Legends of the Old West - MOUNTAIN MEN Ep. 1 | “John Colter: Corps of Discovery”

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

John Colter, a young Kentucky frontiersman, joins the Corps of Discovery to explore the continent with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Colter initially bristles at the military structure of the expedition but he soon becomes one of its most trusted members. The Corps of Discovery completes the journey of a lifetime by traveling to the Pacific Ocean and back, but John Colter decides to stay in the West and become one of the earliest American fur trappers. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the autumn of 1808, probably in September, two men paddled their dugout canoes along the Jefferson River in present-day Montana, deep in the heart of Blackfoot country. They were checking beaver traps they had set the night before. They set their traps at night, checked them in the early morning, and stayed concealed during the day. They saw no signs of the blackfeet, but the two men knew they had likely been seen. The men were John Coulter and John Potts, both veterans of the Louisville. and Clark expedition. They had first seen this country three years earlier when the Corps of Discovery passed through the three forks of the Missouri, where the Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson Rivers converge, and marveled at the thousands of beaver inhabiting the creeks and rivers.

When the expedition was done, Coulter and Potts went back for the beaver. By 1808, John Coulter knew the risks better than almost any man alive. A few months earlier, he had been severely wounded in a major battle between Blackfoot warriors and the group of crow and flathead he was traveling with. Coulter had dragged himself through hundreds of miles of wilderness in order to survive. And yet, he returned to the same area with John Potts as soon as he recovered.

At a time when beaver pelts were some of the most valuable items on earth, he judged the risk was worth the reward. A season of beaver trapping could be worth more than either man could earn in years of labor back in St. Louis. but only if they survived. Early in the morning, as the mist hung over the Jefferson River, Coulter and Potts paddled their canoes through the water when they heard a noise that Potts thought was the trampling of animals.

Coulter warned his friend that the Blackfoot were nearby and they needed to retreat immediately. Potts insisted the noise was caused by Buffalo, and he called Coulter a coward. The steep high banks on each side of the river blocked their view until 500 to 600 Blackfeet warriors appeared on both sides of the creek, beckoning the two men to come ashore. Coulter did as they demanded and paddled to the riverbank. He was immediately seized, disarmed, and stripped of all his clothing.

He urged Potts to surrender, but Potts refused, saying he might as well be killed at once. A warrior fired an arrow and hit Potts in the hip. Potts fell into his canoe but quickly reappeared with his rifle, and shot a warrior dead. In an instant, Potts was pierced with so many arrows that he looked like a pincushion. The warriors pulled Potts' body from the river. With hatchets and knives, they hacked his body to pieces. The relatives of the dead warrior were furious, and they wanted to do the same to John Colter, but others held them back. Coulter stood naked on the riverbank, expecting torture or butchery or both. Then a group of chiefs gathered in council.

When they finished, one of them turned to Coulter, motioned toward the open prairie, and said in the crow language, go, go away. What happened next, with John Coulter sprinting naked across cactus-covered prairie in southern Montana while being hunted by Blackfoot warriors, would become one of the most famous survival stories of the American frontier. It was one of the first legends of the West. But every legend starts somewhere. Before John Coulter found himself in a race for his life on the banks of the world,

the Jefferson River, he was a key player in the first American adventure in the West. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling two important American frontier stories, that of the first mountain man, John Colter, and one of the most famous, Jim Bridger. They were trailblazers in the truest sense of the word, and we start with three episodes about John Colter. This is episode one, John Colter, Core of Discovery. In the autumn of 1803, Meriwether Lewis was assembling the expedition

that would cross the continent and change the course of American history. He had been handed a task for which the word daunting didn't even come close to describing. President Thomas Jefferson wanted Lewis to find a water route across the North American continent from the young American states on the Atlantic coast to the territories on the Pacific coast.

Lewis enlisted his co-commander, William Clark, and told him the kind of man he wanted for the group called the Corps of Discovery. He asked Clark to find good hunters, stout, healthy, unmarried men, accustomed to the woods and capable of bearing bodily fatigue. Clark knew exactly where to look. He had grown up on the Kentucky frontier near Louisville, and his connections in the region ran deep. He began recruiting among the men he knew, experienced Kentucky woodsmen who had grown up in the same

violent, demanding landscape that had shaped Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton, and Clark's own brother, the legendary George Rogers Clark. By the time Clark was finished, he had assembled nine young men who would form the backbone of the Corps of Discovery's hunters and scouts. Among them was John Coulter. Almost nothing is known about John Coulter's life before that moment. For more than 200 years, historians, genealogists, and descendants have searched census records, birth registers, tax rolls, and muster lists for some trace of the man's origins. The results, as one historian put it, can be summed up in a single word.

Nothing. John Coulter has been claimed by Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. A roadside marker in Stewart's draft Virginia identifies it as his birthplace. A similar claim is made by Maysville, Kentucky. Careful research has failed to confirm any of it. The man who would become the first famous. mountain man in American history arrived on the historical stage the way a dust devil appears on a hot summer day, suddenly, without warning and with no clear point of origin. Coulter's birthplace is debated,

but his early years in Kentucky are not, and growing up on the Kentucky frontier in the late 1700s was an education in survival as rigorous as any on earth. The country west of the Appalachians was contested ground. Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Wyndott, all claimed it as hunting territory, and they did not welcome the tide of settlers pushing into their lands. A boy growing up in that world learned to shoot almost as soon as he could walk. He was given a single-shot rifle by the time he was 10, assigned to a portal at the nearest fort, and taught to make his first shot count because lead and powder were precious. He learned to track, to judge the age of a trail by the effects of the sun and wind, to move

through the woods without making any noise. He learned to navigate by the stars on a cloudy night, to follow a compass, and to hold a destination in his mind and go to it as surely in darkness as in daylight. He learned to read the sounds of the forest, the alarm of a bird, the silence where there shouldn't be silence. John Coulter mastered all of it. A man who knew him later compared him to Daniel Boone, writing that Coulter's character was that of a true American backwoodsman, and nature had formed him for hearty endurance of fatigue, privations, and perils. On October 15, 1803, Coulter, who was 28 or 29 years old, enlisted in the Corps of Discovery as a private at a salary of $5 per month.

That was about the equivalent of $140 per month today. The first known written record of the man comes from William Clark's Journal on a snowy December morning at the Expedition's Winter Camp in southern Illinois. Clark's entry was brief and characteristically practical. Colter kill a deer and a turkey. No fanfare, no introduction, just a note about a man helping the crew survive the winter. For Coulter, hunting was the easy part. The hard part was waiting.

The Corps of Discovery had launched from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the end of August 1803. The group traveled down the Ohio River, recruited John Coulter and others in Kentucky, and then switched to the Mississippi River at what is today the southern tip of Illinois. The group moved up the Mississippi to the area around the frontier town of St. Louis and then stalled for the winter. At that time, all the territory to the west, from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, was in a messy state of transition from Spain to France to the U.S. The expedition built Camp Dubois on the Wood River north of St. Louis to wait for resolution so that it could proceed on its journey.

The long, cold winter of 1803 to 1804 at Camp Dubois was an exercise in discipline, close quarters, rigid structure, assigned duties, and orders from sergeants who expected obedience. Colter was a private in the Corps, but he was not a soldier. The life of a Kentucky woodsman, out in the open, answering to no one, going where he pleased, clashed with military structure. So it was not overly surprising, the first court-martial of the expedition included John Colter.

Fighting and drunkenness were fairly common at Camp Dubois that winter. William Clark didn't ignore the problem, but he kept the punishments practical rather than severe. In January, men who had gotten drunk, brawled and neglected their duty were ordered to build a hut for a woman who promised to wash and sew for the company. It was a light punishment, not the kind of correction that inspired fear. and Coulter, it seemed, didn't take the hint. He and three other recruits slipped out of camp under the pretext of hunting

and made their way to a nearby whiskey shop. It was a small act of defiance, the kind of thing frontier men did when the walls closed in. But Meriwether Lewis didn't see it that way. When he returned to camp and discovered what had happened, he confined Coulter and the others to quarters for 10 days. On March 3rd, 1804,

when Lewis and Clark were away in St. Louis on business, Coulter confronted Sergeant John Ordway, the man responsible for maintaining order when the captains were gone. In the heat of an argument, Coulter threatened to shoot the sergeant. A formal court-martial convened on March 29, 1804, the expedition's first. Colter stood before the officers alongside Robert Fraser and John Shields, all three charged with disorderly conduct. The only record of the event was a quick entry in William Clark's journal, in which he wrote that Shields and Coulter asked forgiveness and promised to do better in the future. Lewis and Clark could have dismissed Coulter from the expedition. A man who threatened

to shoot a sergeant was a danger to everyone around him, but the captain saw something in Coulter and gave him another chance. Two days after the court-martial, John Coulter earned a place in the permanent party, the select group of men who would make the full journey to the Pacific Ocean and back. Within a month, Coulter was entrusted with delivering important letters for the captains, a task which required reliability and discretion. Less than two months after that, the man who had been court-martialed was himself serving as a member of a military court, sitting in judgment of others. The speed of Coulter's rehabilitation signaled the captains did more than simply forgive him,

they came to depend on him. One historian wrote that Coulter was on his way to becoming, a sort of right-hand man to Clark, just as Drew Yard was to Lewis. The comparison carried weight. George Drew Yard was the expedition's best hunter and most skilled interpreter. To be mentioned alongside him was to be placed in the highest company in the core of discovery. Whatever had driven Coulter to defy authority, whether it was restlessness or whiskey, or the stubbornness of a man who had never taken orders from anyone, he buried it.

He never again faced disciplinary action. He never appeared on the expedition's sick lists. The man who had threatened to shoot a sergeant became one of the most trusted soldiers in the company. On May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery pushed off from Camp Dubois and headed west on the Missouri River. There were roughly 45 men in the party, soldiers, frontiersmen, French-Canadian boatmen, and Clark's enslaved man, York. They traveled in a 55-foot keel boat and towed two smaller dugout canoes loaded with supplies, trade goods, weapons, and ammunition. Ahead lay more than 2,000 miles of river, and beyond that, a vast stretch of continent no American

had ever crossed. Journal entries by members of the Corps mentioned John Coulter as a hunter and a scout, and a major demonstration of Coulter's hunting skills came in August of 1804, when George Shannon, the expedition's youngest member, went missing. Shannon had been sent to find a pair of stray horses. He found them, but then he panicked, mistakenly believing the main party had moved ahead of him. He mounted one of the horses and raced north along the river, trying to catch up to a group that was actually behind him. William Clark grew alarm. He sent George Drew Yard, the expedition's best man in pursuit. Drew Yard returned with a

without Shannon. Clark sent John Shields and Joseph Field. They came back the next day, reporting that Shannon was ahead of them and they could not close the gap. Now Clark was genuinely worried. Shannon was not a first-rate hunter. Alone, without provisions, he would starve. Clark resolved to try one more time, and he sent John Colter to try to accomplish an almost impossible task. Shannon was on horseback. Colter was on foot. For more than a week, Coulter tracked the younger man north along the Missouri, following signs but never closing the distance. After six days, Coulter finally gave up the chase and returned to the boats. But Coulter had not simply been walking that whole time.

Sergeant John Ordway recorded what Coulter brought back with him. One buffalo, one elk, three deer, one wolf, five turkeys, one goose, and one beaver. George Shannon, by contrast, was nearly starving when he finally turned up on his own. He had used all of his ammunition without killing any game, and was reduced to eating a few grapes and a single rabbit he had managed to kill by loading his rifle with a stick and powder. The Shannon episode became one of those stories the men told and retold around the campfire. The Greenhorn mounted on a horse, running from his own expedition and slowly starving until

he found his way back in the nick of time. The captains displayed their trust in Coulter again for a mission on August 25, 1804. The Corps of Discovery had traveled north up the Missouri River between the modern states of Iowa and Nebraska until it reached the southeast corner of what is now South Dakota. Near present-day Vermilion, South Dakota, the captains mounted a special reconnaissance mission. The target was Spirit Mound, a place Native Americans said was inhabited, by evil spirits, or little people who were fierce enough to kill anyone who approached. Lewis and Clark wanted to see for themselves, and they selected John Coulter as one of only 12 men to accompany them. The party set out at 8 in the morning and walked approximately

nine miles in intense heat. The conditions were brutal enough that their dog collapsed from exhaustion and had to be sent back to the boats. When the group finally reached the mound, they found no devils and no little people. The mysterious phenomenon turned out to be large flocks of birds hovering around the summit, feeding on insects. It was not a dramatic discovery, but after one year together, Lewis and Clark had valued Coulter at the highest level of the 45-man group. Five months earlier, he had been court-martialed. Now he was standing on a hilltop with both captains, as some of the first white men to investigate a place the Native Americans feared to go. The expedition pressed on. The Missouri carried them deeper into country that no American had ever

mapped, through landscapes that grew stranger and more vast with every mile. They followed the river straight up through the middle of modern-day South Dakota and then modern-day North Dakota. They sat in council with the Yankton Nekota people, saw their first prairie dog town and their first grizzly bear and made it to Mandan and Hadatsa villages north of present-day Bismarck at the end of October 1804. The Corps built a crude camp called Fort Mandan to wait out the winter, and the captains hired a French-Canadian trapper called Tucson Charbonneau to be their guide and interpreter in the spring when they resumed their journey. Charbono would bring with him his Shoshone teenage wife, Sakajua, whose name was likely pronounced closer to Sakagawea.

In April of 1805, with the weather warming, Lewis and Clark sent a party of about 15 back to St. Louis with letters and journals and items collected along the way. The remaining 30 or so members of the Corps of Discovery followed the Missouri River as it continued north and then curved west into modern-day Montana. They spent three months on the Missouri until they were forced to leave the river and start the grueling overland portion of the expedition. Mid-August, William Clark took John Colter and ten other men across the Continental Divide in the Bitterroot Mountains on horseback into present-day Idaho to scout the Salmon

River. In doing so, William Clark became the first white man to cross the continental divide at Lemai Pass on the border between Idaho and Montana. With the crucial help of Sakajua, Clark held a council with a group of Shoshone and enlisted a guide called Old Toby. The group scouted a portion of the nearby Salmon River where the raging waters flowed through a narrow, rocky channel. With no hope of using that stretch of the Salmon River,

they called it River of No Return. Clark concluded that the expedition would have to buy horses from the Shoshone and continue overland, over the Bitterroot Mountains at a place called Lolo Pass, and down the other side until they could find a safer river to ride west. Clark needed to send word to Meriwether Lewis and the rest of the Corps, who were a full 70 miles back down the trail. Clark had two sergeants with him, gas and prior, but he chose private John Coulter to go alone on horseback. Historian Burton Harris later wrote that the

assignment was, quote, actually a promotion for Coulter, as it signified that he had advanced to that select group whose members the two captains considered competent enough to undertake difficult assignments on their own. Colter set out alone late in the afternoon on a Saturday toward the end of August. At elevations of 4,000 to 7,000 feet, the weather could be hot during the day, but freezing cold at night. It took Colter two days to reach Lewis and the others at a Shoshonee camp. Colter led Lewis's group up to Clark's group, and then they all rode north along the Bitterroot range on horses provided by the Shoshone. The next part of the journey, crossing the bitter roots would be the worst.

The next six weeks or so were the most brutal part of the expedition. The core of discovery had to ride into the Bitterroot Mountains on what would today be the Montana side of the range, cross the ridge at a place called Lolo Pass, and then traverse the backside of the mountains down into modern-day Idaho. Winter starts early in the mountains. It rained, and then the rain turned to hail. The group cut roads through thickets for the horses.

to pass, and several horses fell and one was nearly killed. There was little to eat. The men woke to frost and snow and frozen moccasins and a breakfast of parched corn. Then on September 4th, the expedition had an unexpected stroke of luck. They arrived at a large encampment of the friendly sailish people who hugged them, smoked with them, and shared food with the travelers. While the hospitality was welcome, communication was extraordinarily difficult. The groups could only communicate through a chain of translations. English to French, to Hidotza, to Shoshone, delivered by Sakajua to a Shoshone boy living among the Salish,

and finally to Salish. Clark bought 13 horses, and the Salish women gave roots and berries to the hungry men. The Corps followed the Bitterroot River north for three more days until it reached Travelers Rest Creek near present-day Lolo, Montana. There, the group rested and prepared for the next push west. On Tuesday, September 10th, a pleasantly warm day, the captain sent out the best hunters. John Coulter alone followed Lolo Creek upstream where he found himself in the most tense situation of the expedition.

Coulter encountered three sailish warriors from a different village than the one he had just left. The warriors were mounted on fine horses, and Lewis wrote that the warriors were alarmed and prepared for battle with bows and arrows. If it came to a fight, Coulter, with a single-shot rifled musket, would die fast. The warriors signed to him to lay down his gun, and he did. Then he advanced toward them, unarmed, making signs of peace which he had learned on the trip. The warriors lowered their weapons and came to him in a friendly manner. Through sign language, which Coulter had been quietly learning throughout the expedition, he communicated that they

should come with him to the expedition's camp. They agreed. One of the warriors took Coulter up behind him on his horse, and they rode down to the camp together. When the Shoshonee guide, Old Toby, spoke with the three sailors in sign language, he learned that they were pursuing two Shoshone thieves who had stolen 23 horses. One of the warriors told the captains that his people were numerous and lived on the Columbia River, where the water was navigable to the sea. It would require five sleeps, six days of travel to reach them. That was critical intelligence. Lewis and Clark named the spot Colter Creek in honor of the Kentucky frontiersmen who had been wise enough to put down his gun and talk rather than start a fight he likely would have lost. With that said, the timetable of

six days of travel was a bit optimistic. The Corps of Discovery started its hike over the Bitterroot Mountains on September 11, 1805, and it took 11 days to make it to a meadow called Weite Prairie on the other side. The group nearly froze and nearly died of starvation before it met a friendly group of Nezpers in what is today central Idaho. But now the group was on the home stretch, relatively speaking. They loaded back into canoes and followed the Clearwater River to the Snake River in the southeast corner of Washington State. The snake led them to the Columbia River and westward to the Pacific Ocean. On November 7, 1805, William Clark wrote the most famous entry in his journal,

Ocean in View, Oh the Joy. They were still 20 miles from the sea, but on November 15th, the Corps of Discovery reached the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River, one year, six months, and one day after leaving Camp de Bois, just north of St. Louis.

They had traveled 4,142 miles by Clark's calculation, and they had accomplished their mission. They found a route across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. For the winter of 1805, they built Fort Clatsup, named for the Clatsub tribe in the area on the south bank of the Columbia River. And in the spring of 1806, they had to turn around and do the whole journey all over again. The return journey was much faster, six months instead of 18 months, but it nearly killed Meriwether Lewis. The Corps of Discovery reversed course and traveled back up the Columbia River and the Snake River and the Clearwater River to the Overland Trail to the Bitterroot Mountains. They crossed the mountains again at Low Low Pass, and then on the Montana side, they split into two groups to explore more territory.

In the first week of July 1806, William Clark led his group south along the Bitter Roots to the Jefferson River, and then followed it to the Yellowstone River and took the Yellowstone all the way. across southern Montana. Meanwhile, Meriwether Lewis led his group to the Missouri River and then up the Marias River into the northernmost reaches of Montana. On their trek from the Marius back down to the Missouri, members of the Corps of Discovery had their only violent encounter with Native Americans. Lewis and three other men had camped with eight young Blackfoot warriors. The next morning, July 27th, the warriors tried to steal the explorer's guns and horses.

Lewis shot and killed one warrior and another member of the party stabbed a warrior. The remaining warriors fled, and Lewis's detachment rejoined the rest of the group and continued to the Missouri River. Lewis's group followed the Missouri east across Montana, retracing their steps from the previous spring. In the second week of August, 1806, the Corps of Discovery reunited at the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, on the present-day border between Montana and North Dakota. In essence, the exploratory part of the mission was done. Even though they still had many miles to go, all they had to do was ride the Missouri River back down to St. Louis.

The expedition would probably be finished in a few weeks, and with the end of the journey so close, John Colter made a surprising decision. Right before the reunion, Lewis's party with John Colter encountered two fur trappers from Illinois who were camped along the Missouri, Joseph Dixon and Forrest Hancock. They were the first white men the expedition had seen in 16 months. Dixon and Hancock had been trapping beaver in the wilderness for two years and had eventually drifted north to the upper reaches of the Missouri. The market for beaver pelts in the states and in Europe

was booming, and the trappers told Lewis they were determined to stay on the river and trap until they made a fortune. If John Colter spoke with Dixon and Hancock that first day, it wasn't noted. But over the next several days, the three men clearly had detailed conversations. On Sunday, August 17th, a couple days after the reunion of Lewis and Clark's groups, Colter made his request. He asked the captains for permission to leave the expedition and go back up the Missouri with Dixon and Hancock to trap Beaver. It was an extraordinary decision. The expedition was less than two months from St. Louis. Coulter had not seen American towns in more than two years.

Most men were desperate to get home. But Coulter had trapped 31 beaver a couple weeks earlier while hunting for Lewis's group. Coulter knew beaver peltz sold for $4 or $5 a piece in St. Louis. The 31 beaver Coulter had trapped in 10 days were worth nearly as much as the $178 the U.S. government had paid him. for the 27 months and thousands of miles he had traveled since leaving Camp Dubois. A single season of trapping could earn him more than several years of labor back east. Because of Coulter's exemplary performance during the expedition, the captains granted the discharge,

but only after warning the other men that no one else would be permitted to make the same request. They allowed it for Coulter and Coulter alone. The expedition provided Coulter with powder, lead and enough supplies to outfit him for two years. That very morning, Sunday, August 17, 1806, the other members of the Corps of Discovery wished John Coulter every success, and Coulter climbed into a small canoe with Dixon and Hancock. The three men drove their paddles into the water

and headed upstream on the Missouri, back into the wilderness. Mary Weather Lewis would never see John Coulter again. William Clark would see him in four years. Several of Coulter's friends from the expedition would see him much sooner than that, as the Mountain Man era officially began. Next time on Legends of the Old West, John Coulter's extraordinary adventures continue with a 500-mile winter journey through unmapped wilderness,

becoming the first white man to see the Teton Mountains, discovering hot springs now called Coulter's Hell, and a battle with Blackfoot warriors which forces him to endure a march of hundreds of miles to survive. That's next week on Legends of the Old West. To binge all the episodes of a new season and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts

or sign up through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This series was researched and written by Matthew Kearns, original music by Rob Belier. I'm Chris Wimmer. Thanks for listening.