A Trail Woefully Hard to Travel: The Bridger Cut-Off

The panel's closing count is too small. Wyoming's State Historic Preservation Office lists the 1864 trains in order of departure: Bridger's own left the cutoff west of Red Buttes on the North Platte on May 20 with 62 wagons and about 300 men, and trains of 46 wagons, of more than sixty and of about a hundred followed. Other accounts give 129 wagons as the size of the largest single train. Whatever the total, the road ran some 510 miles from Red Buttes to Virginia City.

What the plaque says

A Trail Woefully Hard to Travel: The Bridger Cut-Off In 1863, John Bozeman and John Jacobs blazed a new trail through the buffalo rich Powder River Country to the southwest Montana mining camps. The Bozeman Trail, however, could be deadly for the men and women who traveled it. The Lakota and Northern Cheyenne Indians hotly defended their land, the last great hunting grounds on the northern plains. By 1864, travelers ran the risk of being attacked and killed on the Bozeman Trail. That year, famed mountain man Jim Bridger established a new trail, the Bridger Cut-Off, through the arid Bighorn Basin to the Yellowstone River where it intersected the Bozeman Trail. Bridger's trail was safer than the Bozeman Trail, but much tougher to navigate. Plentiful water and wood, didn't make up for scarcity of grass for the oxen, horses, and cattle and the difficult terrain over the trail passed. The Bridger Cut-Off passed near here, following the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River north to the confluence of Rock Creek where it turned northwesterly, reaching the Yellowstone near present Big Timber. Despite the advantage of being 100 miles shorter than the Bozeman Trail and the avoidance of trouble with the Indians, Bridger's Cut-Off never caught on with travelers. In all, only 129 wagons and maybe 450 people navigated the trail in 1864.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Smith Mine — 16 mi
  Rusting buildings beside the highway, all that is left of the mine where Montana's worst coal disaster emptied a valley.
• Chief Plenty Coups State Park — 21 mi
  The log house of the last traditional chief of the Apsáalooke, given in 1928 as a park for Crow and white people together.

More markers nearby

• Jim Bridger, Mountain Man — 0.8 mi
• The Pryor Mountains and Raptor Country — 4.1 mi
• The Pryor Mountains — 4.1 mi
• A Monument to Carbon County: The Fromberg Bridge — 7.8 mi