Jim Bridger: Wars of the West
"I do not believe much of what Mr. Bridger says — He exaggerates about Indians."
That was the Army's assessment in the fall of 1866, when Jim Bridger, who was then sixty-two years old and half-blind after forty-four years on the frontier, kept telling anyone in uniform that Red Cloud had assembled the largest Indian alliance the northern plains had ever seen and meant to sweep the Bozeman Trail clean. Bridger had blazed a trail on the far side of the Bighorns specifically to avoid this war. Nobody took it. On December 21, Captain Fetterman ignored a direct order, rode over Lodge Trail Ridge chasing a handful of decoys (one of them, by Sioux accounts, a young Crazy Horse), and eighty-one men died on the other side. The worst defeat on the Great Plains until the Little Bighorn, and the same story ten years early: an overconfident officer, a decoy, a force nobody in command believed existed, and a scout who'd told them the truth.
This is the last episode of our Mountain Men series, and it's the one where the pattern of Bridger's whole life hardens into something like fate. He guides 2,500 soldiers to Salt Lake City at five dollars a day, past the fort the Mormons took from him, and finds it burned to the ground. He tells a survey captain the shoreline is impassable, the pass is snowed in, the raft will fail. The captain doesn't listen, and a man drowns. He rides on his own dime to talk Sheridan out of a winter campaign; Sheridan sends Custer to the Washita. And at Fort C. F. Smith, the only reason two hundred starving soldiers survive the winter after Fetterman is that the Crows won't let the Sioux attack a fort with Bridger inside it.
Then a blind old man on a Missouri farm, riding a roan horse around his apple orchard because the mountains are fifteen hundred miles away and the horse is as close as he can get. Reporters on the veranda still calling him a liar about Yellowstone — right up until Hayden, Jackson, and Moran come back in 1871 and Congress makes it the first national park in the world.
He was right about everything. They didn't listen. The West was shaped as much by that failure as by anything he did.
That's episode six of six, the end of the second Mountain Men series I've written for Legends of the Old West: three episodes on John Colter, three on Jim Bridger. Chris Wimmer hosts.
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