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.
In September 1870, a small party of Montana citizens and soldiers — the Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition — pushed into the strange, unmapped country of geysers and hot springs at the head of the Yellowstone River, the wilderness that would become the world’s first national park. Among them was Truman C. Everts, a fifty-four-year-old former federal tax assessor, badly nearsighted and the least woodsman-like member of the group. On about September 9, riding through dense lodgepole timber near the southern arm of Yellowstone Lake, Everts fell behind, became separated from the others, and lost track of the trail. Within a day he had also lost his horse — and with it his blankets, his gun, his matches, and nearly everything he needed to live.
What followed was thirty-seven days alone in the high wilderness as autumn turned to early winter. Everts was left with little more than the clothes he wore, a small knife, and a pocket opera glass — and the wits to use them. He survived mainly on the boiled roots of a thistle that would later be named for him — Everts’ thistle — and he kept from freezing by sleeping beside the hot springs and thermal vents that riddle the country, scalding himself badly when the thin crust gave way and burning his hip while he slept. He lost his glasses, half-blinding himself; he was stalked by a mountain lion; he was caught in snow; and as starvation and exposure wore him down he began to hallucinate, conversing with an imaginary companion.
The expedition searched for days, firing guns and building signal fires, then reluctantly gave him up for dead and rode out for the settlements. A reward was offered, and two frontiersmen — Jack Baronett, known as ‘Yellowstone Jack,’ and George Pritchett — kept looking. On October 16, more than thirty-seven days after he had gone missing, they found Everts over fifty miles from where he had been lost, crawling on his hands and knees, delirious, frostbitten and burned, and so wasted by hunger that accounts put his weight at around fifty pounds — a living skeleton whom they at first took for a wounded animal.
Everts recovered, and in 1871 he published his own account of the ordeal, ‘Thirty-Seven Days of Peril,’ in Scribner’s Monthly. It became one of the most widely read survival narratives of its day and helped fix the wonders of the Yellowstone country in the public imagination at exactly the moment Congress was being persuaded to protect it. In 1872 Yellowstone became the first national park; a mountain near Mammoth Hot Springs carries Everts’ name to this day.
In the spring of 1869, a one-armed Civil War major named John Wesley Powell launched ten men in four wooden boats onto the Green River in Wyoming Territory, bound for the last great blank space on the map of the United States. Below the confluence of the Green and the Colorado lay a thousand miles of unrun river and, at the bottom, the deepest canyon on the continent — what Powell himself would call the “Great Unknown.” No one knew whether the river was passable at all, or whether it dropped somewhere into unrunnable falls that would kill them.
Over roughly three months the expedition was ground down by the river. They lost a boat — the No Name — and a third of their provisions in a violent rapid on the Green, and the food that survived rotted and spoiled until the men were near starvation on rancid flour and dried apples. One man quit early and walked out. Then, deep in the Grand Canyon and only days from the end, with rations almost gone and one last fearsome rapid ahead, the party fractured. Three men — the brothers Oramel and Seneca Howland and William Dunn — decided they would sooner climb out of the canyon on foot than run the next rapid. They left at a spot Powell named Separation Canyon.
The six who stayed ran the rapid, and within two days reached the mouth of the Virgin River, where Mormon settlers were watching the water for their bodies. They had survived. The three who climbed out did not. They were killed on the high plateau north of the canyon, in country that is the homeland of the Southern Paiute. By one widely repeated account they were killed by Shivwits Paiutes who mistook them for other men; that attribution has been disputed for over a century, with some historians arguing they may instead have been killed by Mormon settlers. Their true fate remains genuinely uncertain.
The river ran through the homelands of many nations — the Ute of the upper Green, the Hopi, the Diné (Navajo), the Hualapai, the Havasupai, and the Southern Paiute of the canyon country — peoples who had lived along and within these canyons long before Powell declared them “unknown.” His expedition mapped the river and made him a national figure, but the phrase “Great Unknown” was always only true from the deck of a white explorer’s boat.
On March 18, 1851, a family of Brewsterite emigrants — a splinter group of Latter-day Saints led by Royce Oatman — was attacked on the Gila Trail in what is now western Arizona, on the banks of the Gila River some eighty miles east of modern Yuma. The attackers are generally identified as Tolkepayas, a band of the Western Yavapai, though Olive herself later called them Apache. Most of the family was killed at the bluff. Thirteen-year-old Olive Oatman and her younger sister Mary Ann, about seven, were carried off; their older brother Lorenzo, beaten and left for dead, survived and made his way back to raise the alarm. What followed for the two girls was about a year of captivity among the Yavapai and then several years living among the Mohave along the Colorado River.
The distinction between the two peoples matters and is often blurred in the popular tellings. The Tolkepaya Yavapai who attacked the family held the girls in hard, servile conditions — hauling water and firewood, foraging, beaten and burned by children of the camp. About a year later the sisters were traded to a Mohave family — that of a leader recorded as Espaniole — for horses, vegetables, blankets, and beads, and taken down to the Mohave Valley. There the girls were given a different place. Olive later described being taken into the household, given a plot of land and seed to cultivate, and tattooed on the chin in the blue vertical lines that were a customary Mohave marking — by Olive’s own insistence a sign of tribal belonging, meant to be recognized by ancestors in the land of the dead, not a brand of slavery. When drought and famine struck the Colorado around 1855, food ran short for everyone, and Mary Ann died of starvation along with many Mohave.
In early 1856, word reached Fort Yuma that a young white woman was living among the Mohave. Through the intervention of a Quechan (Yuma) messenger named Francisco and the post authorities, Olive was ransomed and brought to the fort on February 28, 1856 — nineteen years old, sun-darkened, and marked with the tattoo she would carry the rest of her life. Her brother Lorenzo, who had spent five years searching and petitioning officials, was reunited with her there, and their meeting made headlines across the West.
Within a year a Methodist minister, Royal B. Stratton, published ‘Life Among the Indians: or, The Captivity of the Oatman Girls’ (1857), a bestseller of some 30,000 copies that made Olive famous and funded the siblings’ schooling. The book is also the root of much that is doubtful about her story: it leaned hard into the lurid captivity-narrative conventions of the era and almost certainly distorted her years among the Mohave, casting them as villains. Olive lectured on the strength of it, married a Texas cattleman and banker named John Brant Fairchild in 1865, and lived quietly in Sherman, Texas, until her death in 1903 — her real experience always partly hidden behind the sensational one that had been written for her.