Colter's Run
- Matthew Kerns
- 12 minutes ago
- 2 min read
At the end of the last episode, John Colter was standing naked on the bank of the Jefferson River, surrounded by hundreds of Blackfeet warriors, watching what was left of his friend John Potts being hacked to pieces. Then one of the chiefs pointed toward the open prairie and told him to go. Colter walked at first. Then he looked back and saw the young warriors stripping off their blankets and leggings. He understood. He was being given a head start.
The third and final episode of the John Colter series I wrote for Legends of the Old West is out now. This is Colter’s Run: six miles across open prairie, barefoot and naked, with cactus thorns tearing into his feet and a line of Blackfeet warriors behind him. Colter outran all but one, turned and killed that man with his own broken spear, reached the Madison River, and hid inside a beaver lodge while his pursuers walked over the logs above him. Then came the part of the story that sometimes gets lost in the famous run itself: Colter still had to get home. With nothing but a blanket and the broken spearhead, he walked roughly two hundred miles in eleven days, living on roots and bark, until the men at Fort Raymond barely recognized the skeletal figure approaching out of the wilderness.
And somehow, even that wasn't enough to make John Colter quit the mountains. He stayed another two years before finally returning to Missouri, marrying, buying a farm, and—for perhaps the only time in his life—turning down another invitation to head west. He died in 1812, only about thirty-seven years old. Less than nine years separate his first appearance in the historical record from his death. In between, he crossed a continent with Lewis and Clark, explored the Rockies alone, saw the Tetons and the geothermal country around Yellowstone before any other known white American, survived two Blackfoot battles, and made the most famous run for survival in frontier history. He left no journal, no memoir, and barely a handful of records in his own name. What he left was a legend.
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My book, Texas Jack: America's First Cowboy Star, is available here:
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