Livingston, Montana

Right here, where the Shields River pours into the Yellowstone, Captain William Clark camped in the summer of 1806 on the long trip home and gave this river a name. Not his own, and not some senator's. He named it for a private in the ranks, John Shields, and that says a lot about the man. Shields was the expedition's blacksmith and gunsmith, one of the oldest men in the Corps, and quietly one of the most important. When a rifle cracked or a lock wore out a thousand miles from the nearest shop, Shields fixed it, and Lewis flatly credited him with keeping every gun in the outfit working. In a starving winter he hammered out iron tools, axes and awls, that the men traded to the tribes for corn, food that may have kept the whole party alive. Hardly any enlisted man came home with a major river named for him, and the name stuck. On this stretch Clark was traveling with Sacagawea, who had pointed the party toward the pass that brought them down to the Yellowstone, her baby boy riding along. Shields himself was said to be a relative of Daniel Boone, and after it was all over he went and trapped a season in Missouri alongside the old frontiersman. (Source: National Park Service, Private John Shields.)

After gold turned up at Alder Gulch and the boomtown of Virginia City sprang out of the Montana hills, every prospector in the country wanted a fast way in. The famous route, the Bozeman Trail, was also the deadly one. It ran straight through the hunting grounds of the Sioux and Cheyenne in the Powder River country, and it was about to set off a full-blown war. So they turned to the one man who carried a map of the entire West in his head, the old mountain man Jim Bridger. Bridger blazed a safer line to the mines, swinging west of the Bighorn Mountains and away from the worst of the fighting, and guided emigrant wagon trains up it in the 1860s. His route came right up this valley from the Yellowstone, followed Brackett Creek, climbed over the divide just west of here, dropped onto Bridger Creek, and rode that down into the Gallatin Valley and on to the gold. The man knew this country so well that the creek, the canyon, and the whole mountain range over by Bozeman still carry his name. (Source: WyoHistory.org, The Bridger Trail.)