Bridger Immigrant Road-Dry Creek Crossing

The significant thing here is the road. It is a historic road, an abandoned road and its name is Bridger Road.

While any road is inherently difficult to maintain, indeed requiring special authority and special taxes to do so, a road abandoned is---owing to the dissolution of rights-of-way and deprivation of tax apportionments---a road practically impossible to preserve. Consequently, only two short, representative sections of the Bridger Road have been projected for enrollment in the National Register and to become recipients of any resultant preservation measures. The section of concern in this nomination is named Bridger Road-Dry Creek Crossing.

The Bridger Road is not a thing of wide historic significance. Still, it was founded and laid out by old Jim Bridger, a great mountain man, fur trader, and--- for decades---foremost figure in the region centering on Wyoming but overlapping to include major portions of other Rocky Mountain-High Plains states. Bridger's connection is enough in itself to make this road a matter of historic significance within the State of Wyoming.

Otherwise, the significance of the Bridger Road is that of a minor link in a chain of historic circumstances which make up an interesting chapter of national history. These circumstances took shape just before and during the Civil War and were resolved, at least in their most important aspects, when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869.

Actually, the first of these circumstances pre-dated the above-cited time period. That was the existence of the Oregon Trail and the consequent hostility aroused in Indian tribes across whose hunting grounds it passed. At Fort Laramie in 1851, a great peace parley had been held over this matter. Their tribal lands had been established and confirmed by treaty. The prime hunting grounds lie to the north of the Oregon Trail and between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains, commonly called the Powder River Country, had been acknowledged as lands to which the Crows, Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes all had claimed. The government had pledged to keep white men out of that country; in return, the Indians were to respect the white man's use of the Oregon Trail.