Legends of the Old West - MOUNTAIN MEN Ep. 2 | “John Colter: Colter’s Hell”

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

John Colter’s extraordinary adventures in the West continue with a 500-mile winter trek across the Rocky Mountains, during which he becomes the first American to see the Teton Mountains and Jackson Hole. He witnesses marvelous geothermal wonders in the region that will eventually become Yellowstone National Park. And he performs another feat of endurance after he narrowly survives a battle against Blackfoot warriors. 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

Everyone in the core of discovery was surprised when John Colter made his request. Colter had been with the group for nearly three years since October of 1803, and now he wanted to leave right before they finished an epic adventure. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had successfully guided a party, with a lot of help from Native American groups along the way, from St. Louis, Missouri to the Pacific Ocean on the Oregon coast. They had traveled more than 4,000 miles. They had navigated the Missouri from the area around the village of St. Louis, up through the Dakotas and across Montana to the Bitterroot Mountains.

They had nearly died crossing the mountains, but they had followed the Clearwater River to the Snake River, to the Columbia River, to the Pacific Ocean. The journey had taken 18 months, and then they had done it all over again in the opposite direction as they traveled back to St. Louis. In all that time and in all that hardship, they had only lost one man, and that was to a medical emergency which was probably a ruptured appendix. Now, in August of 1806, they were at the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, on the future border between the states of Montana and North Dakota. They just had to take the Missouri River down to St. Louis, and they would be done. The hardest parts of the expedition were behind them,

and they were within two months of completing an historic quest, and John Coulter, one of the most important members of the team, wanted to leave the group. Coulter had met two of the earliest American fur trappers in the West, Joseph Dixon and Forrest Hancock, and he wanted to stay on the Missouri and trap beaver. Beaver pelts were some of the most valuable items on the market, and the prospect of making a fortune in the trapping business sounded better than whatever Coulter might do when he returned to American communities in the east. Lewis and Clark granted Coulter's request, and Coulter left the Corps of Discovery to partner with Dixon and Hancock.

Unfortunately, the partnership was anticlimactic, and it lasted just one winter. What exactly went wrong, no one recorded, but by the spring of 1807, all three were separately heading back down the Missouri River towards St. Louis. Dixon arrived at a cluster of Rikarov villages around June 13th, and was promptly robbed of his food, rifle and furs. Hancock came down nine days later, and Coulter appeared to have slipped past the Ericorah villages quietly, possibly at night, without being noticed. Whatever fortune the three men had hoped to find, it had not materialized. By late June, Coulter had reached the Platte River in present-day Nebraska. He was only a couple weeks from St. Louis, and then he saw the keel boats. They were flying the flag of a new enterprise led by a man named Manuel Lisa. Lisa was a shrewd fur trader

who had been paying close attention when Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis the previous September and told of streams in the west filled with Beaver. Lisa partnered with Pierre Menard and William Morrison outfitted two keelboats with $16,000 worth of supplies and launched the most ambitious private fur trading expedition the Missouri had ever seen. His plan was to build a forts along the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, trading posts where trappers could work from a home base, and Native Americans could exchange pelts for goods. Lisa had already recruited six veterans of the Lewis and Clark expedition, including George Duryard, the expedition's best hunter and John Potts, Coulter's old companion. Lisa could hardly have found more qualified hands,

but he wanted one more. Lisa persuaded Coulter to guide his expedition. It was the second time in less than a year that John Coulter had been on the doorstep of returning to the east, and for the second time in less than a year, Coulter turned around. Lisa may have sweetened the offer by not requiring Coulter to sign the three-year contract the other man had committed to, leaving Coulter free to trap and trade on his own once they reached their destination. Whatever the terms, Coulter once again headed back upstream. Back into the wilderness he had just spent months trying to leave. leave. 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 Coulter, 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 Coulter. This is episode two, John Coulter's Hell. The Lisa Expedition traveled more than 1900 miles, pushing past the Mandan villages in central North Dakota, past the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, and up the Yellowstone into southern Montana. In October or November of 1807, Lisa reached the mouth of the Big Horn River and found a spot with plentiful timber. He built a trading post and named it after his young son, Ramon. The other man anglicized it to Fort Raymond. And then Lisa

asked John Coulter to do something extraordinary. He wanted Coulter to leave the fort alone, travel into the winter wilderness, find the scattered camps of the crow and other tribes, and tell them about the new trading post where they could exchange beaver pelts for goods, including firearms. Colter would need to travel roughly 500 miles of unmapped territory with nothing more than a 30-pound pack, a rifle, and some ammunition. And then, of course, he would have to interact with multiple Native American groups who might find him friendly or an easy target.

to rob and kill. John Coulter said yes, and he set out from Fort Raymond in October of 1807. Part of the 30 pounds stuffed into his pack was a supply of trade goods intended as gifts for the Native Americans. Colter had acquired some basic communication skills,

mostly in the form of sign language, but they all hoped the gifts would be better icebreakers than introductions. Lastly, Coulter had snow shoes for the deep snow he knew was coming, And that was all. It just started walking into unknown territory. The mission was simple to describe and almost impossible to execute. Coulter was to travel southwest from the Big Horn Basin into the upper reaches of the

Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains, cross the continental divide, locate the winter camps of the Crow and other friendly tribes, inform them of Lisa's new trading post, and then return to the fort. 500 miles through some of the most forbidding terrain in North America, in the dead of winter, alone. But somebody had to go. Lisa's business model relied heavily on convincing the crow and other tribes to bring their beaver pelts to Fort Raymond. The crow controlled much of the Yellowstone and Big Horn region, and they were under constant pressure from the Blackfeet, who possessed superior weaponry, guns,

thanks to their long-standing trade relationships with the British. Lisa correctly anticipated that the crow would pay handsomely in pelts for access to firearms that would help level the balance of power. But first, someone had to find them and tell them the trading post existed. So Coulter walked, day after day, pushing southwest on snowshoes through deep snow, rising up into the mountains toward the continental divide. He built fires each night and slept in shelters, constructed from branches or whatever cover the landscape offered. He hunted as he went,

elk and deer when he could find them. But when game was scarce, he fell back on the knowledge he had gained during the Lewis and Clark expedition, the roots and berries that native women had taught him to eat. The crow and Shoshone had been crossing the mountains for centuries, but Colter was almost certainly the first white man to attempt it alone in the winter. If he broke his leg, if he fell through ice, if his rifle misfired at the wrong moment. No one would ever know what happened to him. He would simply disappear, the snow would cover his tracks, and that would be the end of the story.

But Coulter had an instinct for direction that bordered on supernatural. During the Lewis and Clark expedition, observers had noted that once a destination was fixed in his mind, he could go to it as surely in darkness as he could in broad daylight. That sense, honed during his youth on the Kentucky frontier, and tested across the breadth of the continent, was now the only thing standing between him and oblivion. And then, sometime in the early winter, weeks into his journey,

John Coulter stood in a pass of the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains and looked west across miles of snow-covered peaks. He took his first step across the continental divide, toward a valley on the other side of the mountains, which would one day be called Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this. school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Zinke's sliced deli-mee products for always

$375 and get Life Brand Pyrvita Shampoo or Conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready, with a whole world and more. Most historians agree that John Coulter probably crossed the continental divide at a place now called Union Pass, 9,000 feet above sea level

in western Wyoming. But Coulter didn't keep a journal and he didn't draw his own map. The only record of his journey comes from second hand accounts and from geographical details he later provided to William Clark, who incorporated them into a map that was first published in 1814. That map has been picked apart by generations of historians, each proposing a different interpretation of the line Clark drew to represent Colter's route. As one scholar put it, the effort to reconstruct where Coulter actually went amounts to trying to,

quote, prove the ultimately unprovable. Whether Colter Crossed at Union Pass or somewhere else, the assumption is that from the headwaters of the wind river, he descended to the west and reached the broad valley that would later be called Jackson Hole. From Jackson Hole on a clear day, Coulter would have looked west and seen three massive jagged peaks rising from the valley floor. They were the mountains that French Canadian fur trappers would later name Le Trois Teton, now simply known as the Teton Mountains. John Coulter had no name for them. He had no audience to share them with. He simply saw them, the first known white man to do so, and then moved on. Jackson Hole was equal parts opportunity

and danger. The valley offered good hunting and shelter from the worst of the mountain weather, but it was contested territory. The blackfeet hunted there, and so did the crow and Shoshone. A solitary white man, no matter how skilled, was vulnerable. The scholarly debate about Coulter's route extend to what he did next. Some historians believe he crossed Teeton Pass into Pierre's Hole, present-day Teeton Basin in Idaho, before turning north. Others believe he stayed east of the Teetons. Still others have proposed routes that took him as far south as the Green River country. Whatever the exact path, at some point during his circuit, Coulter turned north and entered a stretch of country that would change his reputation forever. Near the canyon of the north fork of the

Shoshone River in the vicinity of present-day Cody, Wyoming. Colter encountered something for which no frontier experience could have prepared him. The ground itself seemed alive. Geysers shot boiling water into the air. Hot springs colored the rocks with mineral deposits in shades of yellow, orange, and white. Mud pots bubbled and hissed with gases that smelled of sulfur. Steam vented from cracks in the earth. The thermal area covered roughly one square mile, and there was nothing like it anywhere in the known world. Colter may have reached the northern edge of Yellowstone Lake, where he would have seen similar geothermal phenomena,

though whether he actually entered what is now Yellowstone National Park is yet another point of disagreement. Even if he didn't go that far, Coulter witnessed strange wonders and described them accurately when he returned. Coulter completed his 500-mile winter trek, from the Big Horn River across the Rocky Mountains, to Jackson Hole and back again in the spring of 1808. He was gone for roughly six months.

When he walked back to Fort Raymond and told the other trappers what he had seen, boiling springs, steaming ground and the smell of brimstone rising from the earth, they didn't believe him. Not a word. The men in Manuel Liza's group had seen the east and the northwest. They'd seen rivers, lakes, forests, mountains, and beaches, but they'd never seen anything as wild as Coulter described. The trappers mocked his descriptions and derisively called the region Coulter's Hell. The place trappers called Coulter's Hell was most likely the thermal area on the Shoshone River

near Cody, about 50 miles east of the boundary of modern-day Yellowstone National Park. Washington Irving, the first writer to publish the name, described it in 1837 as a place full of gloomy terrors, its hidden fires, smoking pits, noxious streams, and the all-es pervading smell of brimstone. In 1895, historian Hiram Chittenden muddied the issue by implying that Colter's Hell referred to the part of Yellowstone National Park, which is home to the famous Geyser Old Faithful, and that misconception has persisted ever since. The National Park Service has said, with some dry humor, no item of Yellowstone history is more widely believed, more universally beloved, and more transparently, incorrect.

Historian Hiram Chittenden also wrote that John Colter's 500-mile winter trek, quote, deserves to be classed among the most celebrated performances in the history of American exploration. Colter probably didn't give much consideration to history, and he was never one to rest on his laurels. With his successful return to Fort Raymond

in March or April of 1808, he had completed his mission for Manuel Lisa. Colter found the crow and told them about the trading post. He had mapped in his head vast stretches of territory that no white man had ever documented. But there was precious little time to recover from his adventure. Warm weather is in short supply on the high plains, and it could not be wasted.

Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 1808, sources don't agree on exactly when. John Colter was back out on the prairie, about 250 miles from Fort Raymond. He was somewhere near the Three Forks of the Missouri River, very loosely in the wide territory between the modern cities of Bozeman and Butte, Montana. He had seen some of that area three years earlier with the Lewis and Clark expedition, and now he was back, but in the company of a group of about 800, crow and flathead.

They knew the three forks of the Missouri were teeming with beaver, but the Blackfeet also knew it. The Blackfoot tribe considered the area its hunting grounds, and it would not be able to beaver. let a large incursion go unchallenged. According to the story, the Blackfeet assembled an army of approximately 1,500 warriors. They crept up on the combined group of 800 crow and flathead and attacked without warning. What followed was one of the largest battles of the fur trade era, though it received far less attention than later engagements because the only white man present left no written record of it. What is known came from Thomas James, who heard the account directly from John Coulter.

The area of the battleground was not all that far from a river valley where the Sioux and Cheyenne would fight the 7th cavalry of the U.S. Army 68 years in the future, long after the mountain men were gone. Despite being outnumbered 2 to 1, the crow and flathead held their own. Sometime during the intense fighting, John Coulter suffered a severe wound to one of his legs. There's no consensus on whether the wound was from an arrow or a musket ball. But whatever caused it, the wound forced Coulter to crawl into a dense tangle of brush for cover.

He took up a defensive position, sitting on the ground with his wounded leg beneath him, and loaded and fired, loaded and fired, loaded and fired, and his marksmanship from the thicket was devastating. The Blackfeet took special notice of the white man, sitting in the brush, fighting alongside their enemies, sniping their warriors with deadly accuracy. They would never forget it. From that day forward, the Blackfeet considered John Coulter a personal enemy, and by extension, they deepened their hostility toward all Americans in their territory. Coulter had not come to fight the Blackfeet he had come to trade with the Crow, but the Blackfeet didn't draw that distinction, and the consequences would nearly kill Coulter later that year.

But in the fight in the first half of 1808, the combined force of Crow and Flathead withstood the attack from the Blackfeet. The Blackfeet pulled back from the assault and left the area. The Crow and Flathead eventually moved on as well, but without John Colter. How or why Colter became separated from them after the battle is not clear in the historical record. But whatever happened, John Colter now faced a journey of hundreds of miles, alone and wounded, to Fort Raymond. On a straight line, it's approximately 250 miles from the general. region of the battleground to the fort. Depending on the exact location of the battle and the exact

route Colter used to get home, it's possible he could have traveled very close to the future site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Fort Raymond was on the south bank of the Yellowstone River, where it joins the Big Horn River. If Colter stayed far to the south of the Yellowstone and moved through Crow Territory until he hit the Big Horn and then followed the Big Horn River up to the Yellowstone, he would have been 13 miles from the location of Custer's last stand. Whatever the route, John Coulter picked himself up and started another long, dangerous journey by himself. We make things just for college life, like the Rosenmandel blackout curtains in gray. They say you can't put a price on sleep, but we did for the low low price

of 4999. Why are you in my room? Sh, go back to sleep. You have a big exam tomorrow. Shop back to school at IKEA. In typical fashion, for a story in that time and that place, little information was recorded about John Coulter's journey back to Fort Raymond. A couple years later, a young writer named Henry Brackenridge met Manuel Lisa and noted simply that Coulter, quote, returned to the establishment, entirely alone and without a

several hundred miles. The journey must have taken weeks, four, five, six weeks. No details have ever been found which hint at the specific hardships he faced along the way, but the territory he would have crossed featured rivers, creeks, ravines, rolling hills, prairie, and maybe even mountains, all while dragging an injured leg. He likely made it back to Fort Raymond toward the end of June, maybe early July. But he was definitely there by July, when Manuel Lee, Pact the season's furs for delivery to St. Louis.

At Fort Raymond, Coulter found himself in the company of another convalescent, John Potts, his old Lewis and Clark companion, who was recovering from injuries sustained in a brawl between trapper Edward Rose and Manuel Lisa. Coulter and Potts served together in the core of discovery from 1803 to 1806. They had both joined Manuel Lisa's operation in 1807, and now they were recuperating side by side in 1808 at an outpost on the Big Horn River. While they recovered, they planned their next venture. Coulter and Potts agreed to go back to the Three Forks region.

Despite the enormous battle which had nearly killed Coulter and the journey alone back to the fort which had nearly killed him again, Coulter was ready to go back for one simple reason. That's where the beaver were. Like infamous American bank robber Willie Sutton would say 150 years in the future when asked why he robbed banks. That's where the money is. But the area around the Three Forks

was also where the Blackfeet were. At that time, the western portion of the future state of Montana was dominated by a collection of tribes which would be known as the Blackfoot Confederacy, along with their allies, the Grovan. The Sioux, the northern Cheyenne, and the Crow were mostly to the east,

near the Big Horn, Powder, and Tongue Rivers, and beyond. The Blackfoot nation and its allies controlled an immense territory, stretching from the Saskatchewan River in Canada, south to the headwaters of the Missouri, and west to the passes of the Rocky Mountains. The total area would have been well over 100,000 square miles, but their population only reached an estimated 15,000 at the peak of their power. That was a lot of land to try to hold with so few people. They were magnificent warriors who excelled at ambush tactics, hit-and-run attacks, and feigned retreats. they rarely took male captives. Blackfoot warriors fought to the death, and they expected the same

from their enemies. But a major reason why they were able to hold power with relatively few people was trade. For decades, the Blackfeet managed a strategic advantage over their neighboring tribes through their trading relationships with the British. The Hudson's Bay Company and the Northwest Company both operated out of Canada. Through those relationships, the Blackfeet obtained firearms before most of their rivals. The balance of power depended on keeping it that way. So any trader who supplied guns to the crow, the flathead, or the Shoshone, was not just a competitor, he was a threat to Blackfoot survival.

And that was what Manuel Lisa intended to do. Fort Raymond existed to trade with the crow, not just beaver pelts, but guns too. And the man Lisa had sent to find the crow and bring them to the fort to build those trading partnerships was John Coulter. Along the way, Coulter had the bad luck to get caught in a battle fighting with the enemies of the Blackfeet. And after Coulter killed a bunch of Blackfoot warriors, while on a mission to give guns to Blackfoot enemies, Coulter was marked for death. Sometime in the autumn of 1808, according to historian and author David Weston Marshall, John Coulter had recovered from his leg wound, and he and John Pott's departed Fort Raymond in two canoes.

They were headed for the three forks of the Missouri, which are the Gallatin, the Madison, and the Jefferson. Two of the three are named for American presidents of the era. In the summer of 1808, Thomas Jefferson was halfway through his final year of eight as America's third president. At the end of the year, James Madison would be elected the fourth president. The Gallatin River is named for Albert Gallatin, the Treasury Secretary under Jefferson, who completed a landmark work in 1808 called, Report, on roads, canals, harbors, and rivers. That report was the first step toward a nationwide system of transportation for the rapidly expanding United States. And for the next 60 years, until the

railroad boom of the 1870s, rivers would be the fastest way to travel long distances. So one of the three rivers which joined to form the mighty Missouri was named for Albert Gallatin. Coulter and Potts passed the Gallatin first and then the Madison, on the three rivers, which joined to form the mighty Missouri, was named for Albert Gallatin. the Madison on the way toward their destination of the Jefferson River. The Jefferson was the westernmost of the three, and it's the extension of the Missouri that both men used as part of the Lewis and Clark expedition three years earlier. They knew the river was thick with beaver, and John Potts badly needed money from those pelts. He was in debt up to his eyeballs. Potts signed one promissory note after another to outfit himself for the expedition. His rifle,

beaver traps, alls, blue beads, knives, flint, steel, blankets, needles, thread, fish hooks, powder, lead, axe, kettle, tomahawk, and a good supply of tobacco, were all purchased on credit. He signed notes for the merchants who sold him the goods, in which he promised he would pay for the goods when he returned with his beaver pelts. His debts had climbed to several hundred dollars. But that was the enticing part of the business. One good seems, season of trapping could repay all those debts. On the high end, one good season could make a man's fortune. And in 1808, Coulter and Potts were in no danger of running short of Beaver. The crisis of overtrapping was just beginning in 1808, and it wouldn't hit its worst levels for another few years.

Manuel Lisa's operation would soon grow to roughly 350 trappers in the rivers and streams around the northern Rockies. John Jacob Astor would bring more with his American fur company, and two years later in 1810, with the launch of the Pacific Fur Company. William Ashley and Andrew Henry would start their company in the early 1820s, which would employ legendary mountain men Jedediah Smith, Hugh Glass, Jim Bridger, and others. But in 1808, Andrew Henry was already working in the West. He was one of the first men to join Manuel Liza's operation, and he would lead his own expedition to the Three Forks region the year After, Coulter and Potts set out in that direction.

So in 1808, the danger in the area of the Jefferson River was not the lack of beaver. It was Blackfoot Warriors. The last two times John Coulter had been in the area, he had been with much larger groups. The first was the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the second was with 800 Crow and Flathead. Now, Coulter and Pots were there by themselves, just two men in canoes in picturesque country. William Clark had described the Jefferson River as perfectly transparent, a haven of peace with a riverbed of smooth pebble and gravel, and luxuriant grasses lining the banks. But with the riverbanks and their luxuriant grasses high above the two men in the canoes on the water, Coulter and Potts could not see the hundreds of Blackfoot warriors approaching. The first sign of trouble was a rustling noise which concerned Coulter but which pots dismissed as an animal.

probably a buffalo moving through the grass. Those brief moments of dismissal would be the last of John Potts' life, and they would lead to the most harrowing experience of John Coulter's life. Next time on Legends of the Old West, in the final installment of John Coulter's story, the first mountain man runs for his life. The ordeal soon convinces him to retire from the fur trapping business as combat between Native American tribes and fur trappers intensifies. At the same time, another war between the U.S. and Britain begins. 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. Additional writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.

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