounted the splendors of the Grand Canyon; and he is one of the earliest white explorers known to have seen the natural wonders of Yellowstone. Indeed, his accounts of the incredible magnificence of these natural phenomena sealed his reputation as both a mountain man par excellence and a tall-tale teller of the first order, even if these accounts are now known to have a solid basis in fact. Jim established Fort Bridger in Wyoming as a waypoint and fur post along the Oregon Trail in 1843, and after the fort was commandeered by Mormons, he worked as a scout for the U.S. Army during the nearly bloodless Utah War against the Mormons. Jim helped to survey the Bozeman Trail to the gold fields of western Montana in the early 1860s, and then in 1864, he blazed the much safer, though nearly unused, Bridger Trail as an alternative route. Bridger worked as a guide well into his sixties, retiring to a farm in Westport, Missouri, in 1868. It was there that he died thirteen years later.
A portrait of Jim Bridger (1804–1881), mountain man, scout and explorer of the American West, ca. 1850. In the recent film The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio portrays the ordeal of Hugh Glass, who was left for dead in the wilderness by a young Jim Bridger. (Underwood Archives/Getty Images)
In American literature, Jim makes a notable appearance in a famous, if not particularly complimentary episode, in John G. Neihardt’s epic 1915 poem The Song of Hugh Glass, a legendary anecdote purported to have been based on actual events of 1823. According to the story, a seemingly mortally wounded and defenseless Glass was abandoned by a youthful Jim Bridger in the wilderness hundreds of miles from a fort or settlement. This event was fictionalized in the 2015 Academy Award–winning film The Revenant. Glass survived and escaped his predicament, in any case, and is said to have forgiven Bridger because Jim was so young. Jim Bridger’s legendary status and abiding legacy as a mountain man and frontier guide are enshrined in the nomenclature of several natural features in Montana and Wyoming that bear his name, perhaps most notably Bridger National Forest in Wyoming.
C. Fee
See also Donner Party; Lewis and Clark Expedition; Mountain Men
Further Reading
“Bridger, James.” 2004. In The Oxford Companion to American Literature, edited by James David Hart and Phillip Leininger. New York: Oxford University Press.
“Jim Bridger.” National Park Service. http://www.nps.gov/bica/learn/historyculture/jim-bridger.htm. Accessed August 24, 2015.
“Neihardt, John G.” 2004. In The Oxford Companion to American Literature, edited by James David Hart and Phillip Leininger. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bridger, Jim—Primary Document
Selection from John G. Neihardt, The Song of Hugh Glass (1921)
With the closing of the American frontier in the 1890s, writers became nostalgic for the lost world of the trailblazers, mountain men, wagon trains, and pioneers of the Old West. Novelists, songwriters, and poets burnished the legends of frontier heroes and in many cases invented fictional ones, such as John Neihardt’s Hugh Glass. In this selection from Neihardt’s epic frontier cycle, Glass survives injury, hunger, and thirst in an unforgiving landscape with an unbending strength of will.
All day Hugh fought with sleep and struggled on
Southeastward; for the heavy heat was gone
Despite the naked sun. The blank Northwest
Breathed coolly; and the crawler thought it best
To move while yet each little break and hollow
And shallow basin of the bison-wallow
Begrudged the earth and air its dwindling store.
But now that thirst was conquered, more and more
He felt the gnaw of hunger like a rage.
And once, from dozing in a clump of sage,
A lone jackrabbit bounded. As a flame
Hope flared in Hugh, until the memory came
Of him who robbed a sleeping friend and fled.
Then hate and hunger merged; the man saw red,
And momently the hare and Little Jim
Were one blurred mark for murder unto him
Elusive, taunting, sweet to clutch and tear.
The rabbit paused to scan the crippled bear
That ground its teeth as though it chewed a root.
But when, in witless rage, Hugh drew his boot
And hurled it with a curse, the hare loped off,
Its critic ears turned back, as though to scoff
At silly brutes that threw their legs away.
Night like a shadow on enduring day
Swooped by. The dream of crawling and the act
Were phases of one everlasting fact:
Hugh woke, and he was doing what he dreamed.
The butte, outstripped at eventide, now seemed
Intent to follow. Ever now and then
The crawler paused to calculate again
What dear-bought yawn of distance dwarfed the hill.
Close in the rear it soared, a Titan still,
Whose hand-in-pocket saunter kept the pace.
Distinct along the southern rim of space
A low ridge lay, the crest of the divide.
What rest and plenty on the other side!
Through what lush valleys ran what crystal brooks!
And there in virgin meadows wayside nooks
With leaf and purple cluster dulled the light!
All day it seemed that distant Pisgah Height
Retreated, and the tall butte dogged the rear.
At eve a striped gopher chirping near
Gave Hugh an inspiration. Now, at least,
No thieving friend should rob him of a feast.
His great idea stirred him as a shout.
Off came a boot, a sock was ravelled out.
The coarse yarn, fashioned to a running snare,
He placed about the gopher’s hole with care,
And then withdrew to hold the yarn and wait.
The nightbound moments, ponderous with fate,
Crept slowly by. The battered gray face leered
In expectation. Down the grizzled beard
Ran slaver from anticipating jaws.
Evolving twilight hovered to a pause.
The light wind fell. Again and yet again
The man devoured his fancied prey: and then
Within the noose a timid snout was thrust.
His hand unsteadied with the hunger lust,
Hugh jerked the yarn. It broke.
Down swooped the night,
A shadow of despair. Bleak height on height,
It seemed, a sheer abyss enclosed him round.
Clutching a strand of yarn, he heard the sound
Of some infernal turmoil under him.
Grimly he strove to reach the ragged rim
That snared a star, until the skyey space
Was darkened with a roof of Jamie’s face,
And then the yarn was broken, and he fell.
A-tumble like a stricken bat, his yell
Woke hordes of laughers down the giddy yawn
Of that black pit and suddenly ‘twas dawn.
Dream-dawn, dream-noon, dream-twilight! Yet, possest
By one stern dream more clamorous than the rest,
Hugh headed for a gap that notched the hills,
Where through alluring murmur of cool rills,
A haunting smell of verdure seemed to creep.
By fits the wild adventure of his sleep
Became the cause of all his waking care,
And he complained unto the empty air
How Jamie broke the yarn.
The sun and breeze
Had drunk all shallow basins to the lees,
But now and then some gully, choked with mud,
Retained a turbid relict of the flood.
Dream-dawn, dream-noon, dream-night! And still obsessed
By that one dream more clamorous than the rest,
Hugh struggled for the crest of the divide.
And when at length he saw the other side,
’Twas but a rumpled waste of yellow hills!
The deep-sunk, wiser self had known the rills
And nooks to be the facture of a whim;
Yet had the pleasant lie befriended him,
And now the brutal fact had come to stare.
Succumbing to a langorous despair,
He mourned his fate with childish uncontrol
And nursed that deadly adder of the soul,
Self-pity. Let the crows swoop down and feed,
Aye, batten on a thing that died of need,
A poor old wretch betrayed of God and Man!
So peevishly his broken musing ran,
Till, glutted with the luxury of woe,
He turned to see the butte, that he might know
How little all his striving could avail
Against ill-luck. And lo, a finger-nail,
At arm-length held, could blot it out of space!
A goading purpose and a creeping pace
Had dwarfed the Titan in a haze of blue!
And suddenly new power came to Hugh
With gazing on his masterpiece of will.
So fare the wise on Pisgah.
Down the hill,
Unto the higher vision consecrate,
Now sallied forth the new triumvirate—
A Weariness, a Hunger and a Glory—
Against tyrannic Chance. As in a story
Some higher Hugh observed the baser part.
So sits the artist throned above his art,
Nor recks the travail so the end be fair.
It seemed the wrinkled hills pressed in to stare,
The arch of heaven was an eye a-gaze.
And as Hugh went, he fashioned many a phrase
For use when, by some friendly ember-light,
His tale of things endured should speed the night
And all this gloom grow golden in the sharing.
So wrought the old evangel of high daring,
The duty and the beauty of endeavor,
The privilege of going on forever,
A victor in the moment.
Ah, but when
The night slipped by and morning came again,
The sky and hill were only sky and hill
And crawling but an agony of will.
So once again the old triumvirate,
A buzzard Hunger and a viper Hate
Together with the baser part of Hugh,
Went visionless.
That day the wild geese flew.
Vague in a gray profundity of sky;
And on into the night their muffled cry
Haunted the moonlight like a far farewell.
It made Hugh homesick, though he could not tell
For what he yearned; and in his fitful sleeping
The cry became the sound of Jamie weeping,
Immeasurably distant.
Source: Neihardt, John G. The Song of Hugh Glass. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921.