The Legend of John Colter – More Than Just a Run
The legend of John Colter is one of the most fascinating elements of the history of the American West, elevating far beyond the mystery and drama embedded in the story of his famous “run”—his escape from the Blackfeet Indians in what is known as the fabled Three Forks area of Montana.
Member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, explorer and trapper par excellence, first known white man to “discover” the fantasies now known as Yellowstone National Park—“Colter's Hell” as it came to be called after word of his find reached civilization—lead guide for a number of American fur trapping brigades that invaded the remote wilderness at the headwaters of the Missouri River, a survivor of one after another encounters with dreaded Blackfeet warriors, and on and on.
John Colter remains the first and most significant of America's folk heroes out of the era of the American West in the years immediately following completion of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
What isn't as well-known about Colter is his persistent struggle with a power within him that both kept him in this dangerous Three Forks country, even after his encounter with the Blackfeet that included his famous run and escape and his refusal to lead a life dictated by fear. Author and screenwriter Stephen T. Gough pursues stridently to give us minute insight into not only what it was about John Colter that made him return, time after time, to this dangerous country but some understanding of why.
Colter's Winter Trek of Discovery, 1807/08
Upon his return to civilization in 1810, Colter met in St. Louis with Capt. William Clark who penned on his own map “Colter’s Route of 1807.” The map, which subsequently appeared in the Biddle-Allen 1814 edition of “Lewis, Meriwether, and Clark, William, History of the Expedition, 1804-5-6,” led author/Western historian William Ghent (Unpublished Biography of John Colter (1926)) to conclude… “Colter had of course no means of determining latitude and longitude, and Clark’s maps show strange distortions.
Yet, the location of Jackson Lake is not far wrong (less than a degree too far west and somewhat more than a degree too far south); while the relation, both as to direction and as to distance, of Lake Eustis (now Yellowstone Lake) to Jackson Lake is shown with astonishing accuracy.”
“In the years following, there grew up on the frontier the legend of Colter’s marvelous discoveries. How much he told of what he had seen, we cannot know. Nevertheless, the word traveled from man to man that this Colter has seen an inferno in some mysterious region of the west, an inferno in which no other white man had seen.”
Years later, Washington Irving would write in his Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837)… “A volcanic tract is found on the Stinking River (Shoshone), one of the tributaries of the Big Horn, which takes its unhappy name from the odor derived from sulfurous springs and streams. This last-mentioned place was first discovered by Colter, a hunter belonging to Lewis and Clark’s exploring party, who came upon it in the course of his lonely wanderings and gave such an account of its gloomy terrors, its hidden fires, smoking pits, noxious streams, and the all-pervading ‘smell of brimstone,’ that it received, and has ever since retained among the trappers, the name of ‘Colter’s Hell.’
Background
When I began writing Colter’s Run, the historical novel (and later, the screenplay) I searched for an authentic Piikunii (Piegan) warrior of the early 1800s to put a real-life historical name to the Blackfoot war chief and the Blackfoot band who slew John Potts and captured John Colter on the Jefferson River in the fabled Ahkoto Waktai Sakum, the Three Forks, headwaters of the Missouri River on that fateful day in late summer of 1808.
I found that man, Kootenae Appe (Kutenai Man), in journal excerpts of the famed Canadian explorer David Thompson and I didn’t hesitate to use it. Kootenae Appe was a man of vast appetites, spawning twenty-two sons and four daughters from five wives (four of whom were Blackfoot).
A war chief who led war parties of never less than two-hundred warriors on daring raids, covering wide swaths of present-day central and southwestern Montana and beyond, and quite possibly the same man who introduced the horse to the Piikunii (Piegan) in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
Periodically over the years, I would search the internet looking for additional information, and this past year (2012), I came upon Linda Matt Juneau’s thesis (University of Montana 2007) on the Small Robe Band of the Blackfoot Nation, the Inuk’siks… and Kootenae Appe their war chief. Subsequent correspondence between Ms. Juneau and this author would shed light on tribal elders’ oral traditions confirming Kootenae Appe and the Inuck’siks as the war chief and band who captured and lost John Colter.
More Than Just a Run
"We proceeded on in better spirits. On the next day, we passed a battlefield of the Indians, where the skulls and bones were lying around on the ground in vast numbers. The battle which had caused this terrible slaughter took place in 1808, the year but one before, between the Blackfeet to the number of fifteen hundred on the one side, and the Flatheads and the Crows numbering together about eight hundred, on the other side…”
"Colter was in the battle on the side of the latter and was wounded in the leg and thus disabled from standing. He crawled to a small thicket and there loaded and fired while sitting on the ground. The battle was desperately fought on both sides, but victory remained with the weaker party… The Blackfeet engaged at first with about five hundred Flatheads, whom they attacked in great fury. The noise, shouts, and firing brought a reinforcement of the Crows to the Flatheads, who were fighting with great spirit and defending the ground manfully.”
“At the time of this well fought battle, Colter was leading them (the Salish) to Manuel’s Fort to trade with the Americans, when the Blackfeet fell upon them in such numbers as to seemingly make their destruction certain. Their desperate courage saved them from a general massacre…”
—Excerpts from General Thomas James, “Three Years Among the Indians and the Mexicans.” (1846)
This battle occurred between the Gallatin and the Madison Rivers in the vicinity of Three Forks, Montana. For thousands of years, ancient peoples (circa 500 BC/1750 AD) hunted buffalo here (the Madison Buffalo Jump/Logan, Montana). In the historical time in which Colter’s Run took place, many mountain and plains tribes ventured to the Three Forks (Salish, Shoshone, Nez Perce, Bannack, Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Hidatsa, Cree, Assiniboine, Lakota/Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho) to hunt buffalo, often with the inevitable collision/bloody conflict resulting.
Sacajawea (Sacagawea) and several of her Shoshone companions were kidnapped and enslaved here in the late 1700s/early 1800s by the Hidatsa, coming all the way from the Dakotas.
When L&C met Chief Three Eagles (subsequently slain years later by Blackfoot treachery during a brief truce in the war between the tribes) and his band (400) of Salish in the lower Bitterroot Valley in late summer of 1805, the Salish were on their way to join other bands to hunt buffalo in force in the Three Forks.
The Inuck’siks, the Small Robe Band of the Southern Piikunii of the Blackfoot Nation, on their yearly nomadic orbit of much of central/southwestern Montana would hunt buffalo and summer at Three Forks. We can even make the case that their annual summer village site was located in Milligan Canyon, just a short stone’s throw from the Jefferson River in the immediate vicinity of where John Colter and John Potts (subsequently slain) were captured.
Buffalo was the lifeblood of these tribes, and Three Forks one of their prime bread baskets… ergo the constant specter of battle and turmoil.
Into this dangerous, hostile mix comes John Colter, more or less an innocent bystander, caught up in an internecine conflict beyond his control, at the wrong time, and in the wrong place. The Blackfoot, specifically the Inuck’siks, led by their renowned war chief Kootenae Appe, certainly would not soon forget this lone and wounded white man, an American fighting alongside their mortal enemies, the Crow and the Salish. They would meet again on land they (the Blackfoot) claimed dominion over under much different circumstances… and the run would be on in earnest.
Survival was a constant life-and-death struggle for all those tribes that visited the Three Forks to clothe, feed and house their peoples. How, save for a timely arrival and intervention of a Crow hunting/war party, these Salish bands might have been decimated, even eliminated, confined to that proverbial ash heap of history, rather than become the proud descendants we know today; the people who founded and built the Flathead Kootenai College of Pablo, Montana, serving the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’ Oreilles tribes on the Flathead Reservation.