A member of the Lewis and Clark expedition became the first American to explore what is now Yellowstone National Park, but his most famous ordeal began when he was stripped naked and forced to run for his life from dozens of warriors. John Colter was born around 1774 in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Little is known about his early years; he did not appear in the historical record until October 1803, when he enlisted with the Corps of Discovery in Kentucky. Some historians speculate he may have served as a ranger under frontiersman Simon Kenton, who settled in Kentucky after the American Revolution and was a close friend of Daniel Boone.
In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, adding over 800,000 square miles to the young nation. President Thomas Jefferson commissioned an expedition to explore this vast new land, and Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark recruited men who were unmarried, stout, and capable of enduring extreme fatigue. Colter fit the description perfectly. An acquaintance later wrote that Colter seemed formed by nature for endurance, with an open and honest countenance whose veracity was never questioned.
The expedition got off to a rocky start for Colter. During the winter of 1803–1804 at Camp Dubois, near present-day Wood River, Illinois, he was disciplined for ignoring orders and visiting a nearby whiskey shop. He later threatened Sergeant John Ordway with violence, loading his rifle in a show of defiance. On March 29, 1804, Lewis and Clark placed Colter and fellow member John Shields on trial for mutiny, a charge punishable by death.
Both men were let off without punishment after asking for forgiveness. Once the expedition set out on May 14, 1804, Colter proved his worth. He became one of the chief hunters, often traveling along the shore to bring down game while the boats moved upriver. During a search for missing expedition member George Shannon in September 1804, Colter managed to harvest buffalo, elk, deer, a wolf, turkeys, and a goose—while also preparing jerked meat for the party’s arrival.
Due to his habit of ranging ahead, he was often the first contact with Native peoples, including a peaceful encounter with a Salish war party in September 1805. After reaching the Pacific Coast and wintering at Fort Clatsop in present-day Oregon, Colter continued to serve as a hunter on the return journey. He grew proficient in sign language and dealt with numerous tribes, including the Mandan, Salish, Nez Perce, and others. He also learned to navigate prime beaver country, noting the potential for profit in the fur trade.
As the expedition neared its end, Colter met two trappers named Forrest Hancock and Joseph Dixon at the Mandan villages on the upper Missouri. They offered to furnish him with traps and share profits if he would guide them West. Although his enlistment had two months remaining, Lewis and Clark granted Colter an early discharge. On August 20, 1806, as the Corps headed back to St.
Louis, Colter turned his face toward the West once more. Little is known about Colter’s activities for the remainder of 1806. Biographer David Marshall suggests he spent that winter with the Crow, possibly near present-day Billings, Montana, or further south in Wyoming. At some point, the trio split up, and Colter set his sights on St.
Louis. But before arriving, he met fur trader Manuel Lisa near the confluence of the Platte and Missouri Rivers. Lisa offered Colter a job on the spot, aided by recommendations from former Corps members George Drouillard and John Potts, who were already in Lisa’s company. Lisa’s party built a trading post on the Yellowstone River called Fort Raymond, near the mouth of the Big Horn River.
That winter, Colter was sent out alone to make contact with the Crow and spread word about the new trading post to entice them to bring their pelts in the spring. On this journey, Colter traveled down the Big Horn River and passed through a thermal area that became known as Colter’s Hell, near present-day Cody, Wyoming. This area is distinct from the geysers of Yellowstone National Park, though the two are sometimes confused. From Colter’s Hell, Colter followed the South Fork of the Shoshone River south, skirting the Absaroka Range, then cut west across the Continental Divide to Jackson’s Hole.
He briefly entered Idaho via Teton Pass, crossed through Pierre’s Hole, and circled back east to Yellowstone Lake. He followed the west side of the lake north to the Lamar River, then turned east and returned toward the Colter’s Hell area before heading north back to Fort Raymond. The round trip covered a minimum of 500 miles, possibly closer to 1,000, entirely alone on foot through the dead of winter. Colter carried nothing but his rifle, a 30-pound pack, and equipment needed for survival: a shot pouch, gunpowder, wadding, rifle flints, a powder horn, cleaning tools, lead for casting balls, and trade items such as beads and knives.
He would have worn buckskin clothing, possibly with a capote made from a wool blanket. He likely carried at least one heavy wool blanket and an oilcloth for shelter. In the spring of 1808, Colter headed out from Fort Raymond along the Yellowstone River until he reached a village of Crow camped at the Three Forks. He convinced the Crow and their allies, the Salish, to travel back to the trading post.
But they were attacked by a large contingent of Blackfeet somewhere on the East Fork of the Gallatin River. According to Thomas James, one of Manuel Lisa’s employees who later recorded Colter’s stories, the Blackfeet force numbered around 1,500 against a combined Crow and Salish force of 800. During the battle, Colter took a ball to the leg and dragged himself to a thicket, where he fired from concealment until the Blackfeet broke off the attack. Colter convalesced at Fort Raymond.
In July 1808, he witnessed a near-death confrontation between Manuel Lisa and fur trapper Edward Rose. The argument turned physical, and Rose gained the upper hand, beating John Potts severely when Potts intervened to save Lisa. Once Colter’s leg healed, he and Potts decided to strike out for beaver country. They borrowed horses from Fort Raymond in the late summer of 1808 and headed toward the Jefferson River near the Three Forks, an area they had passed through with Lewis and Clark.
The pair knew the Blackfeet were in the area, so they laid low during the day, setting traps at night and checking them only at dawn. It was on such a morning that the Blackfeet caught up with them. Several hundred warriors appeared on the east bank of the Jefferson River, ordering the two trappers to come ashore. Colter complied, and the warriors stripped him of all his belongings, including his clothes.
Potts refused to leave his canoe, and a warrior shot him in the hip. The wounded Potts shouldered his rifle and killed the nearest warrior, but within seconds he was riddled with arrows. According to Thomas James, the Blackfeet dragged Potts’s body onto the bank and cut it to pieces, throwing his innards into Colter’s face. The warriors argued over what to do with Colter.
Many wanted to kill him, but in the end they motioned for him to leave. As Colter began to walk away, he noticed the younger warriors stripping off their blankets and leggings, preparing to give chase. As predicted, Colter heard war whoops behind him and ran. After a couple of miles, his nose began gushing blood from the exertion.
Looking back, he saw he had outrun all the Blackfeet except one lone warrior wielding a lance, who was rapidly gaining ground. According to Thomas James’s account, Colter despaired of escape and called to his pursuer in the Crow language to save his life. The warrior lunged at Colter with his spear, but Colter seized it near the head and broke off the iron blade, leaving the warrior disarmed and prostrate before him. The warrior began to beg for his life, but Colter finished him off with the spear tip and resumed his flight.
Colter ran east toward the Madison River, about five or six miles away. He plunged into the river and took refuge inside a beaver lodge. The Blackfeet searched the area for the rest of the day, coming close enough that Colter could see them through the chinks in the lodge. That night, he emerged carefully and swam downstream for a considerable distance before stepping out onto the bank.
He had nothing but a blanket he had taken from the warrior he killed—no clothing, no shelter, no rifle, no knife. It took him a week to walk back to Fort Raymond, half-starved, nearly unrecognizable, and with his feet a bloody mess. Colter’s escape was dramatized in the 1980s film “The Mountain Men” starring Charlton Heston and may have loosely inspired the 1965 film “The Naked Prey. ”
Despite everything, a few months later Colter headed straight back to the Three Forks alone, hoping to retrieve the beaver traps he and Potts had left in the river.
But no sooner had he set up camp on the Gallatin River than he was fired upon. Colter took a flying leap over his fire just as a musket sounded and narrowly escaped again. At this point, Colter seemed to reconsider his career as a fur trapper. He headed east, possibly intending to return to the settlements, but got only as far as the Hidatsa villages in present-day North Dakota.
There he met Manuel Lisa’s partners, Pierre Menard and Andrew Henry, who were planning to build a new trading post at the Three Forks—the same area where Colter had already twice narrowly escaped death. They offered him a job, and Colter accepted. They spent the winter at Fort Raymond, and by the spring of 1810 construction on Fort Henry was complete. The post was located at the confluence of the Jefferson and Madison Rivers.
It did not last long. The Blackfeet did not want the trappers there, and many men operating out of Fort Henry ended up dead, including former Lewis and Clark member George Drouillard. Colter had yet another close call when he returned to camp one day to find his two companions slaughtered. He reportedly declared, “If God will only forgive me this time and let me off, I will leave the country day after tomorrow and be damned if I ever come back to it again.
” True to his word, Colter was back in St. Louis a month and a half later. In St. Louis, Colter met with his old captain, William Clark, and helped fill in more blank spots on the map.
He also tried to collect payment for his services with the Corps of Discovery. Colter was due over $500 in wages, but with Meriwether Lewis dead, no one was available to pay him. He sued Lewis’s estate and received a partial payment of $377. 60.
In the year that followed, Colter married a woman named Sally, and the couple settled in the small village of La Charrette, about 60 miles west of St. Louis. This was the same village the Corps of Discovery had passed through in May 1804, and not long thereafter, Daniel Boone moved his family there as well. Biographer David Marshall speculates that Boone and Colter lived as neighbors for two years and likely crossed paths, swapping tales of their respective wilderness experiences.
In July 1811, Sally gave birth to a son they named Hiram. The boy would never really get to know his father. In early March 1812, just before the United States declared war on Great Britain, Colter enlisted with Nathan Boone’s Mounted Rangers, a unit described by the Missouri Gazette as “perhaps as fine a body of hardy woodsmen as ever took the field. ”
Colter did not die in combat.
The official cause of his death was jaundice. The exact date remains unknown—possibly May 7, 1812, after just over two months of service, or according to other accounts, as late as November 22, 1813. His burial location is also unknown. One story, which many find hard to believe, claims that his wife Sally, unable to afford a funeral, left Colter’s body in their cabin, which eventually crumbled around it.
Years later, someone clearing the land allegedly found some of his remains and buried them on a nearby bluff. A gravestone for Colter exists at the Coulter-Miller Cemetery in New Haven, Missouri, where his son was eventually buried, but it was not placed until the 1980s, and it is assumed rather than confirmed that Colter is buried there. A farmer in Teton County, Idaho, found a lava rock with the name “John Colter” and the year 1808 carved into it. The rock’s authenticity remains a subject of debate.
Colter was only in his late 30s at the time of his death. Both Andrew Henry and Manuel Lisa continued to attempt to break into the fur trade out West, but the true era of the mountain men would not begin in earnest for another decade. Legendary figures like Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Hugh Glass, James Beckwourth, Joseph Walker, and Jedediah Smith all walked in John Colter’s footsteps—many of them were still toddlers when Colter was facing off with the Blackfeet.
