Your mention of the Bridger Mountains brought to mind a part of of the book I just read about the Donner party, "Desperate Passage." Normally California bound travelers would cross Wyoming, cut south of Jackson Hole, then up through the high desert of Southern Idaho. California bound travelers came to the parting of the ways and headed southwest from a point north of the Great Salt Lake while the Oregon bound travelers continued on to Baker City then through the Blue Mountains of SE Oregon.
Turns out the party got sold a bill of goods by a guy named Hastings who proposed a "cutoff" from the main trail that supposedly would save travel time. The Hastings route, which was entirely untested, took travelers through Weber Canyon, near present-day Ogden, UT. I drove through Weber Canyon on my road trip and can say it would have been daunting going through it with wagons.
Hastings Cutoff
Weber Canyon
At any rate, the Donner party opted not to go through Weber Canyon, but instead to bushwack through the Wasatch Range and then down into the Great Salt Lake Basin and across the flats without water or forage for the animals.
Which brings us back to Jim Bridger. The party stopped off at Fort Bridger, which was in reality a trading post on Blacks Fork of the Green River. Fort Bridger was established by Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez. The post was at a point where the Hastings Cutoff left the main trail. The success of the post was in many respects tied to emigrants using the Hastings Cutoff as a shortcut to get to California.
Turns out that a party who arrived at Fort Bridger in advance of the Donner Party acquired knowledge of the difficulties that lay ahead on the Hastings Cutoff. They were assured by Jim Bridger that letters they wrote, advising the Donner Party to stick to the main trail and avoid the Hastings Cutoff would be delivered when the Donner Party came through. However, Bridger and Vasquez withheld these letters from the Donner Party, in all likelihood because they wanted people to use the Hastings Cutoff and thereby use Ft. Bridger as a resupply spot on the trail to California.
The result, as we all know it was the Donner Party lost nearly a month travel time bushwhacking through the Wasatch and across the Great Salt Desert. That delay, in turn, led them to the location of present-day Truckee in late October/early November, 1846, where they were snowed in. We know what happened then.
After reading of the duplicity of Jim Bridger, I think less of the man. |
