Jim Bridger

by J. Cecil Alter

Book Overview

On March 20, 1822, the Missouri Republican published a notice addressed "to enterprising young men" in the St. Louis area. "The subscriber," it said "wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years. For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry... or of the subscriber near St. Louise." The "subscriber" was General William H. Ashley, and among the "enterprising...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806115092
• ISBN13: 9780806115092
• Release Date: May 1979
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 386 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Fine book about the life and times of Jim Bridger.

J. Cecil Alter is a historian and therefore his book about Jim Bridger and his time is a very serious work and all Jims events are well documented. Myth and legend are drilled. Consequently the text may seem a bit dry but the adventures on the plains and in the Rockies are very exiting and you get much interesting information about traders, mountain men and indians. There might have been more pictures in the book. Anyway it is a must for students of the old West.The Saga of Hugh Glass: Pirate, Pawnee, and Mountain Man Mik

Old Gabe: one of the greatest of the mountain men

Jim Bridger was without a doubt among the three or four most important and renowned mountain men to roam the West during the fur trade period (1822-1846). His role as a trapper, explorer, and guide was celebrated by all who came to know him. This book, published in 1962, is an updated version of an earlier biography by Alter of Bridger, published in 1925. It contains many new facts that had come to light since the first edition, some major enough to afford Alter new perspectives and compelling him to draw new conclusions about Bridger's capacity as a western icon. Born in Richmond, VA, in 1804, Bridger's family resettled near St. Louis. When both his parents died, the 14-year-old was apprenticed to a blacksmith. He responded to William Ashley's 1822 advertisement for a hundred "enterprising young men" to ascend the Missouri River to the mountains to gather furs, and went on that first excursion with Ashley and Andrew Henry to the Yellowstone. He returned to the mountains again the next year, during which he became one of the major players in the saga of Hugh Glass and his famous grizzly bear attack and subsequent 300-mile crawl alone to safety, when Bridger and another abandoned him to his fate. He would remain in the mountains for many years to come. Sometime late in 1824 he "discovered" the Great Salt Lake and sailed upon it in a bullboat, perhaps the first white man to do both. (He thought at first the lake was an arm of the Pacific Ocean.) He spent the next few years trapping in Utah, along the Big Horn River in Wyoming, and in the dangerous (though beaver- rich) Blackfoot country around the Three Forks of the Missouri. He attended all of the yearly rendezvous, and was wounded by Indians at the Pierre's Hole fight in 1832 (an arrow point remained in Bridger's back until the 1835 rendezvous, at which Dr. Marcus Whitman cut it out). For the next seven years he continued leading trapping brigades throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Finally, in 1839, Old Gabe (a nickname given to him by Jedediah Smith in the 1820s in reference to the Biblical Gabriel and his ability to command authority, something Smith noticed in Bridger as well) returned to St. Louis, his first time back in the States in 17 years. It wasn't long before Bridger was back in the mountains again. He brought supplies to the 1840 (and last) rendezvous on Green River, and then trapped along the Columbia River. In 1843 he went into partnership with Louis Vazquez, and had an unsuccessful hunt along the Milk River. The two men built Fort Bridger in SW Wyoming, which became an important waystation along the Oregon Trail. With the fur trade now at a close, Bridger became a guide. He led a group to California in 1850, and guided the Stansbury expedition, during which he discovered the pass through the mountains in southern Wyoming that bears his name (and offered a safer route to the gold fields of Montana than the Bozeman Trail). During the Mormon War of 1857-58, he led Albert Sidn

An extraordinary man

Barely eighteen years of age, Jim Bridger joined the Ashley/Henry fur expedition of 1822, and the rest as they say, is history. As fur trapper, trader and guide of the early American West, Bridger's legacy still lives on. The man accomplished what most of us only dream about. One of the first white men over South Pass, then discoverer of the Great Salt Lake, his trading post at Fort Bridger, coupled with many Indian battles, and later as guide to several military and governmental operations/expeditions, it is amazing the man lived to be seventy seven years old! He was, and still is considered by many, a colossal figure in the early exploration, development and growth of the American West. A great man and a great book.