John Colter: The First Mountain Man?

One of the joys of researching and writing (with Bob Drury) Throne of Grace was discovering the crucial role mountain men played in America’s westward expansion. They were the tip of the spear of the migration of mostly white people of European descent into the lands of indigenous people in the West. One of the very first American mountain men was John Colter. What follows is an excerpt from the just-published Throne of Grace that describes a tale of survival.

As far back as the winter of 1807-1808, the explorer John Colter had traversed the gap to cross the Continental Divide. Jedediah Smith knew well the legendary stories of Colter and his travels, which had begun under the aegis of Lewis and Clark. A key member of the Corps of Discovery, “Private Colter” was cited often in Meriwether Lewis’s reports for his superior scouting skills and for his uncanny ability to communicate in sign language with the indigenous tribes the expedition encountered.

Although no contemporaneous images of Colter exist, given his incredible adventures it is likely he was a man of significant physical strength, keen mental acuity, and a wellspring of luck, a quality valued in a wild country where the slightest misstep could end in a grisly death. Further, there were unconfirmed rumors that prior to enlisting with Lewis and Clark, the Virginia-born Colter had acquired his sharpshooter’s eye and his gift as a pathfinder while fighting in the Shawnee Wars under the Kentucky militia commander Simon Kenton, Daniel Boone’s best friend.

Colter was already in his late twenties by the time he joined the Corps of Discovery, an advanced age for the epoch that makes his decision to re-enter the wild high country time after time all the more incredible. What one might describe as his second career as a civilian mountaineer began in August of 1806 when, returning from the Pacific with Lewis and Clark, he encountered two trappers ascending the Missouri River in a large, flat-bottomed pirogue. Colter requested permission to join them, and Meriwether Lewis granted him an honorable discharge nearly two months shy of his term of service. It was both a show of thanks and a sign of respect. Having just spent 28 hard months journeying thousands of miles through the mountains to the Pacific Coast, Colter literally hopped from one boat to another to go back upstream. This would prove a milestone as the American journeys of exploration melded into voyages of commerce.

The trapping partnership he had entered into did not work out for reasons unexplained, and by the following spring of 1807 Colter was again canoeing down the Missouri when, near the mouth of the Platte, he crossed paths with Manuel Lisa’s outfit making its way toward the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Bighorn. Lisa’s company included the young Andrew Henry and, to Colter’s delight, his old Corps of Discovery compatriots George Drouillard and John Potts. For a second time Colter turned around, signing on to guide Lisa through the Upper Missouri country and help him establish Fort Raymond at the meeting of the two rivers.

Once a stockade was completed, Lisa prevailed upon Colter to act as his trading emissary with the various bands of Crow and Shoshone spread about the mountains as well as the eastern branch of the Salish peoples known as the Flathead, who lived in the plateau region between the Rockies and the far-western coastal cordillera. All three tribes, hereditary enemies of the Blackfeet, were known to hunger for the white man’s rifles, shot, and powder to counter the territorial stranglehold the better-armed Blackfeet had enjoyed for generations.

The Blackfeet, one of the few Algonquin-speaking tribes to venture west out of the eastern timberlands, had emigrated into the western mountains from their home around the Great Lakes well before the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria weighed anchors at the Spanish port of Palos de la Frontera. Having allegedly acquired their at-first Gallicized (“pied noir”) and later Anglicized name from the darkened conditions of their moccasins after the long trek across the prairie, they immediately clashed with the Shoshone. A centuries-long standoff between the antagonists ensued. Then, sometime in the 1730s, a Shoshone raiding party fell on a Blackfeet village riding giant, four-footed animals. The Blackfeet had never seen horses. Frightened and alarmed, they dispatched runners east to their Cree and Assiniboin cousins pleading for help. Their relatives not only sent warriors as reinforcements, but they carried curious hollow metal sticks that hurled tiny if deadly missiles with such velocity as to be invisible. Acquiring rifles marked the onset of Blackfeet hegemony across the area.

As Blackfeet war parties, now mounted, prowled further afield, the Shoshone were pushed back across the Continental Divide and both the Crow and Flathead, still wielding but arrows, clubs, and spears against musket balls, were hunted like game. John Colter had explained this imbalance of power to Manuel Lisa, who sensed, correctly, that the trod-upon tribes would pay dearly in beaver pelts for modern weaponry. Lisa hired Colter to spend the winter of 1807-1808 traveling over five-hundred miles by birchbark canoe and on foot through snow-choked wilderness to spread word among distant Native American camps that Lisa’s trading post was open for business.

Colter’s journey took him from the Bighorn Basin to the upper reaches of the Wind River range, where he traversed Union Gap to become the first white man to lay eyes on the trio of soaring peaks which French explorers would rather unsubtly name the Grand Tetons. Ascending Teton Pass and dropping into Pierre’s Hole, he limned the northern edge of Yellowstone Lake—another first for a white man—and temporarily lent his name, “Colter’s Hell,” to the stinking sulfurous river later renamed the Shoshone. By the summer of 1808 Colter had fallen in with a small band of Flathead buffalo hunters whom he was escorting to Fort Raymond when they were ambushed near the Three Forks by a party of Blackfeet numbering near one thousand. Colter had already taken a ball to his leg and all looked lost until, at what appeared the fight’s most dire moment, an even larger force of Crow fell on and routed the Blackfeet.

That fall, having recovered from his wound, Colter and his old Corps of Discovery companion John Potts set off in two canoes to trap the same Three Forks region. They were paddling north on the Jefferson when a painted band of Blackfeet appeared on the east bank and motioned them ashore. Colter slipped his traps into the shallow water and complied. Potts refused, even after he was shot and wounded. Watching the Indians disarm and strip Colter naked, Potts managed to level his rifle and fire, knocking one of the Blackfeet from his horse. A cloud of arrows perforated Potts and his canoe. Colter saw great daubs of his friend’s blood stain the river red as both Potts and his floundering craft slipped beneath the surface. Indian swimmers dived into the river to recover Potts’ body and drag it onto the bank. Colter watched as the corpse was hacked to pieces and beheaded.  

Bracing for a similar fate, Colter was surprised when, after a short council, a headman stepped forward and ordered him to run. Given a small head start, Colter soon heard whoops and trills. Turning, he saw scores of warriors chasing. Over several miles Colter gradually outpaced the mass of Indians except for one dogged brave brandishing a lance. The Blackfeet had closed to within twenty paces when Colter, nearing exhaustion, his feet cut to pieces, and spurting gouts of blood from his nose and mouth, suddenly halted. He turned and spread his arms. The warrior, whether from surprise or exhaustion, tripped as he launched his spear. The weapon struck the ground between the two antagonists. Colter pounced, snatching the flint-tipped lance and driving it through the Blackfeet’s chest, nailing the warrior to the ground like a pinned butterfly. Then he ran on, the shouts of the rest of his pursuers echoing through the granite canyons.

Three more miles of chase led Colter to the banks of the Madison, where he spotted a beaver slide. Slithering atop the animal’s trail into the water, he ducked beneath a mass of tangled driftwood, keeping his face above water. There he hid, listening to the moccasin squelch of the frustrated Blackfeet searching the riverbank mud for his footprints. That night he slipped away. Fort Raymond lay more than two hundred miles distant.

Naked, surviving on roots and tree bark, eleven days later John Colter lurched through the stockade gate. Historians have long contended that if Meriwether Lewis’s early confrontation with the Blackfeet laid the fuse for the white man’s decades-long war with the tribe, it was John Colter’s intent to arm their hated enemies that lit the match.

Not long after what came to be known as “Colter’s Run,” Colter understandably retired from the beaver trade upon discovering the murdered, mangled body of his old friend George Drouillard. Sometime in late 1810 he finally made his way back to St. Louis after six years in the mountains.

Originally published on Tom Clavin’s The Overlook.