John Colter - "Mad Man" and "Colter's Hell"

For some reason Colter was sent out to find new trapping routes, and reach agreements with Blackfoot Indians.  Colter started out on foot alone

His route took him through much of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho country.  He crossed the Continental Divide at Union Divide and visited the Yellowstone Park area.  He came across steaming geysers and bubbling mud.  The tales he told of these gave him the name "madman" and were dismissed as deranged hallucinations.  His discovery was know as "Colter's Hell."

Without knowing it, Colter had become the stereotype of a mountain man.  He survived alone in the wilderness, killed his own game, trapped to make his own clothes, endured extreme cold and heat to become a legend. 

Colter escaped death at least twice.  In 1808 he was captured by the Blackfoot, his clothes taken, and told to run for his life while warriors pursued him.  He made the river six miles away, hid underwater until night fall when he made his way away in the darkness.

In 1810, Colter was the only one of six who survived a Blackfoot ambush, to which he said, "If only God will let me off, I will leave this country and never come back again."  He immediately went back to St. Louis where he died in poverty in 1813.

Next time...John Jacob Astor
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On this Day in Pioneer History:  On March 17, 1804,  Jim Bridger is born in Richmond, Virginia. Twenty years later, Bridger, heading West along the routes Lewis and Clark pioneered, became one of the greatest mountain men of the 19th century.  For more on Jim Bridger search this blog...

Mountain Men Beginnings

he first to exploit North American resources for profit were the French in the 17th century.  When England gained the monopoly over the fur trade in 1763, their Hudson Bay Company moved all the way to the Rockies by 1787,

The first mountain men encountered Lewis and Clark's expedition in 1806.  Around the Yellowstone River, 150 miles from St. Louis, they came across a couple of shaggy beaver trappers - Joseph Dickson and Forrest Hancock who had left Illinois in the summer of 1804. 

The American trappers asked if anyone in the expedition would like to join them on the hunt.  Pvt. John Colter of Virginia, along with a couple of other men, were eager to go.  The Trappers moved along the river making winter camp in a Rocky Mountain Valley.  By spring, the two companions had had enough and headed back to the expedition.  Colter however, stayed on to trap, hunt, and hone his wilderness skills.

By 1807 Colter was in St. Louis to sell his catch.  He met one swarthy Manuel Lisa, a St. Louis businessman and schemer.  He was ruthless, unprincipled, and violent, but he could sniff out profit from 1000 miles.  Genius or just a crook, in 1807, he took 50 frontiersmen into two boats up the Missouri to the Far West.  John Colter was among them as a guide.  They halted at the Yellowstone and Big Horn River to build a fort. 

Next time...the Story of John Colter continues
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On this Day in Pioneer History: On March 14, 1879, Albert Einstein is born, the son of a Jewish electrical engineer in Ulm, Germany. Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity drastically altered man’s view of the universe, and his work in particle and energy theory helped make possible quantum mechanics and, ultimately, the tomic bomb.