ARTICLE II – JOHN COLTER

In the early 1800s, everything beyond the edge of American settlement was still largely unknown to a young United States trying to understand what it had just acquired through the Louisiana Purchase.

Maps were incomplete, inconsistent, and in many cases based more on assumption than observation. Vast stretches of land existed as little more than blank space.

With just $2,500 in funding, Congress, under President Thomas Jefferson, approved an expedition to travel west, document the land, establish trade routes, and report back on what actually existed beyond the Mississippi River.

The mission was placed in the hands of his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, who brought on William Clark.

Together, they assembled what would become the Corps of Discovery.

They weren’t looking for scholars.

They were looking for men who could survive.

Among them was a hunter from Kentucky named John Colter.

He wasn’t formally educated. He wasn’t politically connected. He didn’t come from anything notable.

Likely in his early 30s during the expedition, Colter wasn’t old, but the land had a way of aging men quickly. Sun, wind, cold. Constant exposure without relief.

By all accounts, he was weathered and built for the elements. He was tall and lean, made more for endurance than size. The kind of frame you would expect from a distance runner rather than a soldier, which I can’t help but point out, because I was a cross-country runner myself and Colter actually makes us sound cool for once.

And whatever he looked like when he left for this expedition, he did not look the same when he came back.

The journey itself was unforgiving.

The expedition traveled primarily by river, using a 55-foot keelboat and smaller wooden pirogues, forcing their way upstream with poles, ropes, and sails when the wind allowed. Every mile west had to be earned. At times, when the current was too strong, the men waded alongside the boats, waist-deep in freezing water, hauling them forward with ropes over their shoulders.

They carried rifles, powder, navigation tools, and trade goods. Beads, tobacco, cloth, and metal items not just for survival, but for diplomacy with the Native tribes they would encounter. They also carried journals. Detailed records of everything they saw. Weather patterns. Animal life. Soil. Rivers. Languages. Customs.

The Corps of Discovery would become the first American expedition to successfully cross the continent.

They spent the winter of 1804 to 1805 with the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, relying on them for food, shelter, and knowledge of the region. It was there they met Sacagawea, who was pregnant at the time and would carry her newborn son for much of the journey west. Her presence often signaled to other tribes that the expedition was not a war party.

When they reached the Rocky Mountains, it was the Shoshone who provided horses. Without them, crossing the Continental Divide may not have been possible. At one point they ran out of food, resorting to candles, portable soup, and eventually their own horses just to survive the crossing.

When they emerged on the other side, exhausted and under-supplied, it was the Nez Perce who took them in, fed them, and showed them how to build dugout canoes.

By the time they reached the Pacific in 1806, the expedition began its journey back east. Most of the men were ready to go home.

John Colter wasn’t.

Near the Mandan villages along the Missouri River, in what is now North Dakota, Colter made a decision that set him apart from nearly everyone else on that expedition.

He asked to leave.

Not to return to civilization.

But to go back into the wilderness.

What followed was one of the earliest recorded solo movements of the American West.

Colter joined a group of trappers heading west under fur trader Manuel Lisa, a Spanish-born operator out of St. Louis who was aggressively pushing American trade deeper into contested territory.

This wasn’t exploration anymore.

This was business.

And it was dangerous.

By 1807, Colter helped establish Fort Raymond at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn Rivers, in what is now southern Montana.

It was not a fort in any formal sense.

There were no walls and no real defenses. It was a rough timber outpost planted in the middle of Blackfeet territory, a region controlled by a powerful tribe that was actively defending its hold over the fur trade.

From that point forward, Lisa’s operation depended on men like Colter to do what most wouldn’t do. Leave the safety of the post and disappear into the wilderness alone.

Colter became a courier, a scout, and a trapper all at once. He ranged hundreds of miles on foot through present-day Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, carrying messages between posts, forging relationships with Native tribes, and trapping beaver along rivers no American had documented.

Winters were brutal. Food was uncertain. Every movement carried risk.

While traversing the west, Colter entered terrain that did not behave like anything known to early America.

The ground itself seemed unstable. Steam rose out of the earth in thick columns. Pools of water would sit still and then suddenly erupt upward without warning. Mud churned and bubbled in place, thick and hot, as if the earth were boiling from underneath. The air carried a sharp, mineral scent that was unfamiliar and difficult to place.

Today, we know exactly what Colter had stumbled into. A geothermal landscape filled with geysers, hot springs, and mud pots. What we now recognize as Yellowstone. He was ahead of the curve well before the tv series made that place popular.

But at the time, there was nothing to compare it to. So when Colter returned from one of these routes and tried to explain to people what he had seen…

Everyone thought he was batshit crazy.

The details didn’t make sense to people who had never seen the ground behave that way. So most people assumed he went mad in isolation.

They mocked him for it.

Calling the Yellowstone region “Colter’s Hell.”

Colter didn’t argue. He didn’t care,

He just moved on and went back out.

By that point, he wasn’t moving randomly through the territory. He was working within the fur trade network, often traveling in small pairs or groups. It was more efficient for trapping and marginally safer.

That’s how he ended up along the Madison River with another trapper, John Potts.

They were working the same stretch of country for beaver. They were also moving through Blackfeet territory.

They were spotted, intercepted, and ordered ashore.

Colter complied.

Potts didn’t.

He attempted to escape, firing his rifle and killing one of the warriors before being immediately struck down by arrows.

And just like that, Colter was alone.

Outnumbered. Unarmed. With no realistic way to fight his way out.

So he surrendered.

For a moment, it spared his life.

Then they stripped him of everything and told him to run.

This was not escape.

It was a hunt.

Colter ran barefoot across open ground, completely naked. Behind him, the warriors followed at a controlled pace, close enough to pressure him and far enough to prolong the chase.

They weren’t trying to catch him immediately.

They were wearing him down.

The terrain worked against him at every step. Brush tore at his skin. The ground shifted beneath him. Every misstep threatened to end it.

Eventually, Colter understood what was happening. He wasn’t going to outrun them.

So he changed the terms.

When one of the pursuers broke ahead of the others and closed the distance, he committed and threw his spear.

It didn’t stop Colter.

And in that moment, Colter turned, closed the space, took control of the weapon, and killed him.

Then he ran again.

Toward the river.

But even then, he didn’t choose the obvious move. He didn’t try to swim.

Instead, he entered the water, moved along the bank, and forced himself beneath debris, pressing his body into the mud and holding still while the warriors searched above him.

He stayed there until nightfall.

And only then did he move.

What followed was not a sprint to safety.

It was a return.

Nearly 200 miles back to Fort Raymond. Alone. Injured. With nothing.

And somehow, he made it.

You would expect that to be the end of it.

It wasn’t.

He recovered and went back out, moving again through the same territory where the dynamic had already been set.

American trappers were no longer just passing through the region. They were competing in it, pushing into a trade the Blackfeet had long controlled, which made every encounter more volatile than the last.

Not long after, he joined another group of trappers and was attacked again.

Five men were killed.

Colter survived.

But not without consequence.

At some point in the attack, or as they tried to break away, he was shot in the leg. The kind of injury that, in that terrain, usually ends your ability to move at all.

But he did.

He got clear, managed the injury, and continued operating in the same country that had just nearly killed him again.

Around 1809 to 1810, he helped establish another trading post near the Three Forks of the Missouri River.

It didn’t last.

The location sat deep in contested ground, directly in the heart of territory the Blackfeet were actively defending. This wasn’t a passive threat. It was constant pressure.

Trappers were being watched, tracked, and attacked. Small parties moving out to trap along the rivers would disappear or return short-handed. Horses were taken. Camps were hit without warning. Men were killed before they even had time to react.

Movement in and out of the area became increasingly dangerous, and maintaining any kind of foothold there meant operating under the expectation that another encounter was always coming.

Even when groups tried to move together, it didn’t guarantee safety. The terrain favored those who knew it, and the Blackfeet knew exactly how to use it.

Eventually, the position became untenable.

The post was abandoned.

They weren’t pushed out in a single moment.

They were worn out of it.

These weren’t settlements in any lasting sense. They were footholds, temporary attempts to maintain a presence in land that resisted being held.

And most of them didn’t last long.

Eventually, around 1810, Colter did something he hadn’t done in years.

He rested.

He returned to St. Louis, the center of the American fur trade, where men like Manuel Lisa operated, and one of the only places a man could sell his furs, get paid, and step back into society.

He married a woman named Sallie and attempted to live a more stable life.

But years of exposure, injury, and constant strain had already taken their toll.

By 1813, he passed away from jaundice at thirty-eight years old.

Years later, John Bradbury, a British naturalist who encountered him on the frontier, described him simply:

“He had the appearance of a man who had been long habituated to a life of danger.”

There are no journals in Colter’s own words.
No full account of everything he saw.

And for the most part, he isn’t widely remembered.

But his presence is still there.

In the terrain he moved through.
In the ground he was among the first to cross alone.

His name remains, quietly, on the map.

Colter Bay, a bay on Jackson Lake in northwestern Wyoming, within Grand Teton National Park.

Colter Peak, a summit in the Teton Range overlooking the same valley.

Colter Creek, a small perennial stream in north-central Wyoming, flowing through the eastern slopes of the Bighorn Mountains.

Just enough to mark that he was there first.