Bridger Trail - Bighorn River Crossing

Bridger's own train, 62 wagons that left the Oregon Trail west of Red Buttes on May 20, 1864, built a ferry here and left it for the trains behind. Two of his men stayed to run it, charging later companies five dollars a wagon, two wagons to a trip. By the count of the trail diaries, some 600 to 700 wagons and up to 2,500 men, with women and children, came this way that year, about a quarter of Virginia City's population. Bridger guided the season's first train and its last, rerouting the trail as he went.

What the plaque says

Bridger Trail-Bighorn River Crossing The Bridger Trail crossed the Bighorn River near this location in 1864. Passing over the Bridger Mountains to the southeast, the trail came down Kirby Creek, crossed the river and proceeded north to the Yellowstone River, then west to the gold fields in southwestern Montana. Within months following the 1863 gold discovery at Alder Gulch located in present day Montana, a flood of miners and settlers were traveling to the mining communities of Bannack and Virginia City. Jim Bridger blazed a new trail in 1864. His trail through the Bighorn Basin west of the Big Horn Mountains avoided Sioux Indian hostility along the Bozeman Trail which lies to the east. It also eliminated the extra weeks of travel along the Oregon Trail-Fort Hall-Bannack road which lies to the west. Use of the Bridger Trail was short-lived. However, many variants evolved from the trail in the 1880s and 1890s. The trail was the ancestor of a freighting network that connected remote ranches and early communities with Casper, Wyoming, and Billings, Montana. Jim Bridger was the most renowned mountainman, explorer, and guide of the American West. His trail served as a safer route for emigration to Montana during a period of Native American resistance to Euro-American encroachment. Equally important, the trail acted as a foundation for the development of late nineteenth and early twentieth century transportation routes that made settlement possible in a region previously lacking any system of roads. This interpretive sign is part of historic site mitigation funded by Express Pipeline Inc.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hot Springs State Park — 8.4 mi
  Wyoming's first state park: a thousand feet of banded travertine along the Bighorn, a 1916 swinging bridge, and a small bison herd on the hill.
• Legend Rock State Petroglyph Site — 21 mi
  Ten thousand years of images pecked into a sandstone cliff, most by the ancestors of the Eastern Shoshone, now behind a gate after vandalism.

More markers nearby

• Hot Springs State Park — 8.4 mi
• Broad Streets of Thermopolis — 9.2 mi
• World's Largest Mineral Hot Springs — 9.4 mi
• Wedding of the Waters — 13 mi