Jim Bridger

Jim Bridger was an American mountain man, trapper, explorer and guide who became one of the best-known figures of the nineteenth-century Rocky Mountain fur trade. He travelled widely through the central Rockies and was associated with some of the earliest Euro-American descriptions of the Great Salt Lake and Yellowstone region.

Bridger later established Fort Bridger in present-day Wyoming, a trading post that became important to migrants on western trails. He also worked as a guide and scout for U.S. Army expeditions, drawing on extensive knowledge of the region’s geography and Indigenous routes.

Michael Punke’s The Revenant includes the young Jim Bridger among the Rocky Mountain fur trappers whose expedition is shattered after Hugh Glass is mauled by a bear, placing Bridger inside the moral crisis over whether Glass can be abandoned. Ridgeline moves to the Powder River country in 1866, where Bridger’s long knowledge of western routes and peoples belongs to the world of guides and soldiers confronting Red Cloud’s resistance. Hourly History’s Red Cloud’s War provides the non-fiction setting, explaining Bridger’s association with the Bozeman Trail and the military expedition that tried to protect a route driven through Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting grounds.