John Colter's Favorite Mistake
Battling beavers and Blackfeet from Bismarck, North Dakota, to Three Forks, Montana.
By: Candy Moulton 09/01/2007
Screeching and yelling “like so many devils,” the Blackfeet grabbed at the driftwood raft hovering above the swimming naked man.
Although humiliated by the Indians’ sport of having him strip and run for his life as a warrior chased after him, John Colter was a clever man who could outwit his opponents—even despite the prickly pear thorns in his feet and the throbbing hot sun beating down on his naked body.
After all, Colter had tricked the warrior by stopping short and turning around, feigning to give him a bear hug. The warrior tripped and broke his spear, which Colter swiftly picked up to fatally jab his pursuer. The Mountain Man was no greenhorn. He had traveled for nearly three years with Lewis and Clark, who enlisted him among nine other men from Kentucky to become part of their Corps of Discovery to explore the Louisiana Purchase. For the past two years, he’d been trapping beaver for Manuel Lisa’s Missouri Fur Company.
That summer of 1808, he wasn’t about to let the Blackfeet get the best of him. When night came and all was silent, he swam farther down the river. Once on land, he began his 300-mile, seven-day journey on foot to Manuel Lisa’s fort on the Bighorn branch of the Roche Jaune River.
The story of Colter’s dangerous escape from the Blackfeet, so wonderfully recorded in John Bradbury’s 1819 Travels in the Interior of America, played a large role in catapulting this fur trapper to fame. Yet if not for his venture to Yellowstone Country in the winter of 1807, when Colter first clashed with the Blackfeet, they might not have been after his scalp in the first place.
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