Legends of the Old West - MOUNTAIN MEN Ep. 6 | “Jim Bridger: Wars of the West”

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

After the loss of his trading post, Jim Bridger guides an army column to Utah Territory to confront Brigham Young and the Mormons. Bridger leads a frustrating expedition to the Yellowstone region, and then guides the U.S. Army to northern Wyoming as it attempts to build forts along the Bozeman Trail. Bridger warns the Army about the dangers of the mission, and his fears are proved valid when warriors under war chief Red Cloud devastate an army column in the infamous Fetterman Fight. Thanks to our sponsor Trees.com! Get 20% off of your order with the code OLDWEST! 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

Remitly knows if you live a long-distance lifestyle, you probably developed a few unexpected strengths. Like instantly converting time zones. So when a text says, let's talk after dinner in Mumbai, you know they really mean during breakfast in Toronto. Or becoming the unofficial family tech support, explaining why Tia Rosa in Mexico City can't hear you when she's the one on mute. Can you hear me? Download the Remitly app today and keep your long-distance game strong. Remitly, trusted by millions, to send billions worldwide. In the summer of 1857, the U.S. government finally did what Jim Bridger had been asking it to do for four years.

It sent the army to Utah. Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the church itself, had controlled nearly everything in Utah territory since the territory was created in 1850. Jim Bridger's trading post, known as Fort Bridger, was on the Green River in a corner of the territory. For three years from 1850 to 1853, tension had grown between Bridger and the Mormons. And then in August 1853, a Mormon judge in Utah issued an arrest warrant for Bridger, which charged him with treason and accused him of selling guns to Indians who used the guns to kill Mormons. A posse effectively took over the trading post and forced Jim Bridger to leave his home and his business.

Bridger had complained to officials in Washington, D.C., including Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, but they claimed they could do nothing. Bridger and his business partner, Louis Vasquez, ended up selling Fort Bridger to the Mormons for a fraction of its value. Bridger and Vasquez settled in Missouri, south of Kansas City, and opened a small trading post on the Santa Fe Trail. But the turmoil in Utah territory wasn't done. In fact, it was growing worse. Brigham Young's theocracy had clashed with federally appointed officials over everything from court jurisdiction to polygamy to the simple question of who held authority in the territory. By 1857, President James Buchanan had had enough.

He appointed a new governor, Alfred Cumming. He ordered 2,500 soldiers under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston to escort the new governor to Salt Lake City and to ensure that Brigham Young relinquished his position peacefully. It was the largest assembly of troops in the United States at that time, and the Army hired Jim Bridger as its chief scout. The problem was the army mismanaged the timing from the start. Officers didn't hire Bridger until mid-July. It was September 3rd before Bridger led eight companies of the 10th infantry and a battery of artillery out of Fort Laramie.

The 5th infantry and another battery followed. Behind them came more than 2,600 supply wagons. The huge caravan had started late in the year, and the slow-moving procession was heading toward the Rocky Mountains, with winter coming on fast. Major Fitzjohn Porter recorded that near the Rocky Mountains, snowstorms began to overtake them, but, quote, Bridger, the faithful and experienced guide ever on the alert, would point in time to the snowboats, which, like balloons sailing from the snow-capped mountains, warned us of storms, and would hasten to a good and early camp in time. for shelter before the tempest broke upon us. At South Pass, they met a Shoshone chief who told them that Brigham Young had tried to persuade the Shoshonee to fight against the soldiers.

The Shoshonee had refused. The chief's loyalty to Bridger held. Brigham Young, meanwhile, had declared martial law. Mormon leaders were not bluffing about resistance. Heber Kimball, one of the earliest believers and first counselor to Brigham Young, exclaimed, God Almighty helping me, I will fight until there is not a drop of blood in my veins. On the night of October 4th, Lot Smith and a band of Mormon raiders from the Navu Legion struck. They burned 51 supply wagons, leaving a single wagon for the men's personal property.

The fires blazed high, especially when bacon or gunpowder ignited. Two nights later, Smith burned 23 more wagons. He burned a third group on the Sandy River. On that same stretch of trail, Porter Rockwell, arguably the most infamous member of the church, was watching the Army's movements from concealment with a squad of Navu Legion Raiders. At Pacific Springs, shortly before 2 o'clock in the morning, Rockwell and his group stampeded the mules from the Army's camp. Rockwell and Bridger had known

each other for years. Bridger had once told Rockwell he would have made a hell of a mountain man. Now they were on opposite sides of a war, and Rockwell was winning. From Black Barrel Media, this is legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In 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 six, Jim Bridger, Wars of the West. The army column sent to bring the Mormons in line was floundering. The supply train losses were devastating. They had just crossed South Pass and were in the southwest corner of the future state of Wyoming near Ham's Fork

of the Green River. Without provisions, the army couldn't reach Salt Lake City before winter closed in. At a council of officers on November 3rd, Bridger advised them to move to Black's Fork of the Green River, the site of the trading post Bridger had built 16 years earlier in 1841. The Mormons had seized the fort from Bridger in 1853 and then bought it, which was more of a formality than an actual deal for next to nothing in 1855. Now, two years later, Jim Bridger led the army to his former home and trading post and found it in ashes. The Mormons had burned it to keep the army from using it. Army officers realized they would be stranded for the winter. The column spent a miserable winter at Camp Scott near the ruins of Fort Bridger. In the spring of 1858, Colonel Johnston

marched his troops through Echo Canyon, the narrow passage the Mormons had prepared to defend, and found it unguarded. The Mormons stood down, and Brigham Young accepted the new governor. The so-called Utah War, also known as the Mormon War, ended without a battle between the U.S. Army

and the Mormon militias, though the people of the Baker-Fancher wagon train weren't so fortunate. In September of 1857, while Jim Bridger and the U.S. Army were riding across Southern Wyoming, The Baker-Fancher wagon train bound for California was in the far southwest corner of Utah. A Mormon militia killed at least 120 members of the group in a notorious event now called the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

With tentative calm restored in Utah territory, the army asked Bridger to guide the most ambitious scientific expedition since Lewis and Clark. An 18-month survey of the headwaters of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, led by Captain William Reynolds of the, the Corps of Topographical Engineers and Geologist Ferdin and Hayden. Congress appropriated $60,000 for the survey, inspired in part by Bridger's descriptions of the Wonders of the Yellowstone region to Hayden three years earlier. In 1859, Bridger joined the expedition by boarding a steamboat on the Missouri River. He was 55 years old and still the most knowledgeable man on the boat about everything west of the Missouri.

But the expedition was frustrating. Captain Reynolds insisted on relying on incomplete maps rather than Bridger's knowledge, and the two men clashed repeatedly. When Reynolds proposed marching along the banks of the Missouri to the Cheyenne River, Bridger told him the shoreline was nearly impassable. Reynolds went anyway and found out Bridger was right. When deep snow blocked the pass Reynolds wanted to use to cross the Wind River Mountains, Bridger pointed to an alternative, Union Pass, the same cross-es

John Colter may have used 50 years earlier. Reynolds refused until he had no other choice. At a swollen river, Bridger wanted to build a bullboat to cross to the other side. A bullboat was a lightweight circular craft that looked like a large tub. The framework was typically made from willow or cottonwood saplings, and it was covered with buffalo hide to keep it watertight. Native Americans had developed the vessel over centuries, and it was valued for its surprisingly sturdy construction. Captain Reynolds said no to the bull boat and ordered the construction of a log raft instead. The raft failed, a man drowned, and only then did Reynolds let Bridger build the bull boat, which took them safely across the river. In the end, after many months in

the field, Reynolds turned back before reaching the Yellowstone region. Deep snow and his own stubbornness kept the expedition from verifying Bridger's descriptions of geysers and hot springs. Yet again, confirmation would have to wait. Reynolds later wrote that he regretted not confirming, quote, Bridger's marvelous tales, but he was prepared to concede that they might be true. It was the closest thing to an apology Bridger would get. When our mom moved into a new house,

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at Trees.com using code Old West at checkout. Trees.com, code Old West. Now is the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use Old West to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. While Bridger was preparing for the Reynolds expedition,

his third wife, Mary, died at home in Missouri. He had now buried three wives. His surviving children were scattered around the state, and he still had the advantage. adventurous spirit which lured him to the west. Then from 1861 to 1865, the Civil War dominated the eastern third of the United States. There was fighting west of the Mississippi River, scattered through Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico, but nothing on the level of the carnage in the east. While the war raged in the east, fortune seekers continued

to journey west. The legendary gold strike, known as the Comstock load, happened in 1859, in Nevada, and then a series of discoveries in Montana in the early 1860s lured more people to the largely raw territory west of the Rocky Mountains. By 1864, 20,000 miners had poured into Montana territory. They needed a road from the Oregon Trail to the gold fields, and two routes competed for the traffic, the Bozeman Trail and the Bridger Trail. The Bozeman Trail ran along the eastern side of the Big Horn Mountains, through the Powder River country.

It was shorter, had better water, and had better grass for livestock. But it also cut directly through the heart of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho territory, land that had been guaranteed to the nations by treaties. John Bozeman had blazed the trail in 1863 and was already leading wagon trains along it, and Bridger saw disaster coming. Bridger knew the Powder River country. He knew the Sioux, and he knew that driving wagon trains through their best hunting grounds would mean war, not skirmishes, but a full-scale conflict that could cost hundreds of

lives. So he did what he always did. He found another way. The Bridger Trail ran along the western side of the big horns, through Crow territory. The crow were more friendly to Americans. Bridger had lived among them, traded with them, and maintained their trust for decades. The Bridger Trail was longer and drier in places and harder on livestock, but it was safer. In the summer of 1864, while Union General William Tecumseh-Sharman started his Georgia campaign, and Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant started the siege of Petersburg, Virginia. Jim Bridger led a wagon train of miners along his route in Wyoming. When they reached the Big Horns, a large party of Indians appeared in the night and camped within a mile.

Bridger selected a few men and walked out to meet them. unarmed. As they approached, the Indians recognized him and cried out Bridger, Bridger. It was the Shoshone, led by a chief who had been friends with Bridger for decades. The Shoshonee were on a buffalo hunt. They were delighted to see their old friend, and they escorted the wagon train through the most dangerous stretch of the journey. By July 4th, roughly 400 wagons, either directly under Bridger's charge or following his route, had reached the Yellowstone River. Every one of them arrived safely, with no one killed. The Bridger Trail worked.

The Bozeman Trail, by contrast, was already producing casualties. The third wagon train on the road in the summer of 1864 was attacked by Sue and Northern Cheyenne near the Powder River, and six immigrants were killed. Bridger had been right. The Bozeman Trail would mean war. And yet, the Army chose the Bozeman Trail anyway. The gold-hungry miners preferred it. the military preferred it, and in 1866 with the Civil War done, the army sent Colonel Henry

Carrington to build a chain of forts along a dangerous and unprotected stretch of the Bozeman Trail. As Carrington's column moved up into the northern half of Wyoming, it repaired and restored old outposts which had fallen to ruin. Its first major new construction project would be Fort Phil Carney at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains, where the Powder River split into two streams called Big Piney Creek and Little Piney Creek. The location was beautiful and terrible. It had abundant water, grass, and timber, but it was also in the heart of Sioux and Cheyenne territory,

the land that Lakota War Chief Red Cloud had sworn to defend. Jim Bridger was hired as chief guide. The army began calling him Major Bridger, and he would spend the next two years trying to keep alive men who had ignored his advice. Colonel Carrington's troops were as raw as they were scared. Most of them were infantry, marching into a land where warfare was conducted on horseback. They carried old muzzle-loading Springfield rifles that took time to reload,

time a man on the planes did not have. They were perilously low on ammunition. Carrington had requested reinforcements, and the request was sent up the chain of command, but ignored. Congress was more focused on reconstruction in the south. Jim Bridger watched with growing alarm. Margaret Carrington, the colonel's wife, wrote that Bridger was, invariably straightforward, truthful, and reliable.

His sagacity, knowledge of woodcraft, and knowledge of the Indian was wonderful, and his heart was warm and his feelings tender whenever he confided or made a friend. But the tenderness did not prevent him from being blunt. Bridger told Carrington and every officer who would listen that Red Cloud had a an alliance larger than anything the army had faced in the West. That wasn't necessarily a high bar to clear, since the Army was just beginning large-scale campaigns in the West, but the point could not be overstated.

The soldiers were badly outnumbered. Through the Crow, Bridger learned that the Sioux had united with the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Acineboin, the Grovant, and the Blackfeet. They were trying to recruit the Crow, the Flathead, the Nez Perce, and the Shoshone as well. Bridger dictated a detailed letter with the intelligence to the Army and Navy Journal. The response from Fort Laramie was devastating in its complacency. Major Van Vost forwarded Bridger's report to his superiors with the notation, I do not believe much of what Mr. Bridger says.

He exaggerates about the Indians. The U.S. Army would soon learn that Bridger was not exaggerating. And of all things, the tragic lesson would begin with wood. Fort Phil Karnie needed timber to build and heat the outpost. The nearest suitable trees were several miles away. Every day, groups of soldiers traveled from the fort to the trees, and almost every day, warriors harassed the woodcutting parties. The pattern was always the same.

A small group of warriors attacked the woodcutters. The fort sent a relief column, and the warriors retreated, drawing the soldiers farther from the fort where they would be easier. prey. Bridger recognized the tactic immediately. He had seen Blackfoot warriors use it 30 years earlier. He warned the officers not to pursue the warriors beyond Lodge Trail Ridge, the high ground north of the fort. On the far side of the ridge, the soldiers would be out of sight from the fort and beyond the reach of reinforcements. On December 6, 1866, Red Cloud's warriors attacked a woodcutting party and lured relief columns out of the fort.

Colonel Carrington led one column, and Captain William Federman led the other. Federman had arrived at the fort one month earlier with companies of infantry and cavalry to reinforce the garrison. Federman was a civil war veteran, brave and aggressive, but he had little respect for Indian fighting. He, like many others, learned their first scary lesson on December 6th, when warriors killed a lieutenant and a sergeant and nearly surrounded the rest of the soldiers to wipe them out. Margaret Carrington wrote that Federman resolved to proceed with more caution in the future. The future was 15 days later, and the caution did not materialize. On December 21, 1866, Warriors attacked the woodcutters again. Carrington ordered Federman to help the woodcutters, but gave him explicit instructions,

support the wood train, do not engage or pursue the Indians at its expense. under no circumstances pursue over the ridge. Federman rode out with 80 men, a mix of infantry, cavalry, and civilian volunteers. A small group of Sioux warriors appeared on the trail, taunting the soldiers and drawing them forward. Among the lead decoys, according to Sioux accounts, was a young Oglala warrior called Crazy Horse. Federman took the bait and pursued. He crossed Lodge Trail Ridge and disappeared from the fort's view. On the far side of the ridge, hundreds of warriors, maybe more than a thousand, were waiting.

The ambush was total, and the fighting was savage. Bodies were found scattered around the hillside, and their blood was frozen in the snow after a sudden winter storm. The Sioux left all the dead where they fell and picked up their own wounded. Every one of the 81 men in Fetterman's column were killed. The soldiers at Fort Phil Carney collected the remains of their comrades and dug up mass grave, 50 feet long, and 7 feet deep. The ground was frozen so solidly that they could only work in 15-minute shifts. The Fetterman fight, as it was sometimes called, would go down in American history as the worst military defeat in the West, save one, the Battle of the Little Big Horn,

10 years later. Jim Bridger had been right about everything. The Alliance Red Cloud was building, the numbers, the decoy tactic, the ridge, all of it. When the news of the the Federman disaster reached Fort C.F. Smith, 100 miles up the trail in southern Montana, where Bridger was stationed with a smaller army detachment. It came from the crow instead of the army. The crow reported 97 soldiers killed, which was too high, but it didn't change the outcome of wholesale destruction of a unit. The soldiers at the three new forts on the Bozeman Trail, Fort Reno, Fort Phil Carney, and Fort C.F. Smith survived a brutally cold and hard winter. In January of 1867, Lieutenant Colonel Innes Palmer, the commander of Fort Laramie,

reported that Fort C.F. Smith was supposed to have been attacked after Fort Phil Carney. But, quote, the crows were living near there and Bridger was there, and the crows would not permit Bridger to be endangered, and so the expedition failed. The final major attacks of what became known as Red Cloud's War happened eight months later in the first couple days of August 1867. Near Fort Phil Carney, the Sioux and Cheyenne attacked a wood-cutting party in what was called the Wagon Box Fight.

But this time the soldiers were armed with new breech-loading Springfield rifles instead of their old muzzle loaders, and they only lost three men instead of getting wiped out. At the same time, a couple miles outside of Fort C.F. Smith, hundreds of Cheyenne warriors kept soldiers pinned down for nearly three and a half days in the Hayfield fight.

Again, army losses were remarkably low, three killed and three wounded. But then the U.S. Congress asked, was it worth it to keep soldiers garrisoned at isolated outposts where they were badly outnumbered to protect a wagon road which was quickly becoming obsolete? The answer was no, it wasn't worth it. By the summer of 1867,

both halves of the Transcontinental Railroad had been under construction for a year. The Union Pacific was slowly marching across Nebraska, and the Central Pacific was blasting its way through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. So in May of 1868, Red Cloud won his war, and the government agreed to abandon the forts. Jim Bridger was hired one last time to guide the troops home as they closed the outposts on the Bozeman Trail. That was May 23, 1868. That same day, 500 miles to the south, legendary,

mountain man and guide Kit Carson died at Fort Lyon in Colorado. Carson was 58 years old, and Bridger was 64. They had known each other since 1831, and now Bridger was the last of the great mountain men still standing, but he wasn't standing well. An injury he had sustained in 1864 when he was thrown from his horse had never fully healed. His eyesight, which had been deteriorating for years, was now failing badly. The truth was becoming harder to ignore. Jim Bridger was growing old.

He returned to Missouri and spent the last 13 years of his life on his farm. His eyesight worsened, and he needed a heavy staff with a club on the end to feel his way around. His voice still worked, though. Visitors came from near and far to hear him tell stories about the West, and he could out-talk any seven men. He was, one visitor wrote, as anxious to live west as ever, and declares he would not stay east a day if he could only have the use of his eyes. Even with failing eyesight, Bridger still rode his horse around the farm. He'd hollered to his daughter Virginia to saddle Old Ruff for him.

Virginia would saddle the Rhone with the white face and two white feet, and Bridger would ride out, letting Ruff picked the way, with his dog's Sultan trotting alongside. The three of them would go out into the fields, sit for him. for a while and then amble back to the farmhouse. The old mountain man had become a farmer to a degree. He was proud of his apple orchard, and he sent bushels of apples to his neighbors. But he was humorously stubborn about it. When someone asked how his crops were doing, he would reply,

Perfect damn failure, even though they weren't. It was a joke, or mostly a joke, from a man who still wanted to be 1,500 miles west in the Rocky Mountains. While Jim Bridger slowly grew accustomed to farm life in Missouri, the U.S. Army methodically campaigned against the tribes of the West. And as American society moved westward, there was still one matter from the common experience of John Coulter and Jim Bridger that was unresolved.

Reporters sat on the veranda of Bridger's farmhouse and inevitably asked about the Yellowstone region. Bridger told them what he had told everyone for 30 years, about the geysers, the hot springs, the mud pots, and the mineral deposits. They almost always doubted him. Called me the damnedest liar ever lived, Bridger would say. And then finally, in 1871, the government sent a geological survey to the Yellowstone region, led by Ferdin and Hayden, the same Hayden who had traveled with Bridger in 1856, and heard his descriptions firsthand.

Hayden brought a photographer, William Henry Jackson, and a painter, Thomas Marlon. Moran. The photographs and paintings they brought back stunned the nation. In 1872, Congress established Yellowstone as the first national park in the world. It had been 60 years since John Colter saw the geothermal wonders along the Shoshone River near the present-day city of Cody, Wyoming, just outside Yellowstone National Park. None of his fur-trapping buddies at Fort Raymond had believed him when he told stories of the otherworldly landscape. Jim Bridger had seen similar sites in a different part of the region 30 years later, and no one believed him either. Now they knew it was all real. R.T. Van Horn, the editor of the Kansas City Journal, who had killed his own story about

Bridger's Yellowstone descriptions 30 years earlier because someone told him he would be laughed out of town, issued a public apology. He admitted he, heard from Bridger's own lips his account of those wonders and had written it out for publication, but had suppressed it because some friends laughed at it as utterly incredible. In 1874, William Henry Jackson drew a charcoal portrait of Bridger, based on a photograph taken in St. Louis in 1857. The portrait was exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That summer, like everyone else in the country, Jim Bridger heard the news of Custer's disaster on the Little Big Horn River, or Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull's success, depending on how you looked at it.

The most famous Battle of the American West happened just 30 miles from Fort C.F. Smith, where Jim Bridger's presence had been enough to protect soldiers from the Sioux and Cheyenne 10 years before Custer led his men into a doomed fight. That same year, Bridger's son, Felix, died of a bacterial. infection. Bridger, his daughter Virginia, and his youngest child William, who was 23, were all that were left of the family. Jim Bridger passed away on July 17, 1881. He was 77 years old. He was buried in the Watts Cemetery near his farm, and his neighbor, Stubbins Watts, remember that the funeral drew a fairly large crowd for a country gathering. In 1904, Bridger's remains were moved to Independence, Missouri,

where a large monument was erected by General Grenville Dodge. The portrait of Bridger, which had been displayed at the 1876 World's Fair, was later moved to the War Department, and then the Smithsonian. The boy who would never learn to write his name had his portrait on the wall of the nation's museum. In 1923, South Dakota historian Donne Robinson was inspired by a concrete sculpture in Oregon, and he envisioned a huge monument carved into a granite pinnacle in the Black Hills. His initial idea was for the monument to feature the faces of legendary figures of the American West. Depending on the source, some options for those figures included Lewis and Clark,

Saka Jua, John Fremont, Jedediah Smith, Buffalo Bill Cody, George Armstrong Custer, Red Cloud, and Jim Bridger. But when sculptor Goetzen Borglum agreed to take on, the project, which became Mount Rushmore, he proposed to change the concept to honor U.S. presidents. For a brief moment, there was a time when it might have been possible to see Jim Bridger's face carved into a larger-than-life monument in the Black Hills. It would have been a fitting tribute to someone for whom the description, larger than life, was probably too small. Next time on Legends of the Old West, it's the story of the Modoc War. After the campaign on the

the Southern Plains in 1868 and before the Red River War in Texas in 1874, the U.S. Army waged war against the tribes of Northern California and Southern Oregon. For one year, the Pacific Coast was the bloodiest place in the West. That's next time 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.