Jim Bridger's Lies

Now before you believe one word you hear in this park, you ought to meet the finest liar who ever crossed it. Jim Bridger. Trapper, guide, the old man of the mountains. He knew this high country when there wasn't a road in it or a town near it. Give him a buffalo skin and a lump of charcoal and he'd sketch you every river and valley from memory. An Army lieutenant who checked those sketches against the ground in eighteen forty nine called them wonderfully accurate. And Jim told folks the plain truth about the Yellowstone. Water shooting seventy feet out of the ground. Springs so hot you could cook your meat in them. In eighteen fifty six he laid it all out for a Kansas City newspaper editor, Colonel Van Horn. A place, he said, where hell bubbled up. The colonel took notes. He meant to run it. Then a fellow who said he knew Jim warned him he'd be laughed out of town for printing any of old Jim Bridger's lies. So the colonel put it away. Say you've stood in the steam. Say you've walked the greatest wonder on the continent on your own two feet, and the town you come home to pats you on the arm and winks. Hiram Chittenden, the Army engineer who built so much of this road, called that disbelief a cloud on Bridger's life. And Chittenden had a notion what it did to him. Jim seems to have made up his mind, he wrote, that if folks were bound to distrust his word, they might as well have a reason. So the story goes, he gave them one. He told of shooting at a big elk, four times, and the elk never so much as looked up. Mad clear through, he ran at it swinging his rifle like a club and slammed into a mountain of clear glass. That glass was ground like a telescope lens, you see. The elk that looked a few hundred yards off was twenty five miles away. He told of a lake with a lid of hot water floating on the cold, where you dropped your bait through the hot, hooked a trout down below, and cooked him on the way out. And when a fellow in camp bragged on the stone trees down in Zuni country, General Nelson Miles said Jim told him to come on up to the Yellowstone, and he'd show him peetrified birds on peetrified trees, a-singing peetrified songs. Now, not all of those were his. Aubrey Haines, the park's own historian, counted seven Yellowstone yarns hung on Jim Bridger and figured about four were likely his. The rest were added later by folks who wanted a famous name on their joke. Plagiarism in reverse, Haines called it. Lie well enough, and they'll lend you everybody else's. He lived to see it turn. The surveyors came, and the wonders he'd sworn to were sitting where he'd said. That Kansas City editor apologized to him in public. Jim had told an Army captain about a stream that split in two, half for each ocean, and the captain allowed it might be a verity, which is about as near to sorry as the Army gets. He swore fish swam across the Continental Divide on it, too. It's on the map south of this park. North Two Ocean Creek. But you know which ones lasted. Nobody around a fire ever asked for the charcoal map. They ask for the elk. I've told it myself, more times than I'm proud of. Somewhere past the edge of every map I ever trusted, that elk is still grazing behind his wall of glass, twenty five miles off, and the shot is still on its way.