You Can Walk In Jim Bridger’s Footsteps At 1838 Rendezvous In Riverton

Mountain men have to do some pretty tough things, even the modern-day variety in 2025.

Just ask Broken Water, a Riverton dentist who was totally into his mountain man alter ego during this weekend’s 1838 Mountain Man Rendezvous at Riverton.

Rendezvous were trading fairs of the American West in the days of the beaver fur trade. Trappers gathered at the end of each season between 1825 and 1840 at a specified location, often in Wyoming.

There, they’d sell or trade their pelts and furs for the goods they needed to keep going, as well as whiskey that they didn’t necessarily need, but prompted a powerful thirst.

Broken Water was attired, head to toe, in authentic mountain man gear of the era, even if it’s a bit flashy for the time, with a gold paisley shirt and relatively clean, brain-tanned buckskin hides.

The story of his mountain name is a particularly fun one.

“Probably six or eight years ago, when I first started doing this, I didn’t have all the regalia, so I couldn’t sleep with the real mountain men,” said Broken Water, who declined give his real name while at the rendezvous. “All I had was a sleeping bag, and I think there was about a foot and a half, 2 feet of snow on the ground.”

Broken Water placed a tarp on the ground, then put his sleeping bag on top of that. He wasn’t sure what the temperature was at the time, though he later learned it was minus 35 degrees that night.

All he knew right then was that it was really cold.

“I thought, ‘Well, since I don’t have to worry about being period correct, I had this little collapsible water bottle that I thought I’d just sleep with it, so I’d have something to drink in the morning,’” he said.

The Catastrophe

Sleeping with a filled water bottle turned out to be a terrible idea.

“About an hour or two into the night, I woke up just terribly cold,” Broken Water said. “I was shivering, and then I realized I was soaking wet. My water bottle had leaked and got me wet from my shoulders down to my hips.”

Broken Water had a choice at that point that would ultimately define him as a mountain man and give him his name. 

“At that point I was thinking, ‘Well, I can go home, or I can sit in the pickup the rest of the night, or I could just stay here and try to dry out in my sleeping bag,’” he said. 

Staying and toughing it out was his choice, and that remains his choice ever since. 

“I was the first one up the next morning,” Broken water said. “I wanted to get the fire going from the night before so I could get dried out.”

While he was about that, other people in the camp were also waking up and saw him, drying out by the fire.

“I had taken off all my wet clothes except my wool long johns,” Broken water said. “And the steam was just boiling off the long johns, and a guy named Tail Gunner asked me what had happened.

“When I told him, he says ‘Broken Water.’ So that’s been my name from that moment on.”

Yes, Paisley Was A Pattern Then

Broken Water’s trial by freezing cold made him an instant member of the 1838 Mountain Man Rendezvous gang, and he’s been going to the recreation of the annual mountain man trading event since.

Although now he has much more appropriate period gear for these events than he did then, and he knows better than to sleep with any more water bottles. 

Some of his gear was won through mountain man competition events, including the beautiful gold paisley shirt he was wearing this weekend.

While the shirt might seem a bit flashy for the era, it’s 100% period correct, Broken Water said.

“Paisley is a pattern they had then,” he said. “And every stitch of this is hand sewn.”

Every year, Broken Water adds a little more to his mountain man gear, improving the authenticity of his attire.

“This is brain-tanned,” he said, pulling at a pant leg. “So that’s where they take the brains of an animal and go through the tanning process. I’ve brain-tanned one hide, and it’s a lot of work.”

The rifle he carries, though, is probably his most prized mountain man possession. It was custom-made so that it fits his size and reach.

“A local gunmaker maker made this,” he said. “I have two sights, two rear sights so I can shoot long range. And with all the engraving and everything on them, there’s a lot of work in these.”

The rifle includes a secret compartment at the bottom where he keeps the things used to clean the rifle.

“You can see how the barrel is thicker here and then it slims down to reduce weight before it gets thicker again,” he said. “And the old-timers used this.

“It’s what’s called a swamp barrel, and it took a lot of patience for those old guys to make a swamp barrel like this.” 

It’s Not A Site, It’s ‘The’ Site

Broken Water lives in Riverton, but even if he didn’t, it would still be a rendezvous of choice for the mountain man enthusiast.

That’s because the site is one of the best documented in Wyoming.

The Riverton event is not just “near” a rendezvous site, it has been documented as the actual, original site where Jim Bridger himself and other famous mountain men like Kit Carson walked when they met in 1838 for the annual end-of-season blowout.

To walk along the river and camp at the 1838 Mountain Man Rendezvous is to echo a piece of history that few other places can offer.

The documentation, as well as the site’s continued existence, has been hard won.

It came about because in the 1980s the Wyoming Highway Department bought the parcel of land located at the confluence of the Big and Little Wind Rivers, from one Jack D. Richardson of Pinedale, then announced plans to mine the land for gravel for highway construction projects.

That alarmed history buffs in the area, as well as members of the Fremont County Historical Preservation Commission. They pointed out that mining would destroy the last remaining, undisturbed fur trade rendezvous site in the West. 

The state hired a professional historian to evaluate the historical significance of the site, who compared the 1875 General Land Office map with current-day maps, confirming that the confluence of the streams has remained fairly constant over the years. 

From that, it became clear the parcel was indeed exactly where the 1838 Rendezvous had taken place. 

That led to an agreement, which persists to this day, allowing the 1838 Mountain Man Rendezvous Association and the Fremont County Historic Preservation Commission to preserve the site, and keep it much as it would have been in the days of the mountain man rendezvous.

Mountain Men And Missionaries

The history of the 1838 Mountain Man Rendezvous is also one of the more well-documented, and that’s thanks to an unlikely juxtaposition that placed missionaries smack in the middle of a mountain man rendezvous that was raucous even by the standards of a rendezvous in general. 

“Jim Bridger wintered here because the cottonwoods would feed his livestock,” Josh Lehto told Cowboy State Daily. “The livestock would eat the bark, so he would feed them on bark all winter.

“And because we get a fairly wild winter here, he found that the grass was good enough, because the snow was long enough out to (maintain) the grass.”

Lehto is a longtime participant in the rendezvous and has studied the history of the event extensively.

Much of that history is known, Lehto said, because of various journals kept by mountain men, but also from journals that were kept by some missionaries who were traveling through and had been placed on a nearby island at the confluence. 

“The missionaries actually kept better journals,” Lehto said. “And they camped the missionaries on the island because there were women with them.”

A Competitive Prank

Those women became part of a funny historical prank played by the American Fur Co. on the Hudson Bay Co.

The two companies were doing everything they could to stamp the other out, so the American Fur Co. tried to trick the Hudson Bay Co. by first advertising the 1838 Rendezvous location as the meadow on Horse Creek, a tributary of the Green River.

At the last minute, though, they changed it to the Riverton site. 

Some kind soul left a note on one of the cabins at Horse Creek advising those who rode into the site where the real rendezvous was.

“Come to Poposhia (Popo Agie), where you will find plenty of trade, whiskey and white women,” the note read.

The last was a little piece of bait guaranteed to snare a mountain man, but it was also something of a prank. Because those white women mentioned in the note?

They were the wives of the missionaries who had camped on the island that’s near the Riverton Rendezvous in the confluence of the rivers there.  

Let God Sort Them Out

Imagine this scene. On the island, a group of staid, husband-and-wife missionary teams traveling West to bring the word of God to all the “heathens” living there. Their home was a temporary cabin built of canvas that had been strung through the trees with poles and twine.

The men had also gathered poles and brush to build a corral for their horses and cattle to avoid herding them constantly. It was a well-run camp, quiet and peaceful.

Not for long.

By twos and threes in 1838, mountain men began arriving across the river from their camp. At first, there were just a few. Some even attended the Sunday church services the missionaries offered. 

But as the days passed, there were more and more trappers, traders and Indians, gathering by the dozens. Their numbers would ultimately swell to as many as 300 unruly, rough-stock mountain men and Native American braves.

They were all ready for whiskey and “white women.”

Things were suddenly no longer quiet and peaceful by the river.

There were drunken parties with music and dancing punctuated by gunfire. There were drunken card parties, and there were games of skill and daring, played as well as they can be by the drunk and sober.

Then one night, there was a drunken mob in the missionary camp demanding to speak with William Gray, claiming the missionary man had slighted them in some fashion. They demanded he come out and make it right. Or at the very least, honor them in their own ways — by coming out to sing and dance with them. 

Gray hid in his canvas tent, trying frantically to load a rifle, while others did their best to dissuade the mob from taking any further actions they might regret by light of day once sober.

Eventually, the mob’s steam ran out, and they moved on.

Gray was safe, for then. 

Heavy Metal Jacket And All

The camp continued to build, and the presence of the missionaries continued to inspire extraordinary displays of craziness, according to journal entries.

“As if actuated to extraordinary displays by the unusual number of visitors, especially the four ladies, both trappers and Indians conducted themselves like the mad-caps they were,” one mountain man’s journal read. “The Shawnees and Delaware’s Danes their great war dance before the tents of the missionaries; and Joe Meek, not to be out-done, arrayed himself in a suit of armor belonging to Captain Stewart and strutted about the encampment, then mounting his horse, [he] played the part of an ancient knight.”

The suit of armor was a heavy metal jacket if ever there was one.

On July 5, the famous Jim “Gabe” Bridger, who had first ridden to the Horse Creek meadow, finally arrived in camp with his brigade of trappers.

The famous mountain man’s arrival sparked a whole new level of noisy celebrations and gunfire. Horns were blown, more kegs of whiskey tapped.

Bridger had been nicknamed Gabe, short for the archangel Gabriel, by one of the mountain men, and it was a name that stuck.

Diaries written by the missionaries note that Bridger did come to call on the missionary camp to see those “white women” advertised on the door of a Horse Creek cabin. 

He was accompanied by a parade of banging Indian drums, and some of his trappers were said to have been dancing around a Blackfoot scalp.

The appalled reaction of the missionaries was obvious to the mountain men and only encouraged them to even more audatious behavior, eventually chasing the missionaries’ camp dog King howling away to hide on the far side of the river. 

“They [hollered], danced, fired [their guns] and acted as strangely as they could,” a missionary wife named Mary Walker wrote. 

Myra Eells, the wife of another missionary, described the men as “emissaries of the devil, worshipping their own master.”

Eventually, the frivolity and reckless behavior led to a fire July 12 in one of the trader huts.

Trappers and traders alike, some of them drunk with whiskey, rushed to try to save the goods from all the huts before they were completely destroyed by fire. 

One Of The Last Good Rendezvous

The ultimate size of the 1838 rendezvous was estimated as high as 300, along with 30 wagons and 600 to 700 horses and mules.

There were tents pitched in small groups, spaced to provide grazing and corral space, which spread the camp out over several miles between and on both sides of the Big and Little Wind (Popo Agie) Rivers.

Wood trading huts went up, displaying goods that the mountain men needed or just wanted — powder and lead, knives and guns, traps and tack, coffee, sugar, tea, pipes, tobacco, clothing and cloth, whiskey, rum, beads, cloth and more.

The prices were shocking to the missionaries, who recorded many of them. Whiskey and rum, $4 a pint or $30 a gallon. Coffee, sugar and tea, $2 a pint. Blankets, $15 to $16. Tobacco, $5 to $6 per pound.

Prices for pelts, meanwhile, were low, which meant many of the mountain men would spend their entire years’ wages at the rendezvous just to keep going.

By this time many of the mountain men had already realized that their way of life was vanishing. 

On July 15, the fur caravan, then under the command of Black Harris, pulled out to begin its long journey down the Platte River back to civilization. 

William Drummond Smith was with them and wrote a letter along the way that captured the moment quite succinctly.

“We have about 38 packs of beavers [but] the American Co. are about wounded up in the mountains,” he wrote. “The Hudson Bay people have got the whole country. Drips makes a hunt in the Blackfeet country, but his people are daily deserting him. There will not be twenty packs brought down next year.” 

The fur trade was ending.

Beaver had been all but hunted to extinction, but fashion trends were also changing. Beaver felt top hats were no longer favored by the well-dressed of Europe. Silk hats were now the rage.

There would only be two more rendezvous after this, both on the Green River, but the 1840 Rendezvous was so small, many historians and writers simply ignore it. 

The mountain men, for the most part, dispersed to other parts of America, seeking their fortunes, whiskey and “white women” elsewhere.

But they also earned a legendary spot in history as pioneers, opening up new trails in the West that ultimately helped encourage others to migrate West.

That’s the history that year after year draws enthusiasts to Riverton, which is known as the Rendezvous City.

The 1838 Mountain Man Rendezvous is still being held every year, right on the same site where the “white women” married to missionary husbands were scandalized by the rugged mountain men of the West, an unforgettable Wyoming tale, and epic American history.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.