Alone in Winter:

John Colter and the Long Road to Yellowstone

A Soldier Who Left No Diary

John Colter wrote almost nothing about his own life, and that fact limits what any historian can say about him. What survives is a set of enlistment and pay records, the journals of the captains he served, the recollections of men who heard him talk, and one map drawn by someone else. From those fragments a workable outline emerges. Inside the outline are gaps that research has not closed.

Colter was born near Staunton, Virginia, sometime between about 1770 and 1775 (Schmittou). He enters the record on October 15, 1803, when he enlisted as a private at Maysville, Kentucky, among the first recruits William Clark gathered for the expedition to the Pacific (Mattes 13; Schmittou). He served as a hunter. In August 1806, on the homeward journey, the party met two trappers from Illinois, Forrest Hancock and Joseph Dickson, near the Mandan villages on the Missouri. The trappers were bound for the Yellowstone country and offered Colter a share in their venture. On August 15 Clark recorded that Colter's services "Could be dispenced with," and the captains agreed, on the condition that no other man ask for the same favor (Lewis and Clark, 15 Aug. 1806). Colter received his discharge the following day ("John Colter").

Fort Raymond and the Winter of 1807-1808

The partnership did not last. Almost nothing is recorded of the following winter, and by spring 1807 Colter was descending the Missouri alone. Near the mouth of the Platte River he met Manuel Lisa, a St. Louis trader leading a Missouri Fur Company expedition upriver. Several veterans of the Lewis and Clark party, including George Drouillard and John Potts, were with Lisa, and Colter turned back to join them (Mattes 13; Schmittou). In the fall of 1807 the company built a post at the mouth of the Bighorn River, on the Yellowstone, known as Fort Raymond or Manuel's Fort (Mattes 13-14; "Lisa's Fur Trade Forts"). It stood in what is now Montana, roughly twenty-five miles east of present Billings (Schmittou).

From the fort Lisa sent Colter to find the Crow and other nations and invite them to trade. The only account close to the event is secondhand. Henry Brackenridge, who heard the story from Lisa, wrote that Colter carried a thirty-pound pack, a rifle, and some ammunition, traveled more than five hundred miles to the Crows and on to other tribes, and returned alone with a leg wound (Mattes 14). Schmittou estimates the whole circuit at perhaps a thousand miles. The gap between those figures shows how little is fixed.

Reconstructing a Route from a Map

Colter never wrote his own account. After he reached St. Louis in 1810 he described his travels to Clark, who drew a dashed line labeled "Colter's Route in 1807" on the map published with the 1814 edition of the expedition's history (Clark and Lewis; Mattes 14; Hert). That map is the principal evidence, and a flawed one. Mattes points to its topographical distortions, and Schmittou concludes that historians cannot reconstruct the course definitively (Mattes 14; Schmittou).

Four scholars who tried, Hiram Chittenden, Stallo Vinton, Charles Lindsay, and Burton Harris, produced versions that agree in outline. Colter went up the Bighorn and Shoshone rivers to near present Cody, Wyoming; south along the Absaroka Range and up the Wind River to Union Pass; into Jackson Hole and probably over Teton Pass; north to Yellowstone Lake; across the Yellowstone River near Tower Falls; and back over the Absarokas to the fort by way of Clark's Fork and Pryor's Fork (Mattes 14-15). Two features anchor the reconstruction. Clark's map shows two lakes, Eustis and Biddle, which historians identify as Yellowstone Lake and Jackson Lake, and it marks a hot spring near Tower Falls (Mattes 15; Schmittou).

On that basis an early National Park Service history calls it well authenticated that Colter was the first white person to visit the region, and Schmittou reports general scholarly agreement that he was the first Euro-American to enter Jackson Hole and see Yellowstone's thermal features (Cramton; Schmittou). The qualifier matters, because "first" describes the surviving written record of outsiders. Evidence of human occupation on the Yellowstone Plateau reaches back roughly eleven thousand years, and at least twenty-six tribes are associated with the park today (Hert). Rumor also traveled ahead of Colter. In 1805 James Wilkinson, governor of Louisiana Territory, sent President Jefferson a hide map obtained from unidentified traders that showed a volcano on the Yellowstone River (Mattes 11-12).

Physical evidence adds little. A carved rhyolite head inscribed "John Colter" and "1808" was dug up on a farm near Tetonia, Idaho, in 1931. Mattes considers its authenticity plausible but acknowledges that the stone itself offers no conclusive proof (Mattes 15-16). The question remains open.

The Trouble with "Colter's Hell"

The best-known Colter story holds that he described Yellowstone's geysers, his listeners laughed, and they named the place "Colter's Hell" in mockery. Mattes calls it among the most widely believed and least accurate items in Yellowstone history (Mattes 19). In the trappers' own usage the name referred to a thermal area on the Shoshone River, then called the Stinking Water, west of present Cody, not to the geyser basins inside the park (Mattes 19; Hert; Schmittou). Mattes traces the first printed use to Washington Irving's narrative of Captain Bonneville's travels, which places the name on that river. He attributes the transfer of the name to Yellowstone to Chittenden's 1895 book, and notes that Chittenden's later work conceded the Shoshone location while the earlier impression persisted (Mattes 19-20).

A milder disbelief did exist. Trappers' reports drew little public notice, and even Jim Bridger's accounts were treated as tall tales until scientific expeditions verified parts of them (Mattes 1; Hert). The earliest known printed American description of part of the park was a letter from the trapper Daniel Potts, published in Philadelphia in 1827 (Mattes 36-37; Hert; Cramton). Warren Ferris left a fuller description of the geyser basins after a visit in 1834 (Mattes 55-56; Hert). Only the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition of 1870 and Ferdinand Hayden's survey of 1871 produced reports with official weight, and Congress created Yellowstone National Park on March 1, 1872 (Hert). Colter did not live to see it.

Three Forks and the Blackfeet

Colter's Montana years also carried the greater danger. In the summer of 1808 he was leading Flathead visitors toward Fort Raymond when a large Blackfeet force attacked them and their Crow allies near the Three Forks of the Missouri. Thomas James, an associate of Colter's, reported that Colter was wounded in the leg but kept fighting until the Blackfeet withdrew (Mattes 17; Schmittou; "John Colter"). Brackenridge folds a fight and a leg wound into the winter journey, while James places the fight in summer 1808, one of several points where the sources do not line up (Mattes 14, 17). Schmittou, relying on an 1819 army report, argues that Colter's part in this fight convinced the Blackfeet that Americans and Crows were allied and set off their hostility toward American trappers (Schmittou).

That fall Colter and John Potts were trapping on the Jefferson River when a Blackfeet party surprised them. Potts was killed. Colter was stripped and told to run. He outdistanced most of his pursuers, killed the closest with the man's own lance, hid in the river, and eventually reached Fort Raymond, starving and unclothed (Mattes 17; Schmittou; "John Colter"). Details vary. Schmittou puts the initial sprint at five miles and, following James, the walk back at about three hundred miles in eleven days, while Discovering Lewis and Clark gives 250 miles. Accounts also disagree on whether he hid in a beaver lodge or a driftwood jam (Schmittou; "John Colter"). The earliest written versions, by Dr. William Thomas and by James, differ considerably, and James's runs almost six times as long as Thomas's ("John Colter").

In spring 1810 Colter guided a party of trappers under Pierre Menard back to Three Forks, where they built a fort. The Blackfeet resisted almost at once, with a battle on April 12 (Schmittou), and the post was abandoned within months ("Lisa's Fur Trade Forts"). Colter left for St. Louis and arrived in May 1810 (Mattes 17; Schmittou).

After the Mountains

Colter settled at Charette, Missouri, and married a woman named Sally. Irving reported that in 1811 Wilson Price Hunt asked him to join the Astorian expedition and that he declined (Mattes 17). He died in 1813 of what Mattes calls jaundice. Britannica also gives 1813, while Schmittou gives about 1812 (Mattes 17; "Colter, John"; Schmittou). Fort Raymond was abandoned in 1811 (Schmittou).

Colter's connection to Montana is specific. His base stood on the Yellowstone, his trapping led to the Three Forks and the Jefferson River, and about three percent of Yellowstone National Park lies in Montana (Hert). His contribution to Yellowstone was information: a route on Clark's map, oral reports, and a name that later writers attached to the wrong place. The park itself rested on the surveys of the 1870s.

A Note on the Evidence

Confirmed by at least two sources here: the 1803 enlistment; the August 1806 discharge; the meeting with Lisa; Fort Raymond; Clark's map and its lake identifications; the Shoshone location of Colter's Hell; the outline of Colter's Run; Potts's 1827 letter; and the 1872 act. Resting on one source in this record: the Wilkinson map, the first printed use of "Colter's Hell," the Colter Stone (all Mattes), and the claim that the 1808 fight triggered Blackfeet hostility (Schmittou). The cause of death (Mattes) is likewise single-sourced, and the year of death is disputed. The Brackenridge and James accounts are secondhand or written after the fact, and route mileages vary across sources.

Works Cited

Clark, William, and Samuel Lewis. A Map of Lewis and Clark's Track, across the Western Portion of North America from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. Bradford and Inskeep, 1814. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/79692907/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.

"Colter, John." Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Colter. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.

Cramton, Louis C. "Early Explorations." Early History of Yellowstone National Park and Its Relation to National Park Policies, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/yell/cramton/sec1.htm. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.

Hert, Tamsen Emerson. "Yellowstone, the World's Wonderland." WyoHistory.org, 8 Nov. 2014, https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/yellowstone-worlds-wonderland. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.

"John Colter." Discovering Lewis and Clark, https://lewis-clark.org/members/john-colter/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.

Lewis, Meriwether, and William Clark. "August 15, 1806." The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Gary E. Moulton, U of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1806-08-15. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.

"Lisa's Fur Trade Forts." Discovering Lewis and Clark, https://lewis-clark.org/fur-trade/lisas-forts/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.

Mattes, Merrill J. Colter's Hell and Jackson's Hole: The Fur Trappers' Exploration of the Yellowstone and Grand Teton Park Region. Yellowstone Library and Museum Association and Grand Teton Natural History Association, 1962. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50381/50381-h/50381-h.htm. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.

Schmittou, Douglas A. "The Exploits of John Colter." Big Sky Journal, Fall 2025, 25 Sept. 2025, https://bigskyjournal.com/the-exploits-of-john-colter/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2026.