Tag: 1950s

This image shows the Medicine Bow River, which is part of the collection shown previously, but is at quite a distance from Fort Bridger, in southeast Wyoming.
The town of Medicine Bow, Wyoming is indicated as being nearby, but the lack of clear landmarks make it difficult to identify which particular part of the river is shown.
There is no other description on the card, but it is most likely this card dates from the 1950s.

The last card from the Fort Bridger set is a photo of a typical freight wagon used in the 19th and early 20th centuries for moving goods across the far West before the arrival of gasoline engines and motorized trucks. Even when the early automobiles and trucks arrived, many were not able to haul as much over varied terrain as these venerable old wagons.

In contrast to the previous post, this much larger and more up to date building now houses the Ft. Bridger Museum collection on the site. The building is still a historic structure, but much better preserved and more accommodating for the collection and visitors.

This card shows the original building for the Fort Bridger State Museum, housed at the time in the Old Store building. In the foreground is a lone chimney, likely a remnant of a building that was moved to another location without the chimney.
The site has been extensively renovated and developed as a major historic site since these pictures were taken, so the museum is now in a larger building nearby.
There is no additional description on the back of the card, but other cards in this series point to this being from the 1950s.

This image shows how the Fort Bridger site, abandoned in 1890, had been restored after being acquired as a historic site in the 1930s. The two main buildings visible, the guard house on the right and Barracks on the left, were restored from the original structures. Many other structures were demolished or moved to other locations for use by people in the area.
The location is now a fairly extensive historic area, with a couple of dozen buildings in various states of restoration, and active archaeological efforts underway to find other buried structures and buildings from the earliest history of the site, dating back to the 1830s.

This card begins a series of images of the old frontier post of Fort Bridger, Wyoming. This particular image is a drawing of the post as it looked in 1889, one year before the US Army abandoned it permanently. The image dispels some incorrect notions of the nature of frontier forts during the Indian Wars of the late 19th Century.
Most notably, there is no continuous high palisade wall surrounding the entire fort, as is commonly depicted in fiction. In truth, there was often a shortage of good lumber in many frontier areas, so what wood was usable was put to building living and working structures instead of a defensive wall. This settlement had walls at various times during its existence, but these were not present at many Army forts here and elsewhere.
Indeed, Fort Bridger was not even built as a defensive outpost against the local Native American tribes. It was built long before, as a fur trading center and resupply point for the Oregon Trail migrants. The buildings shown were not part of that trading post, but built by the US Army after the original post was destroyed.
The card itself was likely made in the early 1950s. There is no additional information on the back of the card.