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Overview
In the years that followed, Jim Bridger became a master mountain man, an expert trapper, and a guide without equal. He came to know the Rocky Mountain region and its inhabitants as a farmer knows his fields and flocks. Indeed, J. Cecil Alter tells us, “he was among the first white men to use the Indian trail over South Pass; he was first to taste the waters of the Great Salt lake, first to report a two-ocean stream, foremost in describing the Yellowstone Park phenomena, and the only man to run the Big Horn River rapid on a raft; and he originally selected the Crow Creek-Sherman-Dale Creek route the Laramie Mountains and Bridger’s Pass over the Continental Divide, which were adopted by the Union pacific Railroad.”
Such knowledge, together with extraordinary skill and uncanny luck, preserved Jim Bridger in a country where nearly half of his mountain companions met violent death. It also gave rise to a brood of impossible tales about Old Gabe and his adventures-tales which he himself may unwittingly have helped along with his droll humor.
Based on Mr. Alter’s original biography of 1925 (a facsimile edition of which, with addenda, appeared in 1950) and a wealth of new facts gleaned from many years of careful research, Jim Bridger is the authentic story of the Old Scout’s life. Only those events in which Bridger took part are included; improbable and uncorroborated stories, however interesting, have been omitted.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806115092 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/1979 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 386 |
| Sales rank: | 1,119,128 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.86(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Jim Bridger
By J. Cecil Alter
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 1962 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8641-2
CHAPTER 1
BOYHOOD MEMORIES
THE YEAR 1812 was a momentous one for the Bridgers. It was their last in the old home town of Richmond, Virginia. Appropriately, that was where Patrick Henry, in 1775, feeling a bit crowded, shouted to the generations of American people, "Give me liberty or give me death." For a decade the senior Bridger had held a worthy place in the community as a land surveyor, meanwhile leisurely neglecting a starved-out, suburban hill-farm.
Mrs. Bridger presided over a highway inn for dusty travelers. She was also the affectionate mother of three: a toddling baby boy; an ever-busy, inquiring school girl (if there had been a school); and a taciturn young man of destiny, turning eight, whose colorful career we are unraveling here.
Round about Richmond at that time more farmers were abandoning depleted acres than newcomers were requesting land surveys. Moreover, patrons of the Bridger hostelry were fewer than the emigrants camping at the edge of town each night. Dutch, German, Swiss, and other newcomers disembarking at Richmond were unwilling to proceed farther inland, if acceptable opportunities were nearer. The "Star of the West" hovered over Illinois and Missouri.
Young James was curiously interested in the straining ox-teams, the creaking covered wagons, the camping routines, and the preoccupation and gossip of the travelers. He may even have previsioned himself, twenty-five or thirty years later, guiding just such emigrant trains through the Rocky Mountains on their way to Oregon and California.
But if the surveyor's telescope had foreshortened the father's prospect of events that would soon come to pass, he would never have left the Old Dominion, or its unique "Tobacco Town."
Westbound emigrants could hire drivers with teams and wagons as far as the Ohio River, or use their own outfits. There two or three neighbors usually loaded their effects together on a raft, a so-called ark or flatboat, for economical travel. A resident pilot would coax the craft over the falls at Louisville. Barge or keelboat space was available, if broken and irregular, to St. Louis.
Piecing together the scattered bits of James Bridger's recorded recollections, we can only say that in 1812 the family gave way to new managers of the hotel and of the farm and departed toward a bleeding but setting sun. It could have been an omen of their own misfortunes.
A month later, the Bridgers were settling dubiously, like so many migrating wildfowl, on a riverside farmstead near St. Louis. It was on the American Bottoms, also called the Six Mile, or DuPont Prairie, Illinois, if the sources are accurate. Although the soil was deeply fertile, the site had its drawbacks, being subject to flooding and to river fogs. The town of St. Louis was then a rough-and-tumble borough, still learning to look after itself and its uninvited guests.
Even so, opportunity was generous to the senior Bridger. Established surveyors needed an experienced field man. Consequently an occupation and an income were assured; although his assignments were usually toward the settlement frontiers, away from home and family, and out of touch.
From the outset the mother noted that the children seemed to be misfits in a strange environment, in spite of her studied companionship. With further regret, she noted her own increasing frailty in performing some of the outdoor chores she had to undertake. There was money for help, but there was a scarcity of domestic help for any money; likewise a dearth of the store goods, available at Richmond, that had spelled a degree of comfort and convenience. Perhaps the most effective suffocation of her morale was the sheer loneliness—facing alone the problems and responsibilities usually borne by a devoted father-mother team.
Only a mother's hope kept her from invalidism the first year or two, though the company of the growing children was comforting. Then the cruel consequences began to appear, forcing her into her last confinement the winter of 1815–16. In midsummer of 1816—it would occur while the father was away in the wilderness—messengers sought him out with the sad tidings that his wife had passed away.
It was a distressing bereavement for the family, creating an impossible adjustment. The surveyor's sister came from Virginia to attempt to rescue the children and salvage the farm, with the aid of the surveyor's earnings and encouragement. But the fates still frowned upon them. That winter of 1816 the youngest son was laid beside the mother, they hoped within her arms. Could a rigorous frontier be more exacting and severe? It could! To this broken home, the heartsick father was brought, desperately ill himself, late in the summer of 1817. He died before Christmas.
No wonder James Bridger often spoke tenderly of his sister, a fragment of the mother's love. No wonder he eagerly sought any kind of employment and worked as if he had no other solace.
Master James Bridger would be fourteen in a few months (March 17, 1818). Circumstances had already made him a man in some respects. Tall, strong, and serious, he had the looks and ways of an adult. Such gravity seemed to frown on the diminutive "Jim" but, in time, it admitted him to busy circles everywhere.
With a boy's yearning for adventure, he is said to have acquired a canoe, which he handled well. One could not reach St. Louis from Six Mile without a boat. His most recreative excursions were visiting traps that he set in the bayous in winter. He obtained his traps and traded in a few mink and muskrat skins at Chouteau's. Pierre Chouteau, Jr., was still young, only twenty-nine. Born and reared in St. Louis in a well-to-do family, Pierre had probably trapped some of the same sloughs. On a later occasion he helped young Bridger select and obtain his first gun. The two remained good friends the rest of their lives, though James Bridger thenceforth "paddled his own canoe."
James Bridger's first task was to find a job but in selling himself, he was handicapped by a frustrating shyness. The principal avenues open to him were the few men who knew him. They generously remembered that a tongue-tied timidity never oversold itself.
Elements of St. Louis's early increment of growth came downstream by canoe, pirogue, and raft—Indians and hunters with their furs and skins, but always a goodly proportion of the merchandise came upriver in the tedious, usually tardy flatboats, barges and keelboats.
Every person, animal, vehicle, and pound of freight arriving overland from the east had to be ferried across the Mississippi River to the St. Louis wharves. Ferryboats were already increasing in number and competing for the business.
James Bridger frankly disliked the average riverman. Too often he was a potential vagabond, underemployed (part-time) and overworked while on duty; and he did not have a steady job. The roustabouts at the wharves were of like character.
But the spirit of adventure reposed in the river itself; something new could be expected every day. Thus, the lad must have been a familiar figure at Antoine Dangen's ferry to Old Cahokia (East St. Louis), nearest the Bridger farm home. He could assist with the loading, poling, tying-up, and unloading. Dangen's was the more popular passenger ferry at the time, and young James, with his canoe, undoubtedly took an occasional fare or passenger himself, on special trips. A little later Wiggin's new ferry, with horse-propelled tread-wheels, up at Oak Street, could use a horse driver.
It was more than warmth that drew the young man into the St. Louis blacksmith shop that winter. He had often visited there, making himself useful: turning grindstones, handing tools to workmen, holding and soothing horses being shod, pumping the furnace bellows, assisting with unwieldy wagon tires, removing and replacing wagon wheels, and doing errands on the river front and over town for the shop or its patrons.
In the gun-repair section, young Bridger affectionately handled many guns, testing them for heft, feel, and fitness, as companionable, all-purpose friendly weapons. A gun to him was as personal as a jacket, and should fit its owner's hands, arms, shoulder, and sighting-eye naturally.
James Baird (or Beard) was one of St. Louis's pioneer blacksmiths from about 1811. Subsequent growth of the business provided his shop with facilities and workmen for other kinds of smithing; also some wood-working, gunsmithing, and simple manufacturing, such as of butcher knives.
Available directories and writers of that day do not list Phil Creamer, who was said by Bridger to have been his blacksmith-shop foster-father. We can only assume from that, and other circumstances, that Creamer was possibly a neighbor of the Bridgers on the American Bottoms and a leading blacksmith in the Baird shop in St. Louis. It is only certain that for four years, from 1818, James Bridger was a blacksmith's apprentice living in Phil Creamer's home. The apprenticeship would be legally terminated at age eighteen.
We may assume from many circumstances that young James Bridger, the apprentice, was alert and responsive to men and events; in the shop, in the town, and in the world about him. He was a country boy, but he was not a country bumpkin who would let the horse he was holding step on his feet, or who would hold the swage askew under the blacksmith's hammer. Continually in danger, he was almost never hurt in the shop or elsewhere. No word has come down to us on his skill at helving an axe, nosing a plow, or tempering a cold chisel; but we have it from acceptable authority that he always made himself useful around the shop and that the shopmen liked him.
Young Bridger felt his inferiority most keenly in chance meetings with young men who spoke familiarly of the Reverend Mr. Niel's academy for "young gentlemen" in St. Louis. There were others–teen-age travelers visiting home at vacation time from college at Bardstown, Kentucky–to accentuate their comfortable, cultural status. Amply sponsored, they were confident and secure, polished sons of officials or businessmen of the city. James Bridger was without even father's counsel or reflected prestige. All his potential accomplishments, his entire career, must come from his own inherent resources, from his opportunities and environment: "The child is father of the man."
CHAPTER 2HISTORICAL DETOUR
THE ST. LOUIS blacksmith shop near the river front was a kind of information exchange for widely traveled visitors. To apprentice Bridger's eager overhearing, this was living history. Although he did not then know it, Bridger would soon become an actor in this captivating scene.
Bridger's own local hunting tours told him the Missouri River could still be as unruly as it had been when discovered by Father Marquette, descending the Mississippi, in June, 1673: "We heard the noise of a rapid; large trees, entire with branches—real floating islands—came from the west so impetuously the water was very muddy."
Old Cahokia (East St. Louis) was established in 1699 as a Roman Catholic mission, but it promptly became a busy trading post. The tradition in Bridger's nearby community was that beaver fur made it so. The Chouteau family of New Orleans established a trading post opposite Cahokia in 1764, which they called St. Louis.
From there, in 1790, a roaming fur trader reached the Mandan Indian villages (present Bismarck, North Dakota). He learned that the villages had been headquarters for fourteen years of a resident trader for Canadian fur companies, that Mexican (Spanish) bridles and saddles were in use by the Mandans, and that white Canadians had already reached the Pacific.
The Missouri River and St. Louis were the natural outlets for this trade. Consequently, the "Company of Explorers of the Upper Missouri" was organized in 1793. In the next few years of inexperience, the leaders of pilot bands, reinforcements, and competitors brought havoc by accusing one another of villainy. They uncovered the disheartening fact that the Indians were improvident hunters and had few furs to trade. After this discovery, "St. Louis merchants were unwilling to expand their efforts to the more remote Indians."
The Missouri River region was purchased by the United States in 1803. To explore, map, and appraise the territory, the government sponsored the Lewis and Clark Expedition. This semi-military group moved up the Missouri River in 1804, making examinations, studies, and records of geology, topography, streams, animals, inhabitants—everything that 180 hand-picked experts saw, did, and heard. After wintering with the Mandans, 1804–1805, they crossed the continental divide and wintered in 1805–1806 at the mouth of the Columbia. Returning by approximately the same route, they reached St. Louis in September, 1806.
Their report revealed names and locations of streams and Indian villages and the extent of tribal land possessions, along with descriptions and appraisals of unit areas of the country. They cultivated the good will of the Indians by distributing presents, making friendly speeches, and leaving printed copies as mementos with the Indians. But what they did not do had the most salutary effect: they did not hunt buffalo or trap beaver, or gather elk trophies, or molest Indian women, or steal horses, or antagonize the Indians in any manner.
The Missouri River region thus offered a challenge to any fur trapper–trader who would help himself to the Indians' furs, his game, his women, and his homelands; and would treat any Indians' enemies as friends. This last was especially unforgivable!
The effect in St. Louis was explosive. Manuel Lisa selected forty men from the host of volunteers and proceeded up the Missouri River in 1807. He established Fort Manuel at the mouth of the Big Horn. The Mandans were only a way station to the better beaver lands, but here was virgin beaver country. Thus Lisa returned in 1808 with a rich cargo of furs and a lifetime occupation ahead of him.
Thereupon General William Clark and George Drouillard (of the Lewis and Clark Expedition) with Andrew Henry, Pierre Menard, Thomas James, and others led a formidable company of three or four hundred determined men to another winter at Fort Manuel. Their plans were strategic and farsighted, but in their inexperience everything seemed hostile and the Indians aggressive.
Using Fort Manuel as a jumping-off place early in 1810, Andrew Henry and Pierre Menard led an eager crew of trappers to Three Forks Basin, having Drouillard and John Colter as guides. While the trappers were getting their bearings, a militant force of Blackfeet attacked, killing two or three isolated men and making off with their property. In a second attack a few days later, other trappers, including Drouillard, were slain. No wonder "most of the Americans prepared to go back to the settlements."
Andrew Henry remained with a substantial, but uncongenial, party, bravely hoping to gather more furs. Instead he promptly lost several more men in a third annihilating attack by the Blackfeet, who meant business. Henry knew when he was licked and hurried over the continental divide to the southward. He established himself for the winter on what has since been called Henry's Fork of Snake River (St. Anthony, Idaho).
Henry's whereabouts and his probable plight were live topics that severe winter of 1810–11, among the Rocky Mountain Indians as well as among the whites at St. Louis. But Henry, after a miserable winter, reached St. Louis in midsummer of 1811 with some forty packs of beaver and "experience" enough to last him exactly eleven years, when James Bridger was to become his protégé.
Major Henry's dejection was like a dash of cold water on fur trapping enthusiasts in St. Louis. For ten long years Astorians spread their traps on the Oregon; the Hudson's Bay and the North West companies continued to slit each other's throats as deftly as they skinned a beaver; and the broken remnants of the Missouri Fur Company remained close to the lower end of the "Big Muddy"—out of respect for the dead.
Politicians, however, were as busy as beavers, and the United States Congress, in 1818, authorized the army to establish a military outpost at the mouth of the Yellowstone River. Accordingly, by early 1819, armed troops in barges and keelboats were working their way upstream at St. Louis before James Bridger's curious eyes.
Then, about 1820, Jacob Hawken set up his lathes, drill presses, and other gun-making machinery in St. Louis for producing the so-called Hawken gun in quantity. This is mentioned because Bridger early acquired, and for many years carried, one of these guns, an improvement on the Kentucky rifle.
To bring our historical detour to an abrupt ending in the spring of 1822: Missouri was modestly donning her robes of statehood; Wilson P. Hunt, explorer-merchant, was preparing to become postmaster of St. Louis; and, of much warmer concern to readers of this page, James Bridger was completing his apprenticeship in the St. Louis blacksmith shop as of March 17, 1822.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jim Bridger by J. Cecil Alter. Copyright © 1962 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,1. Boyhood Memories,
2. Historical Detour,
3. Up the Missouri,
4. The Indian Country,
5. Blackfeet Defeat Trappers,
6. Arikaras Attack Ashley,
7. Army Aids Ashley,
8. Into the Wilderness,
9. A Famous Bear Story,
10. The Beaver Wonderland,
11. Hostile Weather,
12. Discovering Great Salt Lake,
13. Battle of Ogden Hole,
14. Ashley's First Rendezvous,
15. Bridger's Travels,
16. Indian Medicine Man,
17. "Smith, Jackson, and Sublette",
18. Bear Lake Rendezvous, 1827,
19. Ogden Notices Americans,
20. Bear Lake Rendezvous, 1828,
21. First Wagons West,
22. Bridger Becomes Partner,
23. Battle of Pierre's Hole,
24. Vanderburgh's Death,
25. Trappers' Amours,
26. Green River Rendezvous, 1833,
27. Green River Rendezvous, 1834,
28. Green River Rendezvous, 1835,
29. Green River Rendezvous, 1836,
30. A Winter on Yellowstone River,
31. Green River Rendezvous, 1837,
32. The Smallpox Scare,
33. Bridger Breaks Bread,
34. Father De Smet Goes West,
35. Fraeb Is Killed,
36. Bridger Meets Frémont,
37. Fort Bridger Appears,
38. Emigrants at Fort Bridger,
39. The Mormon Pioneers,
40. The Forty-Niners,
41. Laramie Peace Council, 1851,
42. Fort Bridger Taken,
43. Bridger Guides Gore,
44. The Utah War,
45. Sale of Fort Bridger,
46. Guiding Captain Raynolds,
47. Raynolds Is Snowbound,
48. Guiding Colonel Collins,
49. Guide to Montana Mines,
50. Powder River Expedition, 1865,
51. Powder River Campaign, 1866,
52. Powder River's Flaming Finals,
53. Bridger's Declining Years,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,