Legends of the Old West - MOUNTAIN MEN Ep. 5 | “Jim Bridger: Opening The West”

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

When the fur trade winds down, Jim Bridger builds a trading post at a key location on the Oregon Trail in southwestern Wyoming. In addition to being linked to the Hugh Glass story, Bridger becomes linked to the infamous events of the Whitman Massacre and the Donner Party. Then tension builds between Bridger and new arrivals: members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By the summer rendezvous of 1834, after four years in business, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company was dying. No matter how many Beaver the five owners, Jim Bridger and four others, trapped, they couldn't pay their debts. During the rendezvous at Ham's Fork of the Green River, two of the five sold their ownership. The remaining three, Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, and Milton Sublette, reorganized, but were eventually forced to merge with rivals from the much larger American Fur Company. By that time, Bridger was 30 years old. He'd been trapping beaver in the West for 12 years, and he did something that suggests he was thinking about more than beaver pelts and balance sheets. Sometime in 1834 or 1835, he married a woman from the Flathead Nation. Her name, according to one family tradition, was Cora. Little else about her has been documented.

At the 1835 rendezvous at Horse Creek on the Green River, a caravan rolled into the gathering, which carried good news and bad news. The bad news was reported by Bridger's partner, Tom Fitzpatrick. The price of beaver in St. Louis had fallen steadily. Hatters were using cheaper materials to make faux beaver felt, and fashions were changing. Men in the east were wearing silk top hats instead of beaver caps. The entire economic foundation of a mountain man's existence was beginning to crack. But the good news was that Jim Bridger was about to get relief which he badly needed for three years. The caravan of travelers delivered two missionaries to the rendezvous, a Presbyterian minister

named Samuel Parker and a doctor named Marcus Whitman. They were headed for Oregon to establish a Christian mission. Words spread fast through the rendezvous that a doctor had arrived, a real doctor with surgical instruments. Men with injuries, infections, and lingering wounds sought out Whitman. Jim Bridger certainly qualified as a man with a lingering wound. For three years, since a fight with Blackfoot warriors, a three-inch arrowhead had been lodged in his back against his shoulder blade. Bridger stripped off his shirt. With little

else to entertain them, the trappers, gamekeepers, and Indians all gathered to watch. Whitman's medical training was modest, eight months of study and an apprenticeship, but he was the closest thing to a surgeon for a thousand miles. Bridger lay flat on his stomach and steeled himself against the pain. There was no anesthesia or ether. Whiskey was the only numbing agent. Whitman approached with a cutting blade and pierced the skin. Blood spurred it. He cut deeper and probed until he found the arrowhead. The point had struck a bone and had partly clenched around a rib and tissue had grown around it during the three years it had been in Bridger's back. Whitman cut deep around the arrow point with a sharp knife and inserted an instrument like a pair of

pincers. It required the strength of two men to pull the arrow head out, and Bridger had to be held down. The others were amazed that Bridger bore the operation with only a slight groan or two, and then it was done. Reverend Samuel Parker recorded that Whitman pursued the operation with self-possession and perseverance, and his patient manifested equal firmness. William Stewart, a Scottish adventurer who had been traveling with the mountain men, asked for the Arrowhead. He carried it with him for the rest of his life, even back to Murthley Castle in Scotland. 19 years later, as Stewart wrote a novel based on his Rocky Mountain Adventures, he had the arrowhead in his pocket while he worked. For Bridger, the relief must have been immense.

Three years of dull, constant ache was gone in a few minutes of white-hot agony. And now Jim Bridger, 31 years old, newly married and newly freed of the Arrowhead, entered a new phase of his life. The Beaver trade was dying, but it hung on for five more years. There were five more Mountain Man rendezvous after the Arrowhead came out, each one smaller than the last. The beaver were disappearing, prices were falling. The old way of life was winding down, and every man in the mountains could feel it. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling two important American frontier stories,

that of the first mountain man, John Coulter, and one of the most famous, Jim Bridger. They were trailblazers in the truest sense of the word, and we finish with three episodes about Jim Bridger. This is episode five, Jim Bridger, opening the West. In 1839, Jim Bridger did something he hadn't done since he was 18 years old. He went back to civilization. He joined the fur caravan to St. Louis, his first visit to the settlements in 17 years. After walking the streets of St. Louis, Bridger crossed the Mississippi River by boat to visit his old home in Illinois. He explored the American Bottom where he had grown up.

Philip Kramer, the gunsmith for whom Bridger had apprenticed as a teenager, still lived in the area. But of Bridger's most important connection to Illinois, his sister, there's no mention. After Bridger's parents and brother had all died within 18 months of each other, Bridger and his younger sister were orphans. One of the big reasons why Bridger went west to trap Beaver was to make money to send back to his sister. There's no record of Bridger sending money, but that could easily be because Bridger couldn't read or write.

There's also no record of a reunion when Bridger finally returned to St. Louis and then Southern Illinois. His sister simply disappears from history. But history does record that St. Louis did not feel like home. It was too crowded, too thick, too flat. The mountains had trapped Bridger just as Bridger had trapped Beaver. He told a friend in St. Louis, a man called Clayton, that he had no fixed residence and led a roving life, changing his camp as he pleased. Bridger invited Clayton to go west with him. Go with me now, Bridger said. You'll have no need of money there. You'll never go if not now, for you will never have.

so good an opportunity. Clayton stayed in St. Louis, and Jim Bridger returned to the mountains. The last mountain man rendezvous was in 1840 on the Green River near Horse Creek. Father Pierre Jean de Smet, a Jesuit who admired Bridger and called him, one of the truest species of a real trapper and a rocky mountain man, celebrated the first public Catholic Mass in the Rockies that summer. After the final rendezvous, some of the mountain men drifted to Oregon. Others went to California. Bridger read the landscape the way he always did and saw what was coming, westward migration.

The Bartleson-Bidwell party, the first major wagon train bound for Oregon and California, crossed the mountains in 1841, guided by Tom Fitzpatrick, former mountain man and Bridger business partner. It was the beginning of the Oregon Trail, and it signaled the future. Thousands of people would follow, and they would need supplies, live. stock repairs and information. Bridger partnered with Lewis Vasquez, another trader, and in 1841, they began building a trading post called Fort Bridger, first on the west bank of the Green River, and eventually in the grassy lowlands of Black's Fork in the southwest corner of Wyoming. It sat directly on the immigrant route, roughly halfway between Missouri and Oregon. It had water,

timber, and good grazing land. For 18 years, Bridger had slept under the stock, or in a temporary lodge. Now at 37 years old, he had his first home. Bridger, his wife, Cora, and their young daughter, Marianne, lived in two small rooms. Mary Ann was five or six years old by that time, and Bridger wanted her to have the education he never acquired. But it was nearly impossible to receive a proper education at a raw frontier outpost, so Bridger made a hard decision. He sent Marianne to the Whitman mission in Oregon, where Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa were running a school. Marianne arrived at the mission in August or September of 1841, and Narcissa Whitman wrote that she had a mild disposition and was easily governed.

In December of 1841, just a few months after Marianne left, Cora gave birth to a son, Felix Francis Bridger. Fort Bridger was open for business, and it grew as the number of wagon trains grew. By 1844, the Oregon Trail was becoming one of the longest roads in human history, and Fort Bridger was one of its essential stops. That year, 1,500 travelers assembled at Westport, present-day Kansas City, Missouri, split into four wagon trains and started west. When their wagons rolled up to Bridger's Fort, exhausted after weeks on the trail, there was a holiday atmosphere.

Couples strolled arm in arm. They crowded the trading room, wanting first chance at the blankets and foodstuffs. Wheelwrights used Bridger's blacksmith shop to repair wagons that had been battered by 2,000 miles of prairie and river crossings. Bridger and his partner Vasquez had plenty of well-rested livestock to sell, oxen at $40 a pair,

mules at $40 each, horses at 25. Bridger was known for his honesty in his dealings, and he would talk for hours about the trail ahead. And in 1846, the most infamous group to whom he offered advice, the Donner Party, rolled into Fort Bridger well behind the other wagon trains of the season. In the last couple days of July, 1846, the B-Leager Donner Party arrived at Fort Bridger. They were 81 people in 20 wagons headed for California, and they were way behind schedule. They had left Missouri a full month later than they should have, and now they arrived at the halfway point of the journey with a difficult choice to make. Until recently, everyone headed west used the same trail, the Oregon Trail,

which made a sharp turn north at Fort Bridger to follow the Bear River up above the Bear River Mountains and the Wasatch Mountains to Fort Hall near Pocatella, Idaho. From there, people who wanted to go to Oregon continued west through Idaho. Those who wanted to go to California, turn south, and cut a diagonal path through Nevada to Reno at the doorstep of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. California travelers had to cross 500 miles of dry country from Fort Hall to Reno, and then get up over the Sierra Nevada Mountains and down to Sacramento, California, before winter closed the mountain passes. It had taken the Donner Party a month and a half to do the easy part of the journey, from Missouri to Fort Bridger, and now they had a month, to do the hard part. But a month earlier at Fort Laramie,

the party had met Lansford Hastings and Bridger's old mountain man friend, James Clyman. Hastings and Climmon had just returned from California on horseback, and they pioneered a new trail from the middle of the Nevada desert, through the Great Salt Lake Desert

in the middle of Utah, south of the Great Salt Lake, and straight through the Wasatch Mountains to Fort Bridger. In time, the path would be known as the Hastings cut off. And while it shortened the distance to Oregon, it was also much more difficult

than the established trail, especially for big groups with wagons and children. James Reed, one of the party's leaders, discussed the options with Jim Bridger, but Reed had already made up his mind. He had been advocating for the Hastings cutoff since Fort Laramie.

Bridger, who was known for giving extensive commentary on any route he was asked about, very likely discussed the pros and cons section by section, as was his custom. Reed acknowledged in a letter that Bridger told him they would have to cross a formidable desert and would need to carry water in barrels.

Bridger described part of the route as a fine level road with plenty of water and grass, with the exception of the desert. The description was accurate for the portion he was discussing, but Hastings cut off as a whole in the earliest days of its use was exceptionally difficult. What happened next is one of the most infamous tragedies in American history. The Donner Party took the Hastings cut off.

They lost weeks hacking through the Wasatch Mountains with oversized wagons. They crossed the bone-dry, great salt lake desert. They banished James Reed after he killed a man in a fight. They pushed across Nevada and finally reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the worst winter ever recorded hit the region. They were stranded on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas, just inside the current border of California. As the weeks dragged on, they ate their animals, then boiled their leather,

and then they resorted to cannibalism before the survivors were finally rescued by volunteers from the other side of the mountains. 36 of the 81 members of the Donner Party died. Some novelists and historians have blamed Jim Bridger for encouraging the Donners to take the cutoff, suggesting he wanted to keep immigrant traffic running through Fort Bridger, rather than diverting to Fort Hall. Nothing in Bridger's Pass shows him to be dangerously selfish or hell-bent on making money, but at the same time, the choice of roads was becoming an issue by the time the Donner Party arrived in 1846.

A trail called the Sublette Cut-Off that bypassed Fort Bridger and went straight through the Wyoming Mountains to Fort Hall in Idaho had been in use for two years before the Donner Party arrived. It would become increasingly popular in 1849 for people who wanted the fastest route to the goldfields of California. To further muddy the situation, a friend of James Reed left a letter at Fort Bridger, warning Reed not to take the cutoff, but no one knows of the letter was delivered to read. Like the Hugh Glass story, Jim Bridger's name became associated with the Donner tragedy for all time, though with a similar amount of uncertainty. he. And then the following year, 1847, his name became associated with a different kind of catastrophe,

one that was personal, the one that Bridger himself had nothing to do with. His 12-year-old daughter, Marianne, would witness the Whitman Massacre firsthand. Jim Bridger and his family had already experienced tragedy before the event at the Whitman Mission in 1847. In 1845 or 1846, Bridger's wife, Cora gave birth to a third child. a daughter they named Mary Josephine. Their eldest child, Mary Ann, was at the Whitman Mission in Oregon. Their son Felix was five or six years old, and now they had a new baby. But then Cora was bitten by a wolf.

Bridger's granddaughter remembered the family story decades later. She was bit by a wolf and must have suffered from rabies. She was taken ill, and one night she disappeared and no one ever knew what became of her. possibly by the time the Donner Party arrived at Fort Bridger or certainly by the end of the year, Bridger's wife was gone and he likely relied on help from another Native American woman or his wife's family to raise Felix and Mary Josephine. And then, 500 miles away in Oregon, a measles epidemic swept through the area of the Whitman Mission in November of 1847. The Cayuse tribe who lived near the mission had limited immunity, but half of the island.

the tribe died, including most of the children. The deaths generated fury. The Cayuse remembered that Marcus Whitman had once injected watermelons with a solution that caused vomiting to stop the Indians from stealing them, and Whitman's assistant had set out poisoned meat to kill wolves, meat that some of the Cayuse had eaten, and which had nearly killed them. Tension had been growing steadily for the 11 years the Whitman's had run the mission, and the measles epidemic turned out to be the breaking point. November 29, 1847 was a foggy day. Mary Ann Bridger, 12 years old, was alone in the kitchen of the Whitman home,

washing dishes after the noonday meal. Dr. Whitman was reading in the living room, and his wife Narcissa was bathing two children in a tub on the floor. Mary Ann said later that several Cayuse men barged into the kitchen. A younger man demanded medicine. Dr. Whitman got it for him and led him into the kitchen. The Cayuse chief sat down at the kitchen table and distracted the doctor. The younger man stepped behind Whitman and drew a pipe tomahawk from under his blanket.

He struck the doctor twice in the head. More Cayuse men rushed in and one of them shot Dr. Whitman in the neck. The Cayuse killed 14 people at the mission, including Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and they took 47 captives, including Marianne Bridger. the captives for a month until Peter Skeen Ogden of the Hudson's Bay Company bartered the captive's freedom for the price of 50 blankets, 50 shirts, 10 guns, some tobacco, musket balls, and gunpowder. Four days later, the survivors set out in wagons. While fording a river, high water washed over the wagon and drenched several of them, including Mary Ann. They had no

time to change clothes or dry off. It rained on them all afternoon, and they rained. they shivered in the winter cold of late December. Mary Ann, weakened by a month of captivity, became deathly ill. Four months later, in April of 1848, Mountain Man Joe Meek, whose daughter had been taken by the Cayuse during the massacre and had then died in captivity, arrived at Fort Bridger on snowshoes. He was headed to Washington, D.C. to demand justice. He told Bridger about the massacre, and he said Mary Ann Bridger was in questionable health, but still alive. But Meek didn't know that Mary Ann had already died. And Bridger's losses continued. Not long afterward, Bridger's second wife, a Ute woman, gave birth to a daughter. They named the girl Virginia.

Nine days later, Bridger's second wife died. Bridger mixed a milk concoction, which he fed Virginia through a perforated bird quill, and he kept the child alive. Virginia survived, and many years later, with no memory of her mother, she said, All I know is the love of a father's care to me, and he took all the responsibility on himself. In the spring of 1847, about six months before the Whitman Massacre, Jim Bridger and two of his men were on their way to Fort Laramie when they saw a large party approaching near the mouth of the Little Sandy River. It was Brigham Young, leading 143 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

They were heading west to find a place where they could worship free of the persecution that had driven them from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois. They were an advance party for thousands more. That evening, Young's 12 leaders went to Bridger's camp. They wanted to know about the Great Salt Lake Valley. They had been studying the maps of John Fremont's expedition, led by Kit Carson, and were committed to settling in the Great Basin. Bridger told them what he knew, that the valley was his paradise, that it had good land, and that the Shoshone were friendly. But he also warned them that it would be difficult, maybe impossible, to grow certain crops. He said he would give a thousand dollars if he knew that an ear of corn could be ripened in the Salt Lake Valley.

Bridger told Brigham Young to beware of bringing a great population to the basin until he knew if grain would grow. Young thanked Bridger and moved on. The Mormons struggled through the Wasatch Mountains west of Fort Bridger and arrived at the valley that one settler called the Paradise of the Lizard, the Cricket, and the Rattlesnake. But the Mormons were not easily discouraged. They planted 900 acres of wheat and slowly constructed their new society. At first, the relationship between Bridger and the Mormons was civil.

Bridger welcomed them to his fort and hired young Mormons to work for. him, including 18-year-old Homer Brown, who carried furs and goods between Fort Bridger and Fort Laramie. Bridger wrote to Young and expressed his desire to maintain an amicable friendship with the people in the valley. But the friction was building. The Mexican-American War had ended in 1848, and nearly everything west of the Rocky Mountains was now part of the United States. In 1850, Congress created Utah territory, which at the time included all of the modern states of Nevada and Utah, plus about half of Wyoming and a corner of Idaho. Fort Bridger in the southeast corner of the future state of Wyoming was now in Utah territory. Brigham Young became

territorial governor, which meant Fort Bridger was in Young's jurisdiction, and Young intended to control all the commerce in the territory. The disputes between Bridger and Young centered on two of the oldest things over which people fight, money and power. On the money, side, Bridger and his partner Vasquez operated ferries, which shuttled travelers in their goods across the Green River. During immigrant season, the ferries generated substantial income, and Brigham Young wanted the majority of the profits. A Mormon-controlled company proposed that Bridger and Vasquez continued to operate the ferries, but the two men would have to pay 60% of all receipts to the Mormon company. If the ferries made $20,000, Bridger and Vasquez would only keep $8,000.

Bridger refused the terms. On the power side, the legal officers in Utah Territory, the Attorney General, the County Marshals, the probate judges, were appointed by the Church. The territory's first Attorney General, James Ferguson, was also a sheriff and a major in the territorial militia. When Bridger and the unlicensed mountaineers continued to operate their own ferries, Ferguson sued them for $20,000.

And since the courts were controlled by the Mormon, church, there was virtually no chance of Bridger winning. On top of growing disputes over money and power, there were disputes about local tribes. Bridger had lived among the Shoshone and had traded with them for decades. He knew the tribes of the region, better than anyone in the Mormon church, could ever hope to know them. But Brigham Young saw the Indian trade as something to be managed by the church, not by independent mountaineers. Bridger and Vasquez warned Young that his settlements were provoking hostility, that the Ute and Bannock were angry about being pushed off their land. And in 1853, the escalating problems all came to a head.

Bridger and Vasquez experienced a reversal of fortune so fast it was hard to believe. In August of 1853, Judge Leonidas Shaver issued a warrant for Jim Bridger's arrest, charging him with treason, specifically that he had supplied guns and ammunition to the hostile Ute Indians. Bill Hickman, who would later serve as sheriff, remembered it this way. It was rumored that Jim Bridger was furnishing the Indians with powder and lead to kill Mormons. Affidavits were filled out to that effect, and the sheriff was ordered out with posse. Sheriff James Ferguson and 150 armed men rode toward Fort Bridger. Bridger learned they were coming and slipped into the hills.

From a concealed spot above Black's Fork, he watched through his spyglass as the Pau. Posse entered his fort, inventoried his goods, confiscated his guns, powder, and iron, and killed his oxen. Some of the posse rode to the Green River ferries. They killed two or three of the mountaineers and confiscated property, livestock, and whiskey. The posse returned to Salt Lake City and reported, Bridger was either gone for good or if he returned, his influence would be diminished. The report was right. Bridger fled east all the way to St. Louis.

On Christmas Day 1853, Bridger and his old friend Tom Fitzpatrick set out for Washington, D.C. to plead his case. They arrived on January 4, 1854, met with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, and testified before congressional committees. Ultimately, the long trip was a waste. The U.S. Attorney General concluded that the case belonged in the Utah courts. the same courts controlled by the church that had taken Bridger's fort. Bridger returned to Missouri and tried to make sense of a world in which he had contributed so much and yet had lost everything so quickly. Jim Bridger was 49 years old.

He had been in the West for 31 years. He had traveled thousands of miles, achieved great things, and survived multiple near-death experiences. He had also lost two wives, a daughter, and essentially everything he owned. The situation with the fort would be resolved soon, but before it was, he also lost his old friend Tom Fitzpatrick. During the trip to Washington, Fitzpatrick had traveled to New York on other business and returned with a severe cold that deepened into pneumonia. Bridger was by his side when Fitzpatrick died on February 7, 1854. Of all the men Bridger had known in the mountains, Fitzpatrick had been the closest thing to a brother. They had been business partners during the fur-trapping era and friends for 30 years.

Bridger returned to Missouri without Tom Fitzpatrick, but his current business partner, Louis Vasquez, was there, along with his third wife, Mary, a Shoshone woman, and his surviving children. Bridger purchased a farm south of Kansas City, and he and Vasquez opened a small trading post on the Santa Fe Trail. The following year, in 1855, Bridger went back to his fort in Wyoming, one last time. The Mormons asked him to sell the outpost, even though they had essentially taken it already. Eventually, they agreed on a price of $8,000, a fraction of what the fort and

its business had been worth. With the fort sold and the fur trade dead, Jim Bridger used his knowledge and skills to become a guide in the West. In 1854, Irish nobleman, Sir St. George Gore hired Bridger to lead a hunting expedition through the Rockies. In 1856, topographer Governor Warren and geologist Ferdinand Hayden hired Bridger to guide a scientific expedition of the Yellowstone River. Bridger led them as far as the mouth of the Powder River and then described what lay beyond. He painted a picture of gushing geysers, exploding mud pots, and dramatic waterfalls.

Warren and Hayden knew that if what Bridger told them actually existed, it would be one of the most spectacular sights in the world. When Bridger returned to Missouri and described the wonders of the Yellowstone region to the editor of the Kansas City Journal, the editor was fascinated. He wrote it all down and summed it up with Bridger's declaration that Yellowstone was, the place where hell bubbled up. And then someone advised the editor he would be laughed out of town if he printed any of old Jim Bridger's lies.

The editor killed his own story. It was Colter's Hell All-Werell. over again. Decades after the trappers at Fort Raymond had laughed at John Coulter for describing the geothermal wonders near the Shoshone River, newspapers were refusing to print Jim Bridger's descriptions of the same region. Luckily for Bridger, they would believe him before he died. But the end was still far off. In the mid-1850s, Civil War was brewing, and after that, decades of war in the West. The U.S. Army would be Jim Bridger's next employer. Next time on Legends of the Old West, Jim Bridger leads an army column to Utah to square off with the Mormons.

After the Civil War, Bridger guides the army to northern Wyoming, which leads to Red Cloud's war. And after a lifetime on the frontier and witnessing more monumental changes than nearly any man in American history, Jim Bridger finally retires to his farm in Missouri, where he becomes a living legend. That's next week on Legends of the Old West. to binge all the episodes of a new season and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts

or sign up through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This series was researched and written by Matthew Kearns, additional writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.