Jim Bridger: Opening The West
In August 1853, 150 armed men rode toward Fort Bridger carrying a treason warrant sworn out against a man who couldn't read it, against a name he couldn't write. Jim Bridger watched them take everything he owned through a spyglass from the hills above Black's Fork.
That's where episode five of our Mountain Men series opens, and it's where twenty years of Bridger's life had been heading. This is the middle of the story, which is the part that most often gets skipped in pop culture depictions of Bridger's life. It includes moments like Marcus Whitman cutting a three-inch iron arrowhead out of Bridger's back at the 1835 rendezvous with no anesthesia, just whiskey and two men holding him down. The last rendezvous in 1840, with a Jesuit saying Mass in the same meadow where the trappers were drinking. Bridger's first trip back to St. Louis after seventeen years, where he'd said he's never seen "two houses joined as one," and where the sister he'd gone west to support simply vanishes from the record. The fort he built with his own hands on the Oregon Trail. A daughter sent away for schooling and lost in the Whitman massacre. A wife buried nine days after giving birth, and an infant he nursed with mare's milk dripped through a bird quill.
And then Brigham Young, Utah Territory, and a fight over ferries and Indian trade that Bridger couldn't win, because the courts, the militia, and the law all answered to the same church. He went to Washington and told his story to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and to Congress directly. But even the president couldn't help him. His oldest friend, Tom Fitzpatrick, died in a hotel room beside him.
The man who survived everything the wilderness could throw at him was undone by civilization. But he was far from finished.
This is the second of three episodes on Bridger, part of a six-part series I wrote for Legends of the Old West (the first three covered John Colter).
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