Colter's Hell
- Matthew Kerns
- 18 hours ago
- 2 min read
In the winter of 1807, John Colter crossed the Continental Divide alone, on snowshoes, in temperatures that dropped to thirty below zero. He carried a thirty-pound pack, a rifle, and nothing else. Somewhere on the far side of the mountains, he descended into a valley no white man had ever seen and looked west at three jagged peaks rising straight off the valley floor — the mountains French trappers would later name the Tetons. He had no name for them and no one to tell. And when he finally made it back to Fort Raymond and described what else he'd found — boiling springs, steaming ground, the smell of brimstone rising from the earth — the other trappers laughed at him. They gave his impossible country a mocking name that stuck: Colter's Hell.
The second episode of the three-part series on John Colter I wrote is out now on Legends of the Old West. This one covers the year that made Colter a legend among the trappers before he ever ran a step of his famous run — starting with the moment he stood at the doorstep of civilization for the second time in less than a year, met Manuel Lisa's keelboats at the mouth of the Platte, and turned his canoe back upstream.
The episode follows Colter through Lisa's founding of Fort Raymond and the mission no reasonable man would have accepted: a five-hundred-mile solo winter journey through unmapped country to find the winter camps of the Crow and invite them to trade. That circuit took him through Jackson Hole, past the Tetons, and into the geothermal country near present-day Cody — which, in one of my favorite ironies of Western history, was the actual Colter's Hell. It wasn't Yellowstone at all, despite what historians have been repeating since 1895. Then came the summer of 1808, when fifteen hundred Blackfeet warriors attacked the Crow and Flathead band Colter was traveling with in one of the largest battles of the fur trade era. Colter took a bullet — or an arrow, the sources disagree — crawled into a thicket, and fought from the ground until the attack broke. Then he walked several hundred miles back to Fort Raymond on that wounded leg, alone. And then, because he was John Colter, he went back to the Three Forks anyway, with his old expedition messmate John Potts paddling the other canoe.
What waited for them on the Jefferson River became the most famous survival story on the American frontier — Potts hacked to pieces, Colter stripped naked, and a six-mile run across a cactus-covered plain with his life as the prize. That's where we're headed next.
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