anta Fe, his name also appears cut
on a cenotaph raised to commemorate the services of the soldiers of the
Territory. As an Indian fighter he was matchless. The identical rifle
used by him for more than thirty-five years, and which never failed him,
he bequeathed, just before his death, to Montezuma Lodge, A. F. & A. M.,
Santa Fe, of which he was a member.

James Bridger, "Major Bridger," or "Old Jim Bridger," as we was called,
another of the famous coterie of pioneer frontiersmen, was born in
Washington, District of Columbia, in 1807. When very young, a mere boy
in fact, he joined the great trapping expedition under the leadership
of James Ashley, and with it travelled to the far West, remote from the
extreme limit of border civilization, where he became the compeer and
comrade of Carson, and certainly the foremost mountaineer, strictly
speaking, the United States has produced.

Having left behind him all possibilities of education at such an
early age, he was illiterate in his speech and as ignorant of the
conventionalities of polite society as an Indian; but he possessed a
heart overflowing with the milk of human kindness, was generous in the
extreme, and honest and true as daylight.

He was especially distinguished for the discovery of a defile through
the intricate mazes of the Rocky Mountains, which bears his name,
Bridger's Pass. He rendered important services as guide and scout during
the early preliminary surveys for a transcontinental railroad, and for a
series of years was in the employ of the government, in the old regular
army on the great plains and in the mountains, long before the breaking
out of the Civil War. To Bridger also belongs the honour of having seen,
first of all white men, the Great Salt Lake of Utah, in the winter of
1824-25.

After a series of adventures, hairbreadth escapes, and terrible
encounters with the Indians, in 1856 he purchased a farm near Westport,
Missouri; but soon left it in his hunger for the mountains, to return
to it only when worn-out and blind, to be buried there without even the
rudest tablet to mark the spot.

"I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country
churchyard, than in the tomb of the Capulets." This quotation came to
my mind one Sunday morning two or three years ago, as I mused over
Bridger's neglected grave among the low hills beyond the quaint old town
of Westport. I thought I knew, as I stood there, that he whose bones
were mouldering