Jim Bridger – 1804-1881

Bridger spent two decades, from 1822 through the early 1840s, tramping through the vast wilderness bounded by Canada, the Missouri River, the Colorado-New Mexico border, Idaho, and Utah, in search of new peltries (fur-trapping grounds). He was the first white man to see the Great Salt Lake (1824), and in 1843, he established Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming, which served as rendezvous for trappers and as a way station Oregon Trail “emigrants” bound for the far West.