As the passage of time would demonstrate, Bridger was driven by a will to push boundaries. After his trek up the Missouri, he volunteered to explore the Bear River, which led him to be the first white man to see the Great Salt Lake in 1825, at the age of 21. He then volunteered to lead an expedition down the Big Horn River, during which he almost lost his life. By 1830, at just 26 years of age, he was well-respected as a serious explorer, and had accumulated the means to buy out Ashley’s Rocky Mountain Fur Trading Company when the older man retired.

The 1830s were significant in Bridger’s life as the Rendezvous years. He was always present, from the first get together at the Green River in 1832, to the last in 1840. While the other mountain men brawled and drank away their hard earned winter fur stores, Bridger would entertain them with his tall tales. He continued telling stories to travelers throughout his life. Most of them had a grain of truth in them, but many found the stories of the marvels of Yellowstone and the Black Hills hard to swallow, especially after he’d just told them a story about being chased by Indians in which he died or got scalped at the end.

Bridger did have one encounter with the Gros Ventre Indians in about 1833 which left him with an arrowhead in his shoulder that he carried with him for the next three years. When the Reverend Samuel Parker and Dr. Marcus Whitman brought religion and “modern medicine” to the West in 1836, the doctor performed a publicly viewed surgery to remove the arrowhead which established not only his expertise, but also Bridger’s reputation as a tough customer. After this, the once far-ranging adventurer began to slow down a bit, especially when he saw the economic tide was turning away from the fur trade. He’d sold his share in the Fur Trading Company to William Sublette in 1835, and with the Rendezvous drawing to a close in 1840, he chose to throw in his lot with the fortunes of Ft. Laramie. There, the trappers could go year-round for supplies. Capitalizing on this new trend, he established his own “Fort” Bridger as a stopover for travelers coming down from South Pass in 1842.

Fort Bridger life had its perks, and kept his finances more or less stable with the constant influx of immigrants, but Bridger couldn’t sit still for long. After the arrival of the Mormons in 1847, which Bridger directed to the Salt Lake Valley, he began to act as a scout for various parties. He led numerous survey teams around the region, enabling them to map much of the West. His knowledge was so extensive that he became known as “Old Gabe,” because it was said he knew his way around as well as the angel Gabriel. Bridger also had an extensive knowledge of Indian sign language, as well as the customs of various tribes, which could prove very useful if people listened to it. They often didn’t.

Bridger had three or four Indian wives (accounts vary) who tended to die young. Perhaps he was just hard to keep up with. His last wife, known as Mary, was the daughter of Chief Washakie. She must have been made of tougher stuff because she was with him into his old age. The only thing which could have kept Bridger from staying in the mountains forever was failing eyesight. As blindness overtook him, he was forced to return to Missouri, and lived his last days with Mary on a farm in Westport. When he died in 1881, at the age of 77, he left behind a legacy of adventure and discovery seldom rivaled in the annals of U.S. history.