Jim Bridger: Into the Wild

"Hulloa! Bridger, what's the matter now?"

"Only some feathers in my back."

The feathers were two Blackfeet arrows. One came out clean. The other left a three-inch iron point buried in the bone near his spine — and Jim Bridger carried it there for three years, through three trapping seasons and three rendezvous, because no man in the mountains had the surgical skill to dig it out without killing him.

He was twenty-eight years old. He'd been in the mountains for a decade — since the day an eighteen-year-old orphan who couldn't read the ad recruiting him signed a company ledger with an X and boarded a keelboat up the Missouri. In those ten years he survived the Arikara disaster, rode alone through Bear River Canyon to become the first American to taste the Great Salt Lake, helped run the Hudson's Bay Company off ground the trappers called American soil, and became a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company — which mostly meant he was now personally in debt to everyone from William Ashley to John Jacob Astor's lawyers.

And then there's the question that's followed him for two hundred years: was Jim Bridger the seventeen-year-old boy who left Hugh Glass for dead? The evidence is thinner than the movies would have you believe, and we dig into it.

The new episode of Legends of the Old West — "Jim Bridger: Into The Wild" — is out now, wherever you get your podcasts.

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