John Colter: The First Mountain Man

by Win Blevins

  He deliberately did not look back. He wondered how far he had run, a couple of miles, at the most. He put his pursuers out of his mind, and turned back to the feeling of the running.

  Colter gave himself up to his legs, and his mind floated. Images of herds of running horses came into his mind, horses spread across a plain. Buffalo passed through, huge in fore-shortening. The water-wheel of a mill drifted in, turning steadily with the flow of a wide, Virginia creek, as it had turned for years. A stick slid along, frictionless, on ice covered with a thin layer of water. And, underneath, he felt the evenness of his own slide. He loved he feel of the running. He would run until he died.

  How close were they? He felt he had to look back, just a quick glance. They were scattered all over the plain, most of them straggling far behind. Only one was close. He was no more than a hundred yards behind, and carrying a spear. He had been gaining.

  That glance made Colter feel a sort of quickening. Maybe he did have a chance. Now was the time for that extra speed he thought he had. He forced his legs to pick up the pace, and then let them settle into their own faster rhythm. It must still be two or three miles to the river.

  He felt his breath coming faster now, maybe twice as fast, and it rasped in his throat. He ignored the rasp, and the pain that was growing in his chest, and tried just to feel his legs moving and moving. The rest of his body was getting loggy, as though only his legs were still alive.

  When he snapped to, he realized that he had been dizzy for a moment. Dizzy! He fixed his eyes on the ground and made a point of holding them open. The dizziness came back in slow waves, and with it came nausea. He merely watched as his body let both pass and his legs kept moving relentlessly. For a couple of minutes he let the waves pass, observing himself dispassionately. Once he choked off the feeling that his bowels would let go, then ignored it. He snatched huge chunks of air into his lungs and forced himself on.

  Maybe he had left the Indian behind. He decided to look back quickly. He knew that his body would not stand much more of this punishment. He was afraid that it would just shut down, on its own. He looked. The Indian was only about twenty yards back, and now had the spear lifted high for the moment when he would be close enough to throw it. Colter forced his legs a little harder.

  He gradually became aware of something on his knees, as they pumped in and out of view. Blood. He looked down. The whole front of his body was covered with blood. He felt it now on his lips, sticky and salty, my God, blood was gushing out of his nose.

  Colter wondered whether, in the surprise of the blood, he might have slowed down. Then he began to think that the area between his shoulder blades might be hit by that spear any moment. He wished he could shake that feeling off, like an itch you can’t reach. But it was getting to him.

  All right. He hadn’t much chance. He couldn’t outrun this Blackfoot.

  Abruptly he stopped, turned around, spread his arms, and called to the Indian in the Crow language to spare his life. Startled, maybe by the suddenness, or by the plea, or by the blood, the Indian tried to stop and to throw his spear at the same time. He stumbled, just at the moment when his arm started forward, and his body pitched toward the earth. The spear stuck in the ground, and broke off in his hand.

  Colter pounced. He grabbed the head of the spear and, as the Indian pleaded for mercy, drove it into his stomach.

  He waited, and took about six deep breaths. Suddenly, he felt as if he had enough energy left to run to St. Louis. His legs tingled with new blood. Not one Indian in sight. Yet. He started toward the river with the loping motion he liked. Before long he heard one whoop, and then a series of whoops, as the Blackfeet found their dead comrade. He must be no more than a mile from the river, he thought. He was going to make it. Maybe. He let his legs take over again, long and easy.

  Only one step shorter, and then the others broke the rhythm as he shifted from run to dive. The water was a blast of ice. His head reeled as he came up. He had to spot the top of the island again. The strokes took him just above it, and he stroked beaver-like, beneath the surface. Both hands groped for some kind of space between the logs. He couldn’t see anything, and his breath was running out.

  He turned around, and a moment later his head eased above the surface of the water about where he had dived. He looked for a long moment at the big pile of driftwood lodged at the top of the island. Somewhere under those logs must be a place he could get his head up.

  On his second try he stuck his arm in a hole between logs, right off. He couldn’t see anything, but he put his head through. His shoulders didn’t even touch. A big hole. And he must be under five or six feet of wood. He could see out of small chinks sideways, and, straight up, he could see, through the crevices, blue and a cottonwood branch moving lazily in the wind. It would do. It would do in a pinch, definitely. Colter grinned, and then laughed noiselessly, scarcely believing.

  The Blackfeet soon began to splash in the water and prance along the bank. Colter watched them without moving. They were yelling and screeching like devils. Several swam across to the island and trampled all over it, sounding like they thought noise would help them trap their prey. One stepped out onto the raft of driftwood, and Colter slipped back under water. He didn’t think any had tried to swim under it. If one did, and found him, he could strangle the man. Now that he had a hiding place he felt strong, bull-strong.

  An hour later the Blackfeet were still crisscrossing the area. Colter wondered what they were thinking, now that they had lost his track. They must have known, by then, that his trail didn’t come out the river for quite some distance, upstream or down. He had a sudden thought, and it chilled him. What if they decided to set fire to the driftwood. He stopped himself. They wouldn’t. No reason.

  Then he realized where the chill came from. He was still up to his chest in this icy water, which was melted snow spilled down from the continental divide. He intended to stay here until the Blackfeet went away. It could be a couple of days if they were stubborn. But if he stayed in this water, he might never get out of it. Men who lay injured in creeks too long didn’t make it. He figured a way to prop and wedge up, mostly out of the water. It was tiring, but he could do it.

  It had been dark for two or three hours when he decided to risk getting out. He had heard no sound of Indians for quite a while by then. Without a sound he swam under the raft and came up alongside the island. Then, keeping his hands in the water so he wouldn’t make any noise, he swam slowly downstream. He went a long way. They still might check again for his track leaving the river. Then he walked all night to make sure.

  At dawn he clambered onto some rocks, and walked trackless a ways, and lay down to sleep at the bottom of a rock chimney. His feet were bleeding from the night’s beating. Though his face was leathered, his body was white as the underside of a fish. He wouldn’t be able to expose it to very much sun.

  Well, he had done it before. Traveled alone from the Three Forks to Fort Lisa after that other tangle with the Blackfeet. That time he had had a wounded leg. This time he was naked, so his feet would go raw. They were already cut. That made it about even. But the first time he’d had his knife and gun. This time he was bare-handed. He could survive, he thought, on roots and bark. More than 200 miles—a long walk.

  When John Colter approached Fort Lisa eleven days later, the man at the gate didn’t recognize him. His face was gaunt, his body emaciated and covered with scratches and dried blood. Only the beard identified him for sure as a white man.

  When he told his story, some believed it, others scoffed.

  He didn’t take much notice either way. One, a veteran, decided not to travel with Colter any more. The man was plaguery bad luck. Another, a newcomer, didn’t sympathize much because Colter seemed such a queer fellow, talking as though he were seeing faraway places and didn’t care if anyone listened anyway. Lisa wondered why Colter seemed to take to these lone odysseys. Anyway, thought Lisa, Colter seemed to be a man born to the mountains.

  The
man born to the mountains surprised Manuel Lisa, when the ice broke up on the river early in 1810, by announcing that he was going back to civilization. Storming into the fort one day, after a new encounter with the Blackfeet, he threw down his hat and declared, “If God will only forgive me this time and let me off, I will leave this godforsaken country day after tomorrow—and be damned if I ever come back into it again,” wrote a trapper who was there.

  With two other trappers he set off downriver, had another brush with the Blackfeet and, by traveling at night and hiding in the daytime, made it to St. Louis in May.

  There he gave William Clark information for the forthcoming map and talked considerably around town about his adventures. (Meriwether Lewis had died under mysterious circumstances—a victim of suicide or murder.) Colter’s stories earned him a reputation as a confirmed liar, and he was not vindicated for some years.

  Soon he got himself a piece of land at Charette, Missouri, along the great river, and got married. By the next year he had mountain fever again. The Astoria expedition made a stop to talk with him and invited him to join them. He was reluctant to see them move on without him, but he was too recently married to go along.

  Two years later the first mountain man, who had left the mountains because it was hazardous to his health, died of jaundice in the settlements.

  Lewis and Clark’s Shining Mountains

  In 1803, when Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France, neither the President nor the American people knew what they got in the bargain. Except for the part along the Mississippi River, Louisiana was largely a blank space on the map. Jefferson persuaded Congress to outfit a military expedition, headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to do some exploring.

  Jefferson had several goals in mind: To find an overland route to the Pacific that might be a key to trade with the Orient and commerce in the northern Pacific; to bring back a map of what they found to fill in that blank space; to secure the friendship of the Indians of the West; to improve the American claim to the territory of Oregon. And to open a way for the American fur trade to get pelts of its own land—the British had been stealing down from Canada to take Louisiana Territory beaver.

  Nowadays, Americans are inclined to believe that the drive of westward movement raged in early America like an incurable fever. It didn’t. Some Americans did believe that in the West, just over the next hill, stretched ground so fertile you had to be careful of what you planted; they expected that somewhere out there lay a Kentuck of a place, the Promised Land, with the Fountain of Youth bubbling evermore. Just as many people scoffed at whatever might be west of the Hudson River, or whatever river they happened to live east of.

  Some of these people even proposed legislation to make venturing west a crime. (Benjamin Franklin had countered shrewdly that it makes no sense to pass laws that can’t be enforced.) These people feared the effect of the wilderness on civilized man. Man had been nurtured, they thought, by Christianity and the work ethic out of a state of savagery and depravity; if men returned to the wilderness, if they left the civilizing persuasions of society, they would again become as beasts.

  Lewis and Clark executed their mission superbly, guided over the Rockies by an Indian woman, Sacajwea—The Bird Woman. They made a long and dangerous journey into unknown territory with the loss of only a single man, and him by illness. But their findings lent strength to the anti-westering forces. What Lewis and Clark had found, people said, was that the country west of the frontier at St. Louis was one huge desert. They had crossed the Shining Mountains, or Stony Mountains, or Rocky Mountains as they were variously called, but they had found a country that no man could live in—arid, uncultivatable, oppressive. Nomads might exist there, buffalo and antelope might thrive there, but no civilized man—no white man—would want to.

  And so was born the myth of the Great American Desert. The other early reports confirmed it. They spoke constantly of desert, steppes, of the Sahara and Tartary.

  Myth can grow in ground that supports nothing, and it did. While some white men were living in the Rocky Mountains, the myth that the West was uninhabitable thrived. While some white men went over the West as familiarly as other men went to the post office, the mapmakers continued to label it UNEXPLORED TERRITORY and to invent lakes, rivers, and mountains that bore no relationship to facts. While any tavern conversation in St. Louis could have provided accurate information about the West, most Easterners stuck to their land of fable—poisonous fable.

  Even in 1844, a year after thousands of emigrants had traveled the Oregon Trail, this kind of speech was common enough to be attributed to Daniel Webster and to be believed:

  What do we want with the vast, worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands, and whirlwinds of dust, or cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their base with eternal snow? … I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific coast one inch nearer to Boston than it now is.

  While most Americans were wondering to what use such a worthless area could be put, a very few men asked a different question and got an answer: They asked what kind of living could be made in the West, and answered their own question by building a life they loved. Caring nothing for the myth of the Great American Desert, they had found their Promised Land smack in the middle of it. Caring nothing for an Easterner’s civilization or a Midwesterner’s agricultural society, they created a culture around beaver, buffalo, antelope, Indians, and wild places.

  Their progenitor was a single man who left the Lewis and Clark expedition. While Meriwether Lewis and William Clark went home to report to the government, and their brigade made its way to the settlements, one man, John Colter, had turned back and gone to live in the Shining Mountains.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Win Blevins is an American author of historical fiction, narrative non-fiction, historical fantasy, and non-fiction books, as well as short stories, novellas, articles, reviews, and screenplays. He has written many books about the western mountain trappers, and is known for his "mastery of western lore."

  His notable works include Stone Song, So Wild a Dream, and Dictionary of the American West. According to WorldCat, the Dictionary of the American West is held in 728 libraries.

  Blevins has won numerous awards, including being named winner of the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement in writing literature of the West, being selected for the Western Writers Hall of Fame, being twice named 'Writer of the Year' by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers, and winning two Spur Awards for Best Novel of the West.

  If you enjoyed this story, visit Win’s home on the web:

  www.meredithandwinblevins.com

  or on Facebook:

  https://www.facebook.com/Mountain-Man-Books-1640372442847626/

  You might also enjoy his book:

  ‘So Wild a Dream,’ the first book in Win’s Rendezvous Series.

  http://tinyurl.com/znsezjt