John Colter’s Run — 1808, Naked and Hunted

John Colter was one of the toughest men the American fur trade ever produced — a veteran of the Lewis and Clark Expedition who, instead of going home with the Corps of Discovery in 1806, turned back upriver to keep trapping the country he had just helped map. Two years later, in the autumn of 1808, he was caught by a Blackfeet party near the Three Forks of the Missouri in present-day Montana, stripped of everything including his clothes, and turned loose on an open plain to be hunted for sport. What he did over the next several hours and the following eleven days became one of the legendary escapes of the era.

Colter’s run is known to us because he told it, after the fact, to two men who wrote it down: the naturalist John Bradbury, who recorded it in his published Travels, and the trapper Thomas James, who heard it from Colter directly and put it in his own memoir. The accounts agree on the essentials. Colter outran a whole pursuing party barefoot across miles of prickly-pear flats, bleeding from the spines, until only one warrior remained close. When that man closed on him with a spear, Colter turned, the warrior stumbled, and Colter killed him with his own weapon — then kept running to the river.

Reaching the Madison or Jefferson — the sources differ on which fork — Colter dove in and hid beneath a raft of driftwood or, in the most famous version, inside a beaver lodge, breathing in the dark while the Blackfeet searched the banks above him. After dark he slipped downstream and climbed out far from the search, naked, unarmed, his feet shredded, hundreds of miles of hostile country between him and the nearest fort. He walked it. Living on roots and what little he could find, he covered the distance to Manuel Lisa’s Fort Raymond, at the mouth of the Bighorn on the Yellowstone, in roughly eleven days.

What makes Colter’s run extraordinary is not just the chase but everything after it: a man with no clothes, no tools, no weapon, and ruined feet who simply walked out of the wilderness. He had already, the year before, made the solo winter journey through the geyser country that skeptics dubbed “Colter’s Hell” — the first European-American to see what is now Yellowstone. He kept trapping the Blackfeet country even after this, narrowly escaping them again, before finally quitting the mountains for a Missouri farm. He had survived what should have killed him several times over.