john Colter: The First Mountain Man

In the summer of 1808, two veterans of the Lewis and Clark Expedition paddled their canoes up the Jefferson River, deep in Blackfoot country, checking beaver traps they'd set under cover of darkness. When John Potts insisted the sound of approaching hooves was only buffalo, he called his partner a coward for wanting to retreat. Moments later, five or six hundred Blackfeet warriors appeared on both banks. Potts was dead within minutes. His partner — John Colter — stood naked and alone on the riverbank, waiting to learn why the chiefs had spared him, and what they intended to do with him next.

https://youtu.be/y3vuRLzpFAY?si=k2KcefyuqtgKPEek

The first episode of a three-part series on John Colter I wrote is out today on Legends of the Old West. Colter is the most famous mountain man in American history, and yet he arrives on the historical stage out of nowhere, with no confirmed birthplace, no family record, nothing before the day William Clark recruited him as one of the "nine young men from Kentucky" who formed the backbone of the Corps of Discovery.

This episode follows Colter from a court-martial that nearly ended his expedition before it began when he threatened to shoot a sergeant to becoming one of the two or three men Lewis and Clark trusted above all others: the hunter they called on when a shot needed finishing, the tracker sent alone across seventy miles of frozen mountains, the diplomat who laid down his rifle in front of three armed Salish warriors and changed the course of the expedition. And when the Corps finally turned for home, Colter did the unthinkable: two months from St. Louis, after twenty-seven months in the wilderness, he turned his canoe around and paddled back into the unknown.

What waited for him there wasa solo 500-mile winter journey, thirty-below temperatures, and a landscape so strange they'd call it Colter's Hell. And that's where we're headed next.

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