John Colter: The Naked Run From the Blackfeet and Colter's Hell

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

John Colter was born in Virginia sometime between 1770 and 1775, moved to Kentucky, and likely served as a ranger under Simon Kenton. In 1803 Meriwether Lewis recruited him as a private in the Corps of Discovery at $5 a month. He was confined for ten days for slipping off to a whiskey shop and court-martialed for threatening to shoot a sergeant, yet became the expedition's go-to tracker, finding lost horses in the Bitterroot Mountains and securing a guide from the Flathead people through Plains Indian Sign Language. In August 1806, in present-day North Dakota, he asked for an early discharge to trap with Forrest Hancock and Joseph Dixon. In 1807, one week from St. Louis, he met fur trader Manuel Lisa and turned back to the mountains.

In the winter of 1807 to 1808 Lisa sent him on a solo 500-mile trek to find the Crow, and Colter became the first known person of European descent to enter what are now Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Back at Fort Raymond, people mocked his boiling springs as Colter's Hell, though William Clark used his reports for an 1814 map. In 1809 Blackfeet warriors caught Colter and John Potts on the Jefferson River. Potts fired and was killed, and Colter was stripped and told to run. After five miles over cactus, he killed his lone pursuer with the man's broken spear, hid inside a beaver lodge in the Madison River, and walked 11 days barefoot to a trading fort. He later farmed in Missouri, married a woman named Sally, and died of jaundice around 1812 or 1813.

• William Clark spelled Colter's name three different ways in his journals, though surviving signatures show he could write his own name.
• Clark's map drew the Bighorn Mountains about twice their actual size.
• Colter took a leg wound in 1808 fighting alongside Flathead and Crow allies against the Blackfeet.
• Nicholas Biddle helped shape Colter's legend and argued his skirmishes soured Blackfeet relations for later explorers.
• A rhyolite stone carved with "John Colter" and "1808" was dug up by a farmer near Tetonia, Idaho, in the early 1930s, and its authenticity is still debated.