John Colter: America’s First Mountain Man

Perhaps no other event in Colter’s frontier exploits demonstrates his legacy as an indefatigable and tenacious mountain man more than what historians have termed “Colter’s Run.” During the winter of 1808, Colter teamed up with another trapper named Potts in pursuit of beaver pelts on the Jefferson Fork of the Missouri, deep in Blackfeet territory. Historian H.W. Brands explains in Dreams of Eldorado that much to Colter’s dismay “a band of several hundred Blackfeet appeared on the shore” and demanded both men to approach the riverbank and disembark. Colter complied, but Potts rebelled by shooting one of the Blackfeet. Brands reports that “Thereupon a hundred bullets rained upon and through Potts, killing him in seconds…His heart and other internal organs were cut out and thrust in Colter’s face.”

Colter now faced the enraged mob alone. They stripped him naked and concocted a plan for his gruesome end. In Astoria, Washington Irving describes the Blackfeet chief’s directions to Colter: “The chief, however, was for nobler sport. He seized Colter by the shoulder, and demanded if he could run fast. The unfortunate trapper was too well acquainted with Indian customs not to comprehend the drift of the question. He knew he was to run for his life, to furnish a kind of human hunt to his persecutors.” Naked, cold, and facing certain doom, Colter would have to outrun the entire band of angry Blackfeet over a stretch of five miles to reach the Madison Fork where perhaps he could make an escape on the river.

Exposed and barefoot Colter took off running, outpacing most of the Blackfeet, save one fleet-footed brave with a spear. The two tussled, Colter broke the spear in two, stabbed the Blackfeet pursuer, and seized his blanket. The remaining Blackfeet, inflamed by Colter’s actions, continued in their unflagging pursuit. Bleeding from his nose and mouth, Colter outsmarted the band at the Madison River by wading into a vacant beaver lodge. There he remained for hours until the tribe had moved on, at which point he emerged to find his bearings. H.W. Brands writes, “During the next eleven days he traveled three hundred miles across the plain, subsisting on roots and tree bark. He finally arrived at Manuel’s Fort in the Bighorn River, exhausted, emaciated, and dirty, but alive.” Colter’s escape catapulted him to legendary status and solidified his place in American frontier history as an intrepid mountain man.