Fitzgerald eased his large frame to the ground, sitting down to better enjoy himself. “Maybe you don’t like girls? You a bugger, boy? Maybe I need to sleep on my back, keep you from rutting at me in the night.” Still Bridger said nothing.
“Or maybe you got no pecker at all.”
Without thinking, Bridger jumped to his feet, grabbed his rifle, cocked it, and pointed the long barrel at Fitzgerald’s head. “You son of a bitch, Fitzgerald! Say another word and I’ll blow your damn head off!”
Fitzgerald sat stunned, staring at the dark muzzle of the rifle barrel. For a long moment he sat like that, just staring at the muzzle. Then his dark eyes moved slowly up to Bridger’s, a smile creeping to join the scar on his face. “Well, good for you, Bridger. Maybe you don’t squat when you piss, after all.”
He snorted at his joke, pulled out his knife, and set to butchering the deer.
In the quiet of the camp, Bridger became aware of the heavy sound of his own breathing, and could feel the rapid beat of his heart. He lowered the gun and set the butt on the ground, then lowered himself. He felt suddenly tired, and pulled his blanket around his shoulders.
After several minutes, Fitzgerald said, “Hey, boy.”
Bridger looked over, but said nothing in acknowledgment.
Fitzgerald casually wiped the back of a bloody hand against his nose.
“That new gun of yours won’t fire without a flint.”
Bridger looked down at his rifle. The flint was missing from the lock.
The blood rose again in his face, though this time he hated himself as much as Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald laughed quietly and continued his skillful work with the long knife.
In truth, Jim Bridger was nineteen that year, with a slight build that made him look younger still. The year of his birth, 1804, coincided with the launch of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and it was the excitement generated by their return that led Jim’s father to venture west from Virginia in 1812.
The Bridger family settled on a small farm at Six-Mile-Prairie near St. Louis. For a boy of eight, the voyage west was a grand adventure of bumpy roads, hunting for supper, and sleeping beneath a canopy of open sky. In the new farm, Jim found a forty-acre playground of meadows, woods, and creeks. Their first week on the new property, Jim discovered a small spring. He remembered vividly his excitement as he led his father to the hidden seep, and his pride when they built the springhouse. Among many trades, Jim’s father dabbled in surveying. Jim often tagged along, further fixing a taste for exploration.
Bridger’s childhood ended abruptly at the age of thirteen, when his mother, father, and older brother all died of fever in the space of a single month. The boy found himself suddenly responsible for both himself and a younger sister. An elderly aunt came to tend for his sister, but the financial burden for the family fell upon Jim. He took a job with the owner of a ferry.
The Mississippi of Bridger’s boyhood teemed with traffic. From the south, manufactured supplies moved upriver to the booming St. Louis, while downstream flowed the raw resources of the frontier. Bridger heard stories about the great city of New Orleans and the foreign ports beyond. He met the wild boatmen who pushed their craft upstream through sheer strength of body and will. He talked to teamsters who portaged products from Lexington and Terre Haute. He saw the future of the river in the form of belching steamboats, churning against the current.
Yet it wasn’t the Mississippi River that captured Jim Bridger’s imagination—it was the Missouri. A mere six miles from his ferry the two great rivers joined as one, the wild waters of the frontier pouring into the bromide current of the everyday. It was the confluence of old and new, known and unknown, civilization and wilderness. Bridger lived for the rare moments when the fur traders and voyageurs tied their sleek Mackinaws at the ferry landing, sometimes even camping for the night. He marveled at their tales of savage Indians, teeming game, forever plains, and soaring mountains.
The frontier for Bridger became an aching presence that he could feel, but could not define, a magnetic force pulling him inexorably toward something that he had heard about, but never seen. A preacher on a swaybacked mule rode Bridger’s ferry one day. He asked Bridger if he knew God’s mission for him in life. Without pause Bridger answered, “Go to the Rockies.” The preacher was elated, urging the boy to consider missionary work with the savages. Bridger had no interest in bringing Jesus to the Indians, but the conversation stuck with him. The boy came to believe that going west was more than just a fancy for someplace new. He came to see it as a part of his soul, a missing piece that could only be made whole on some far-off mountain or plain.
Against this backdrop of an imagined future, Bridger poled the sluggish ferry. To and fro, back and forth, motion without progression, never venturing so much as a mile beyond the fixed points of the two landings. It was the polar opposite of the life he imagined for himself, a life of wandering and exploration through country unknown, a life in which he never once retraced his steps.
After a year on the ferry, Bridger made a desperate and ill-thought effort to make some progress westward, apprenticing himself to a blacksmith in St. Louis. The blacksmith treated him well, and even provided a modest stipend to send to his sister and aunt. But the terms of apprenticeship were clear—five years of servitude.
If the new job did not put him in the wilderness, at least St. Louis talked of little else. For half a decade Bridger soaked in frontier lore. When the plainsmen came to shoe their horses or repair their traps, Bridger overcame his reserve to ask about their travels. Where had they been? What had they seen? The boy heard tales of a naked John Colter, outracing a hundred Blackfeet intent on taking his scalp. Like everyone in St. Louis, he came to know details of successful traders like Manuel Lisa and the Chouteau brothers. Most exciting to Bridger were occasional glimpses of his heroes in the flesh. Once a month, Captain Andrew Henry visited the blacksmith to shoe his horse. Bridger made sure to volunteer for the work, if only for the chance that he might exchange a few words with the captain. His brief encounters with Henry were like a reaffirmation of faith, a tangible manifestation of something that otherwise might exist only as fable and tale.
The term of Bridger’s apprenticeship ran to his eighteenth birthday, on March 17, 1822. To coincide with the Ides of March, a local actors’ brigade played a rendition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Bridger paid two bits for a seat. The long play made little sense. The men looked silly in full-length gowns, and for a long time Bridger was unsure whether the actors were speaking English. He enjoyed the spectacle, though, and after a while began to develop a feel for the rhythm of the stilted language. A handsome actor with a bellowing voice spoke a line that would stick with Bridger for the rest of his life: