Westward Ho!

Pull out a modern map of the United States. Find St. Louis on the eastern border of Missouri. Now imagine that was the edge of the United States in the 1820s. To the west was the vast territory known, somewhat misleadingly, as the Great American Desert.

Bridger hopes that isn't the cavalry on the horizon.

Bridger's A Ballad of the West: More than a century of devastation condensed into four hours of Homeric song.

Details

Ballad of the West is four hours of history and music that you won't hear on the radio. You can get it only on the Web, at www.aballadofthewest.com.

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More About

• Jim Bridger
• Bobby Bridger
• William "Buffalo Bill" Cody
• John Neihardt
• U.S. History

Jim Bridger was then a disgruntled 18-year-old youth bonded to a St. Louis blacksmith in an arrangement that amounted to temporary slavery. Poised as he was on the edge of the wilds, Bridger decided to heed their call. He answered an advertisement calling for "one hundred young men" to ascend the meandering Missouri River to its source high in the Rockies, some 2,500 upstream miles away. The career of a great American explorer (Bridger discovered the South Pass, which became the route of the great migration westward) was thus born.

Such a choice was perilous, to say the least. If the bears didn't eat you, you might end up on the business end of a Sioux's feathered arrow. Should you survive the perils of beast and man, the land itself -- its rushing rivers, treacherous snowbanks, dizzying cliff tops and howling tornadoes -- could and did quite often swallow men whole. But not Jim Bridger. He lived to a ripe age and served as a pivotal witness to many of the great events of the early West.

The great-grandnephew of the famed mountain man -- Houstonian Bobby Bridger -- has put his relative's life to song, and what a life it was. But the modern-day Bridger wasn't content to stop there. There were other passes to cross, higher peaks to scale. Like a Malian griot, Bobby Bridger has drawn an epic vision of American history on the four-CD A Ballad of the West (Golden Egg). More than a concept album or a salute to his famous ancestor, Ballad chronicles the American West from the 1820s to the 1950s.

The genesis of Ballad began in 1963 when Bridger discovered he was related to the famous mountain man. He began reading everything he could find on not just Bridger but also Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill and all the other real-life Grizzly Adamses. Bridger then decided to branch out into the belles lettres. He discovered the work of Nebraskan John G. Neihardt, whose five epic poems, 60,000 lines long, collectively titled A Cycle of the West, were written over a period of 40 years. Neihardt wrote two lines a day for 18 years to create the last poem of the cycle, meticulously researching every line, says Bridger.

Neihardt became Bridger's role model. In 1965 Bridger decided to write a musical work to parallel the Nebraskan's epic poetry. Like Neihardt, Bridger decided to write the first part of his trilogy about mountain men and the second part about the Lakota Sioux people. Like Neihardt, the project has taken him decades to map out.

"People ask me if I mind that it's taken me since 1965 to complete this project. I don't mind. Here's the ultimate reason for that: No [musician] has done what I'm doing. Always in the back of my head, I've known what I'm doing is starkly unique. And that's the only reason for being an artist. I've no desire to be a parody of the Texas singer-songwriter."

A Ballad of the West is as close to a Homeric interpretation of the American West as you're going to get. It's written in rhyming couplets, 30 songs composed of some 2,000 lines of verse. Instead of the siege of Troy, you have the Battle of Little Big Horn. Instead of Ulysses, you have Jim Bridger. "When I delved into [Jim] Bridger's life, I learned that he lived to be 77 years old. Most of the other mountain men died at a young age. Very few of them saw 25 years old. Accidents, bears, Indians, it was one of the hardest lives you could imagine.

"For example, they had to push against the currents of the Missouri River to ascend it westward. You couldn't go in the winter when it was frozen. You had a small window of opportunity in the springtime when you could push two massive barges against the current 2,000 miles to get into unknown territory. Astronauts going into space knew a lot more about where they were going than the mountain men," says Bridger.

In addition to Jim Bridger, two other pivotal characters come to the fore in parts two and three of the trilogy. One is Echa-Cha-Sapa, the Lakota Sioux known as Black Elk. A participant in Little Big Horn, Black Elk was also present at the murder of Crazy Horse, and he participated in the Ghost Dance movement as well as its shameful coda: the Wounded Knee Massacre.

The second is William Cody.

Cody already enjoyed ample press, and Bridger at first resisted writing about him. Nevertheless, Bridger could find few better embodiments of the drive west. Around the time of Cody's birth in 1846, migration across the plains had kicked into high gear; the great potato famine decimated Ireland and sent streams of starving immigrants to America; and James Polk was elected president on a manifest destiny ticket, which he fulfilled by manufacturing a war with Mexico. Gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in California, and Oregon was thrown open for settlement. Cody's life coincided with America's rise to a sea-to-shining-sea imperial power. William Cody embodied that image.