Jim Bridger
Even among iconic frontiersmen like John C. Frémont, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger stands out. A mountain man of the American West, straddling the fur trade era and the age of exploration, Bridger lived the life legends are made of.
His adventures are fit for remaking into the tall tales Bridger himself liked to tell. Here, in a biography that finally gives this outsize character his due, Jerry Enzler takes this frontiersman's full measure for the first time-and tells a story that would do Jim Bridger proud.
Born in 1804 and orphaned at thirteen, Jim Bridger made his first western foray in 1822, traveling up the Missouri River with 100 "enterprising young men" to trap beaver. At twenty, he was the first Euro-American to realize there was salt in the Great Salt Lake. At twenty-one, he was the first Euro-American known to paddle the rapids of Bighorn River's Bad Pass. At twenty-two, he and others explored the wonders of Yellowstone.
In the following years, he led trapping brigades into Blackfeet territory and guided expeditions of Smithsonian scientists, topographical engineers, sightseeing hunters, and army leaders. Though he could neither read nor right, he mapped the tribal boundaries for the Great Indian Treaty of 1851, likely the largest assembly on American Indians in history.
He built Fort Bridger on the Oregon and California Trails and blazed a new trail for Montana gold miners. Along the way he married into the Flathead, Ute, and Shoshone tribes and had seven children.
Tapping sources uncovered in the seventy-five years since the last documented biography of Bridger was written, Enzler's book fully conveys the drama of the mountain man's larger-than-life history, and gives us what will be the definitive story of an extraordinary life.