MOUNTAIN MEN | “Jim Bridger: Into The Wild”

By the summer of 1812, the Bridger family was moving west into the Illinois frontier, and the war between the United States and Britain was moving with them. That summer, British forces captured Fort Mackinac in Michigan. At a place called Chicago—an Indian word meaning “onion field”—Potawatomi warriors ambushed a surrendering American garrison and killed 68 people. Into this dangerous territory, James and Chloe Bridger brought their three children from Richmond, Virginia, settling near the Mississippi River in southern Illinois. Their middle child, eight-year-old James Felix Bridger—known as Jim—would soon lose nearly everything.

Within five years, Jim’s mother died of illness while his father was away surveying. His brother died the same year. The following year, his father died too. At thirteen, Jim Bridger was an orphan, supporting his younger sister by working a flatboat ferry, then apprenticing to a gunsmith named Philip Kramer. That apprenticeship took him 170 miles north to a Potawatomi Indian agency in Peoria, where he first lived among Native Americans—watching families go about their daily lives, watching interpreters translate, and seeing frontiersmen communicate with sign language. It was an introduction to a world he would inhabit for the rest of his life.

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