John Colter’s Run — 1808, Naked and Hunted

Summary

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.

The Setup

By 1808 John Colter was among the most experienced wilderness travelers alive in North America. He had marched the whole way to the Pacific and back with the Lewis and Clark Expedition between 1804 and 1806, and on the return journey, near the Mandan villages, he had asked for and received an early discharge so he could turn around and go back up into the mountains to trap. He spent the next years in the upper Missouri and Yellowstone country, including a solo winter reconnaissance through the thermal basins of present-day Yellowstone — the geysers and boiling springs that earned the half-mocking name "Colter's Hell" when he described them.

The man Colter now worked for was Manuel Lisa, the St. Louis entrepreneur who in 1807 had built Fort Raymond at the confluence of the Bighorn and Yellowstone rivers, the first American trading post deep in the interior. From that base Colter and other trappers ranged out into beaver country. The problem was geography and politics: the richest streams lay in the homeland of the Blackfeet, a powerful confederation already hostile to the Americans — in part because Lewis and Clark's own brush with them in 1806 had ended in bloodshed, and in part because the Americans were arming and trading with their Crow and Shoshone enemies.

In the autumn of 1808 Colter was trapping near the Three Forks of the Missouri — the headwaters where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers meet — with a single companion, a Pennsylvanian named John Potts who had also served with Lewis and Clark. They worked the streams by canoe, setting traps at night and lying up by day to avoid being seen. It was deep in Blackfeet country, the most dangerous ground a fur trapper could choose, and the two men knew it. Their luck ran out on the water.

The Disaster

The two trappers were on the river, checking or setting their traps, when a large Blackfeet party appeared on the bank and signaled them to come ashore. Colter, judging that resistance was hopeless, complied; as he reached the bank he was seized and stripped. Potts, still in the canoe, refused to surrender. By the account Colter gave, Potts was immediately shot — and as he was hit he killed one of the Blackfeet with his own rifle before being riddled with arrows and killed outright. His body was hauled ashore and cut to pieces in front of Colter.

Now the Blackfeet turned to Colter. After some debate among themselves about how to dispose of him, they settled on a crueler entertainment than a simple execution. They stripped him completely naked, walked him out onto the open plain, and — by the accounts of Bradbury and Thomas James — asked him, or made him understand, that he should run. He realized they meant to hunt him: he was being given a head start so the young men could chase him down for sport. The warriors stayed back several hundred yards while the fastest of them prepared to pursue. Then he was told to go.

Colter ran. He was a strong runner and he ran for his life across a plain studded with prickly pear, the spines driving into his bare feet at every stride. He drove himself so hard that, by his own telling, blood burst from his nose and ran down over his chest. Behind him the pursuit strung out, the fastest warriors gaining and the rest falling back, until after perhaps three miles he risked a glance and saw that the whole field had dropped away — except for one man, armed with a spear, closing fast and now well ahead of all the others. The chase had narrowed to a single duel on the open ground, with the river still a mile or more ahead.

The Ordeal

When the lone warrior was almost on him, Colter stopped and suddenly turned to face him, his arms spread, by his own account a horrifying sight — naked, blood-smeared, gasping. The pursuer, startled and already off balance, tried to throw his spear and stumbled, the shaft breaking as he fell. Colter snatched up the spearhead and killed the man with it, then pinned him to the ground and ran on, now armed and with the rest of the pursuit still far behind. He reached the river — the Madison or the Jefferson, depending on the account — and plunged in.

Near the bank was a logjam, a raft of driftwood and debris piled against an island or, in the version Colter told that became most famous, the dome of a beaver lodge with an underwater entrance. He dove under and worked his way up into a pocket of air inside the tangle, where he could breathe but not be seen, and there he stayed, submerged to the chin in cold water, while the Blackfeet swarmed the banks above him through the rest of the day. By his account they even climbed onto the driftwood over his head, searching, and he lay in the dark below them expecting at any moment that they would set the pile alight. They did not find him. After dark, when the searchers had gone, he slipped out, swam and waded downstream a long way, and only then climbed out and started his walk.

He was naked, barefoot, and unarmed except for the captured spearhead, hundreds of miles from Fort Raymond, in late autumn, in the heart of the country of the people who had just tried to kill him. He walked it anyway. The standard accounts put the distance at something on the order of two hundred to three hundred miles and the time at about eleven days. He survived on roots — Colter is said to have dug and eaten the bulb of a plant the trappers called "white root" — and on whatever else the country offered, traveling mostly by night at first to avoid being seen, his feet a ruin of prickly-pear wounds and stone bruises. Burned by the sun, half-starved, he finally staggered into Fort Raymond on the Yellowstone, where the men there are said not to have recognized the gaunt, blackened apparition until he told them who he was.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

Colter reached Fort Raymond alive, recovered, and — almost unbelievably — went back into the same Blackfeet country to trap again. He had further violent encounters with them, including a fight at the Three Forks the next year in which other trappers were killed, before he finally concluded that the country would eventually kill him. Around 1810 he came down the Missouri to Missouri, where he settled near present-day New Haven, married, and took up farming. He had less time than he might have hoped: he died, probably of jaundice, around 1812 or 1813, only a few years after leaving the mountains.

The run survives because Colter told it and reliable men wrote it down. John Bradbury, an English naturalist traveling up the Missouri in 1810–1811, recorded the story from people who knew Colter and published it in his Travels in the Interior of America. The trapper Thomas James, who wintered with Colter and heard the tale from his own mouth, set down a fuller version in his memoir Three Years Among the Indians and Mexicans. Their two accounts, broadly consistent, are the backbone of everything written about the episode since, and they are the reason historians treat the core of the run as fact rather than tall tale.

Colter's larger legacy is as the first of the mountain men and the first European-American to travel through the Yellowstone country. The geyser basins he described were doubted in his lifetime and mockingly called "Colter's Hell," but he had seen them. His run from the Blackfeet, meanwhile, became the template for a whole genre of frontier escape stories — the lone man, stripped of everything, who outlasts an entire war party by speed, nerve, and an absolute refusal to quit. Unlike most such legends, this one is anchored to named witnesses and stands up to scrutiny.

Lessons

References

• John Colter Wikipedia
• Thomas James, Three Years Among the Indians and Mexicans Internet Archive (1846 memoir)
• John Colter Discovering Lewis & Clark