Legends and Tales of the American West

by Richard Erdoes

  “Thar’s a heap of Injin sign hyar,” Colter remarked. “This hoss don’t take a shine to this.” Potts said nothing.

  Suddenly, they heard the sound of a mighty trampling of numberless feet.

  “Injins,” whispered Colter. “We must git away afore they seed us.”

  “Don’t be sech a yellow-livered cuss,” said Potts, “it’s jest a herd of bufflers.”

  Colter only shrugged as they paddled on, but he had been right because they soon saw the tops of the bluffs aswarm with Blackfeet. The Indians motioned for them to come ashore. Flight was impossible. Over Potts’s objections, Colter steered for the riverbank. As soon as their craft touched ground, an Indian snatched Potts’s rifle from his grip. Quick as lightning Colter jumped ashore, wrested the weapon from the Indian’s grasp, and handed it back to his companion. Frantically, Potts paddled away into midstream.

  “Come back, you darn fool!” shouted Colter. “Come back or they’ll kill you!”

  But Potts had made up his mind. Taking a chance of being killed instantly by bow or bullet was preferable to a slow death by torture in case of capture. He raised his rifle and fired. One Blackfoot brave fell dead. Hideous yells and a volley of arrows was the answer. So many shafts found their target that poor Potts, to Colter, seemed transformed into a human porcupine.

  “They made a riddle of him,” he was to say later, recounting the scene. Soon Potts’s reeking scalp was waving on a stick above the milling crowd.

  The Indians stripped Colter of everything but the hair on his chest. Naked as he was born, they dragged him to their village. They brought him to their chief. In his years of trapping Colter had learned enough of the Blackfoot language to understand what his captors were talking about. They were discussing various methods of putting him to death, methods highly amusing to them, less so to him. Fortunately, the chief was something of a sportsman.

  “Is the white man a good runner?” he inquired.

  Colter understood at once. He was to furnish entertainment by running for his life. Here was a glimmer of hope. He strengthened the chief’s whimsical fancy by assuring him: “This white man is a very poor runner, slower than a turtle.”

  His captors grinned, enjoying the game. The chief motioned them to stay back. He then led Colter to a spot some four hundred yards distant to give him a sporting chance. Then he slapped Colter on the back and said, “Run for your life, white man! Save yourself if you can!”

  The chief signaled to his braves that the race was on. The Indians howled like demons, waving their lances and tomahawks. The odds seemed hopeless. Colter was outnumbered five hundred to one. His pursuers were armed. He was naked and defenseless. Nowhere could he see a place to hide. The river, lined with timber in which he might seek concealment, was six miles away. Still, he did not despair. One chance in five hundred was better than none. He flew rather than ran. On and on he raced, the war whoops of the Blackfeet ringing in his ears. He did not dare look around for fear of losing one inch of ground. Moccasins protected his pursuers’ feet; his were bare. Prickly pear, thorns, and sharp stones reduced his soles to a reddish mass, yet, bent on survival, he did not even feel the pain.

  Constant yelling and howling after their human prey was knocking the wind out of many Indians, who kept dropping out of the race, one after the other. Those who continued after him were strung out over a great distance. The yells and the sounds of pounding moccasins behind him grew fainter. He was gaining on his hunters. He dared to look. Only about a dozen Blackfeet had been able to keep up with him, but the foremost, a gigantic, spear-wielding warrior, was only about a hundred yards behind him. On and on went the race. Colter strained every muscle and spent his last ounce of energy. His lungs were about to burst. Blood gushed from his nostrils, spattering his chest. His gigantic pursuer was in no better shape. He could not get nearer his two-legged game, but Colter could not get farther from him. Thus both raced on. The trapper now held a slight advantage. He was running for his life, the warrior only to earn an eagle feather, but the latter had finally driven himself to within twenty yards of his intended victim. It left him incapable of a further effort. Despairing of closing this last gap, he hurled, or rather tried to hurl, his spear at Colter, but he stumbled and fell, breaking his weapon in the process. Colter had turned around, arms outspread, to face his pursuer. In a flash he saw and seized his only chance. Grabbing the spear’s pointed part, he impaled his foe with such tremendous force as to pin him to the ground. Then he ran on.

  One after another the braves arrived, stopping for a few moments to mourn their fallen comrade, breaking into frightful howls of anguish, giving Colter a further chance of getting ahead of them. He reached the timber alongside the river and disappeared in the undergrowth. Seconds later he plunged into the sluggish river. In its midstream he discerned a huge, brush-covered beaver hut. The trapper knew beavers better than he knew men. He was aware that a beaver house always was partly under and partly above water, the entrance lying below the surface. Above was the comparatively dry upper chamber—the beaver family’s home. Without the slightest hesitation Colter swam to the dome-shaped structure and dived, fumbling for the entrance opening in the murky water. He was alert to the great risk involved. A man is bigger than a beaver. He might get stuck in the narrow channel leading to the upper part. Then it would be all over. He would drown. But he would try his luck. He found the entrance and, as he had feared, got stuck. With a mighty effort he managed to squeeze himself through and into the beavers’ den. The outraged occupants hurriedly left their home in the opposite direction, leaving Colter sole master of the place. He crouched there alone, in darkness, panting and retching.

  The Blackfeet warriors followed Colter’s tracks to the river’s edge and began searching for him. They combed the shore on both banks without finding his footprints, proof that he had nowhere gone ashore. Some even swam to the beaver hut and stood on its top to get a better view of their surroundings, unaware that only a foot of earth and tangled branches separated them from their prey. Colter could feel his roof trembling above him and feared that one or the other of them might break through. He could hear them talking, could even make out a word or two. The Indians looked for him everywhere, even in the most unlikely places. Colter heard them shouting to each other across the river for a long time, but after several hours everything was quiet at last. The Blackfeet had given up, thinking that the trapper in his weakened state, possibly wounded in his fight with their slain comrade, must have drowned.

  The fugitive stayed in his strange hideout the rest of the day and the following night. He was weary unto death. His lacerated feet gave him great pain. He was cold and hungry. Through chinks in his domed roof he could discern a little light—the dawn of another day. Once more he squeezed himself through the entrance channel. Cautiously, his head hidden in tangled driftwood, he scanned the river in every direction, making sure that his enemies were gone. He felt something against him—his unwilling hosts reclaiming their home. He swam to the far shore and stood for a moment, caught up in revery. He was alive. He had escaped.

  He had escaped his human foes but not the forces of nature. He was naked and defenseless, without any means of killing game. His feet were lumps of suffering flesh. A chance encounter with a grizzly or a pack of wolves would be his end. He was over a hundred miles from the nearest place of refuge, Manuel Lisa’s fort and trading post on a branch of the Yellowstone River, but with renewed hope and grim determination he set out upon his awesome trek. He stilled his hunger by eating toads, snakes, insects, and roots. A jackrabbit’s partly decomposed body made a welcome feast. What was left of its skin, and a fragment of fur he found in his path, he wrapped around his bleeding feet. Out of reeds and grass he fashioned himself the poor imitation of a garment. Years in the wilderness had given him an eye for the land and a sure sense of direction. He reached the fort in the incredibly short time of seven days. To the men watching from the stockade Colter appeared as a stumbling ghostlike shape, a two-l
egged bundle of reeds barely dragging itself along. He was at last recognized amid thundering cheers, clad, and fed. A bumper of brandy did him no end of good. After ten days he was fit again, his mind fixed on beaver.

  A choice lay before him—to go back to trap, or to St. Louis and his bride, Sally, whom he had married two years before. Incredible as it may seem, he chose the mountains and returned to the land of the Terrible Blackfeet where beavers were a-plenty. At five dollars a plew the lure was too great. In the month of May 1810 a small canoe arrived at St. Louis from the headwaters of the Missouri, sagging under a huge load of beaver pelts, paddled by none other than John Colter. He had paddled his frail craft over 2,500 miles of winding streams and rivers, covering the distance in a mere thirty days. Whether walking, running, or paddling, Colter was the fastest man on the prairies. He sold his pelts at a good profit and returned to his Sally.

  The rest of his life was anticlimactic. He bought land and livestock. He built himself a house and set up as a farmer. Together with his wife he raised chickens, milked cows, and stuck pigs. What the wilderness and the Blackfeet failed to accomplish, civilization did. It killed him. John Colter died in 1813, at the age of thirty-eight. The legend of his epic race lives on.

  The story is almost too good to be true—almost. It is much more factual than the tales of most western heroes. Events happened as described—except for one bit of later embroidery, namely the beavers. As Colter himself told it, it was not inside a beaver hut he was hiding, but under a natural raft of tangled tree trunks, branches, driftwood, and other debris, lying almost motionless in mid-river. With nose and lips above water, his head concealed between tree trunks, he stayed there, waterlogged, until his skin shriveled, while his pursuers actually cavorted on top of his floating island, “yelling like the devils.” But true or not, the beavers, added by later story tellers, give the Colter saga that “extra touch.”

  Old Solitaire

  Old Bill Williams was a semilegendary character, famous among the free trappers, often called the “ultimate mountain man.” He himself sometimes signed his papers proudly “Bill Williams, Master Trapper.” A Ute chief commented that Old Bill was “a great trapper, good hunter, took heaps of beaver, great warrior, many scalps hanging from his belt, but no friends, always by himself.” One observer described him as six foot one inch, tall, gaunt, red-headed, with a hard, weather-beaten face, marked deeply with smallpox. He was said to be all muscle and sinew, the most indefatigable hunter in all the West, “a shrewd, cute, original man.” His hardihood was incredible. He could outrun a deer, outfight a bear, and run all day with six traps on his back. He wolfed down his meat raw and was in like measure impervious to the searing desert storms of summer and the icy blizzards of winter. He was very profligate of life, killing Indian men, women, and children with the same lack of feeling as when bringing down a deer or jackrabbit.

  No one ever accused Old Bill of being fastidious. He outdid his fellow trappers in dirtiness and never washed if he could help it, a gent carrying a few pounds of topsoil around on his body. He went about in a filthy, reeking buckskin shirt, so stiff he could stand it upright on the ground. His pants, shrunken and clinging to his bony shanks, were full of holes, leaving parts of his buttocks exposed. His lousy hair hung down to his shoulders, his unkempt beard to his waist, yet he loved to deck himself out in barbaric finery, fringed, beaded, and quilled, his cap of otter fur decorated with hawk and eagle feathers. The best description of Williams was left us by an early British traveler, George Frederick Ruxton, who knew him well:

  Williams always rode ahead, his body bent over his saddle-horn, across which rested a long heavy rifle, his keen eyes peering from under the slouched brim of a flexible felt hat, black and shining with grease. His buckskin hunting shirt, bedaubed until it had the appearance of polished leather, hung in folds over his bony carcass; his nether extremities being clothed in pantaloons of the same material (with scattered fringes down the outside of the leg, which ornaments, however, had been pretty well thinned to supply “whangs” for mending or pack saddles), which, shrunk with wet, clung tightly to his long, spare, sinewy legs. His feet were thrust into a pair of Mexican stirrups made of wood, and as big as coalscuttles; and iron spurs of incredible proportions, with tinkling drops attached to the rowels, were fastened to his heel—a bead-worked strap, four inches broad, securing them over the instep. In the shoulder belt which sustained his powder-horn and bullet-pouch, were fastened the various instruments essential to one pursuing his mode of life. An awl, with deerhorn handle, and a point defended by a case of cherry-wood carved by his own hand, hung at the back of his belt, side by side with a worm for cleaning his rifle; and under this was a squat and quaint-looking bullet-mold, the handles guarded by strips of buckskin to save his fingers from burning when running balls, having for its companion a little bottle made from the point of an antelope’s horn, scraped transparent, which contained the “medicine” used in baiting traps.

  The old coon’s face was sharp and thin, a long nose and chin hob-nobbing with each other; and his head was always bent forward giving him the appearance of being hump-backed. He appeared to look neither to the right nor the left, but, in fact, his twinkling eye was everywhere. He looked at no one he was addressing, always seeming to be thinking of something else than the subject of his discourse, speaking in a whining, thin, cracked voice, and in a tone that left the hearer in doubt whether he was laughing or crying.

  The legend of Old Bill is controversial. He is described as kindly and true, a faithful friend and honest fellow, but is also accused of being a murderous fiend, a horse thief, a scalp-hunter, and a booze-blind drunkard. Some said that he had gone to school and could read and write in a legible hand; others said that “he had no glory except in the woods.” The truth probably lies somewhere in between. On one thing all who knew him agreed: of all the free trappers Old Bill was “the most tattered, toughest, and notoriously the least trammeled.” It is also certain that he was a loner who had no use for the company of man or beast except, of course, during the mating season. Among his fellows he was known as Old Solitaire.

  There is an old joke that our hero was known as Old Bill Williams before he was weaned. At any rate, the epithet “Old” was a moniker of affection, bestowed regardless of age.

  William Sherley Williams was born in 1787, on Horse Creek, North Carolina, of pious Baptist parents. His father had been a soldier in the army of the Revolution who had taken up farming after the war was over. In 1794 the family settled in the vicinity of St. Louis, then a village of roughly a thousand inhabitants ruled by Spain. Old Bill therefore grew up in the shadow of the fur trade. As a boy, he worked on the farm from “can see to no can see.” In 1806 he went West on a stolen horse with his pappy’s Hawken rifle. He was nineteen then, a ginger-haired, walking, six-foot human skeleton. God grabbed him by the scruff and shook his soul mightily so that he looked heavenward. He fell under the influence of a wandering hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher, the Reverend John Clark, a Scotchman and one-time sailor, privateer, pirate, British foretop man, deserter, and schoolteacher. Clark so worked for Bill’s salvation that he was “saved” and himself set up as an itinerate sermonizer, swapping the Word of God for a meal and a place to sleep. His orations were mighty powerful. He put the fear of God into his trembling listeners, threatening them with hellfire everlasting for a variety of transgressions. Once, seized by the spirit, he preached with such tremendous effect that his listeners were rendered “as slick as peeled onions,” their sins peeled off after having been washed thoroughly in the Blood of the Lamb. One day, as he worked himself up into a frenzy, with foam-flecked mouth holding forth on the always-interesting subject of fornication, his eye fell upon a comely, high-bosomed lass who smiled back at him, which put an aching into his loins. Then and there he decided that, like the fellow who crept into a harem disguised as a eunuch, “he was not cut out for his job.” He gave up preaching and went farther West to live among Osage Indians. On
rare occasions he was still seized by an urge to preach the gospel to the heathen children of nature. He had no great luck with this endeavor. Once he regaled them with the story of Jonah and the Whale. The Indians commented: “We have heard the white people tell lies, we know they always lie, but this is the biggest lie we ever heard.” He did not missionize the Osages, but they missionized him. He began worshiping the Sun as Giver of Life, the Moon as Goddess of Propagation, and Grandmother Earth as the Great Nourisher of Men and Beasts. His Indian brothers called him Pah-Hah-Soo-Gee-Ah, the Redheaded Shooter. He then took to wife the daughter of the chief of the Big Hill Band and with her begat ginger-haired offspring. He then became an interpreter at trading posts, for the government, and for a company of dragoons. In 1820, Bill’s father died after having predicted, correctly, the exact minute, hour, and year of his demise.

  In 1825, at the age of thirty-eight, Bill began his somewhat belated career as a mountain man. He took to it with the enthusiasm of a hungry cat pouncing upon a succulent mouse. He soon had a squaw in every tribe, for political as well as physical reasons, and also in order to learn as many native languages as possible. He became fluent in seven, a great asset for a man after beaver plews. He likewise cemented relations with the Hispanic people of the Southwest, attracting a beautiful señorita who, on her part, presented him with a strapping carrot-haired son. As a trapper, Old Bill ranged far and wide, from the Texas Panhandle to the Pacific and from the Rio Grande all the way up into the Yellowstone country. Shunning human company, he talked to his Hawken rifle, named Knockumstiff, and conversed with his old nag Calico, reportedly the ugliest horse on the Plains. Above all others he hated the Terrible Blackfeet, the mountain men’s perennial enemies. It was said that Old Bill could smell a Blackfoot from ten miles off. In the words of Ruxton: