The Bridger Trail crossed the Bighorn River near this location in 1864. Passing over the Bridger Mountains to the southeast, the trail came down Kirby Creek, crossed the river, and proceeded north to the Yellowstone River, then west to the gold fields in southwestern Montana. Within months following the 1863 gold discovery at Alder Gulch in present-day Montana, a flood of miners and settlers traveled to the mining communities of Bannack and Virginia City. Jim Bridger blazed a new trail in 1864 through the Bighorn Basin west of the Big Horn Mountains, avoiding Sioux Indian hostility along the Oregon Trail–Fort Hall–Bannack road to the west. Use of the Bridger Trail was short-lived, but many variants evolved from it in the 1880s and 1890s. The trail became the ancestor of a freighting network that connected remote ranches and early communities with Casper, Wyoming, and Billings, Montana. Jim Bridger was the most renowned mountain man, explorer, and guide of the American West. His trail served as a safer route for emigration to Montana during a period of Native American resistance to Euro American encroachment and helped lay the foundation for late nineteenth-century transportation routes that made settlement possible in a region previously lacking any system of roads.