The original Fort Bridger was modest by any standard. According to historian Stanley Vestal, it consisted of an eight-foot stockade with a corral adjoining on the north, containing just four log cabins with flat dirt roofs. One housed Bridger's forge and carpenter's bench, another his store, the third his family and possessions, and the fourth belonged to his partner Louis Vasquez. When Mrs. Benjamin G. Ferris visited in October 1852, she described it as 'a long, low, strongly-constructed log building, surrounded by a high wall of logs, stuck endwise in the ground.' In March 1854, Bridger filed a claim with the United States General Land Office for the land around his fort, formalizing what had been a rough frontier operation.

In 1845, Lansford Hastings published The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California, advising California-bound travelers to leave the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger and take a new cutoff through the Wasatch Range and across the Great Salt Lake Desert. Hastings claimed it would save time. In July 1846, the Donner-Reed Party arrived at Fort Bridger and received a letter from Hastings claiming he had 'worked out a new and better road to California' and would be waiting to guide them. They took the cutoff. The eighty-mile waterless crossing of the salt flats cost them weeks and oxen. By the time they reached the Sierra Nevada, early snows had sealed the passes. Of the eighty-seven members of the party, forty-one died.

When Mormon pioneers arrived in 1847, Orson Pratt described the fort as merely 'two adjoining log houses, dirt roofs, and a small picket yard of logs set in the ground, about eight feet high.' Disputes soon arose between Bridger and the new settlers. By 1853, a Mormon militia was sent to arrest him for allegedly selling alcohol and firearms to Native Americans. Bridger escaped and returned east. The Mormons established their own Fort Supply nearby and in 1855 claimed to have purchased Fort Bridger for $8,000 in gold coins. Bridger denied any sale. A deed existed, dated August 3, 1855, but Bridger was absent that year, guiding Sir St George Gore on an expedition. His name was signed by someone else under a purported power of attorney.

From 1853 to 1857, Fort Bridger served as an important Mormon outpost. Orson Hyde arrived in November 1853 with thirty-nine settlers who established Fort Supply on Willow Creek, southwest of Bridger's post. But in September 1857, with Colonel Johnston's army approaching during the Utah War, the Mormons abandoned and burned both forts rather than let federal troops use them. The U.S. Army rebuilt Fort Bridger as a military post in 1858, and it served as such until finally closing in 1890. The strategic location that Jim Bridger had identified as neutral ground between tribal territories had proven equally valuable to emigrants, settlers, and soldiers.

Today Fort Bridger is a Wyoming State Historic Site preserving several original structures, including the old Pony Express barn and portions of the Mormon protective wall. Each Labor Day weekend, the fort hosts a mountain man rendezvous reenacting the fur trade era when Bridger first recognized this confluence of waters and trails as a place where different peoples could meet. The small town of Fort Bridger, Wyoming still stands nearby, bearing the name of the man who understood that the right location matters more than the size of your stockade. Richard Francis Burton, visiting in 1860, noted that 'Colonel Bridger, when an Indian trader, placed this post upon a kind of neutral ground.' That neutrality made it essential.