JACKSON, Wyo. — Sunday, March 10, marks the 83rd anniversary of the naming of Bridger National Forest, which became the Bridger-Teton National Forest (BTNF), after mountain man Jim Bridger.
On March 10, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8709 renaming the Wyoming National Forest the Bridger National Forest. The document states the name change was recommended by the Secretary of Agriculture, in honor of Jim Bridger.
According to the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), President Theodore Roosevelt initially added 5 million acres to the Forest Reserve system in northwest Wyoming and southwest Montana in 1902. This newly created Yellowstone Forest Reserve was divided into the Absaroka Division, the Shoshone Division, the Wind River Division and the Teton Division.
Three years later, President Roosevelt transferred the Forest Reserve System to the Department of Agriculture. In 1907, Forest Reserve was rebranded as National Forest, and a year later the newly named Yellowstone National Forest and its separate divisions were dissolved to create the distinct Teton, Wyoming (now Bridger), Absaroka and Beartooth (now Custer), Shoshone, Bonneville (now Caribou) and Targhee National Forests.
The decision to honor Bridger stemmed from the fact that he was “long associated with the early exploration and development of the region in which this forest is located,” the Executive Order states.
According to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD), Bridger was a successful trapper and mountain man who also became an expert scout for the Army. Although he was born in Virginia in 1804, he headed to the Rocky Mountains in 1822 as a fur trader with William Ashley, U.S. congressman who WGFD claims revolutionized the fur trade. Bridger worked out west until 1867, when he headed back to the east and died in Missouri in 1881.
“He was one of the first Americans to see the wonders of Yellowstone,” the WGFD website says.
In a 2020 article for the U.S. Geological Survey, University of Wyoming Ph.D. student Cole Messa and Professor Ken Sims wrote that Bridger was famous for his mysterious and borderline fictitious accounts of the area. As a spinner of tall tales, Bridger often presented the region with magical elements. Allegedly, Bridger once described a petrified forest in Yellowstone as having “petrified birds that sang petrified songs.”
The National Park System suggests Bridger rivaled Daniel Boone with how he captured the American imagination throughout history.
“Bridger has been celebrated as the greatest of them all, his true exploits tremendous, his fancied feats fantastic,” the NPS writes. “He was overshadowed by none, perhaps equaled by a very few.”
In 1973, the Bridger and Teton National Forests were combined to form a single forest, and today the BTNF consists of 3,439,809 acres of public land.
