little community of ten or a dozen officers and their families, when they 

 had any; most of them were young bachelors. We called, as etiquette 

 demanded, upon the commanding officer and found that he had three 

 charming daughters. They received us most cordially and said: "We are 

 so glad to see you; we are delighted to meet some one who doesn't say 

 what we know he is going to say before he opens his mouth." 



Life in those little, two- or three-company posts, which were scattered 

 through the Far West, was very hard on all concerned and especially 

 on the women, who suffered much from the strong winds, which blew 

 nearly every day and all day till sunset. Several army ladies told me that 

 the dry, windy climate wore them out nervously. The isolation and long 

 absence from friends, often from children who had to be sent East to 

 school, added to the burden of Plains life. 



The situation of Fort Bridger was very beautiful, at least in summer; 

 it was in the verdant, wooded valley of Black's Fork of the Green 

 River, with the fantastic desolation of the bad lands on all sides and the 

 southern horizon, eighty miles away, bounded by the Uinta Mountains, 

 a range of snowy peaks that rose some 13,000 feet above sea-level. The 

 post became my familiar stamping ground for several years and this 

 was the first of four visits, '77, '78, '85, '86, and in all of them I was 

 accompanied by Frank Speir. Though he had taken to the practice of 

 law, Speir never lost his interest in palaeontology and always found 

 more and better fossils than any other member of the party, for he was 

 a born collector. 



The name of the post came from the famous trapper and frontiers- 

 man, Jim Bridger, who discovered Great Salt Lake in 1825, and one of 

 the best-known of those old fur-traders and Indian fighters, whose ex- 

 ploits were well known fifty years ago, but are, for the most part, for- 

 gotten now. Captain Raynolds, who explored central Wyoming in 

 1855, had Bridger as a guide and mentions him in his report with 

 appreciation. Jim was what is called a picturesque liar, but liar is not the 

 proper word, for he never meant to deceive anybody. When we first 

 went to the fort that bears his name, Jim's memory was still green and 

 his yarns, or at least those attributed to him, were still current. 



At the end of the last century, I attended a meeting of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science in Yorkshire and was, with 

 my friends, the Poultons, of Oxford, quartered in the hospitable house 

 of a young lawyer. One evening, the family and guests had gone out to 

 some function, which I evaded from weariness. My host and I, having 

 very little in common, found conversation rather uphill work, until it 



