Legends of the Old West - MOUNTAIN MEN Ep. 3 | “John Colter: Colter’s Run”

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

In 1808 or 1809, John Colter faces an extreme test of endurance and resilience when he is captured by Blackfoot warriors on one of the three forks of the Missouri River in present-day Montana. Afterward, he makes one final journey to the Three Forks region before he decides the risks are not worth the rewards. 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

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but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs? What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search Select Historical Occupational Records for free for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors. Search free until August 31st.

Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. It seems there will always be debate about whether John Coulter ran for his life in September of 1808 or September of 1809. If it was in 1808, he experienced one hell of a year, one for the history books, so to speak. In the winter of 1807 to 1808, Colter went on his famous 500-mile trek from the Big Horn River in Montana to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. After he returned in the spring of 1808, he went back out later that spring or early in the summer and survived a battle against Blackfoot Warriors. He then dragged himself on an injured leg, roughly 200 miles,

back to the fur-trapping base of Fort Raymond on the Big Horn River. After recovering, he and his friend John Potts went right back to the area where Coulter had been wounded, the Jefferson River, one of the three forks of the Missouri River, in what is now south-central Montana. That timeline would place Colter's most famous action in the autumn of 1808, probably September. Coulter and Pots worked the Jefferson River in the pattern that every trapper in Blackfoot country knew was the only way to stay alive, set the beaver traps at dusk, check them before dawn, and disappear during daylight hours. The Jefferson was rich with beaver, and for a while the system worked. The two men were alone on a crystal clear river that held what William Clark

described as luxuriant grass along the banks. It must have felt in the quiet hours before dawn, like Coulter and Pots had the country to themselves, but they did not. Early one morning, as mist hung over the water, Coulter and Pots were checking their traps when they heard a noise above them in the grass on the riverbanks. It sounded like the trampling of animals, a large herd moving fast, somewhere beyond the steep, high banks that lined both sides of the river and blocked their view. Coulter reacted immediately. He pulled his paddle into his dugout canoe and warned Potts. Indians were nearby. They needed to retreat. Pots disagreed. He insisted the noise was caused by Buffalo, and he called Coulter a coward.

Then several hundred Blackfoot warriors appeared on both sides of the river and motioned the two men to come ashore. Both men quickly dropped their beaver traps over the sides of their canoes into the shallow water in an attempt to hide the evidence of what they'd been doing. And maybe if they were really lucky, they would be able to come back later and find them. Colter obeyed the Blackfoot command and paddled to shore. The warriors seized him, disarmed him, and stripped him of all his clothing, including his moccasins. He stood on the riverbank, naked and defenseless, surrounded by hundreds of armed men.

As scary as it was, Colter urged Potts to come ashore too, but Potts refused. He pushed his canoe back into the current, saying he might as well as well. be killed all at once rather than being robbed and stripped. A warrior fired an arrow that struck Potts in the hip and knocked him into the bottom of his canoe. He sat back up and Coulter urged him again to surrender. Instead, Potts leveled his rifle at one of the warriors and shot him dead. The response was a barrage of arrows. Pots was hit by so many arrows that Coulter later said he was made a riddle of.

The warriors rushed into the stream, pulled what was left of pots onto the riverbank, and hacked his body to pieces with hatchets and knives. Then they turned their attention to Coulter. The relatives of the warrior's pots had killed wanted to slaughter Coulter as well, but others held them back. A few chiefs gathered in council and discussed the naked white man on the riverbank. They had seen him before. The white man had killed many Blackfoot warriors a few months earlier while fighting with Blackfoot enemies the crow in the flathead. He was a special kind of enemy, and the chiefs

decided to do something special with him. One of the chiefs turned to Coulter, pointed toward the open prairie of southern Montana, and said in the crow language, go, go away. Colter hesitated. He was certain they would fire the moment he was clear of the crowd, but then he began to walk. An old man gestured impatiently for Coulter to move faster. Coulter continued to move faster. Colter continued to walk, not understanding the full picture. After 80 or 100 yards, he looked back. The younger warriors were casting off things which might weigh them down, and now Colter understood.

He was supposed to run a race, and the prize was his scalp. If he won, he would live. If he got caught, well, it was best not to think about that. 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 three, John Coulter's Run. As John Coulter

looked back toward the bank of the Jefferson River, he watched a group of Blackfoot, which numbered in the hundreds, maybe as many as 800. In the group, a large company of young warriors with spears had prepared themselves for the chase. With a howl, the warriors started sprinting toward him. Coulter had been given a head start, but that was his only advantage. Otherwise, he was naked, unarmed, and barefoot. And when he turned back around and started running for his life, there were six miles of open prairie covered with sagebrush, prickly pear cactus, and sharp rocks between himself and the Madison River to the east. If he could reach the Madison he might have a chance.

If not, he would end up like John Potts. John Coulter pounded across the prairie. Cactus thorns tore into his bare feet in the first steps and never stopped. Rocks cut and bruised the skin that the cactus missed. Within the first mile, blood began gushing from Coulter's nose as vessels ruptured from the violence of the exertion. His legs grew heavy, but he bounded over sagebrush and stone. He glanced back to see the young war.

warriors spread out behind him in a long line. The fastest runners pulled ahead of the rest, but Coulter allowed himself to think that he might have a chance. Despite the burning muscles in his legs and the blood pouring from his nose and the agony in his feet, he was outrunning most of them. Most but not all. After roughly three miles, half the distance to the Madison River, Coulter looked back again. The main body of warriors had fallen well behind, but one man had not. A single Blackfoot runner, far ahead of the others, was closing the gap. He carried a spear. He was 20 yards behind Coulter, and he was gaining.

Coulter's body was failing him. His feet were shredded. Blood covered his face and chest. The Madison River was still close to three miles away, and the warrior behind him wasn't slowing down. Colter called out in the crow language, hoping his pursuer would spare him. The young Blackfoot didn't understand or didn't care. And then Coulter did something the warrior did not anticipate.

He stopped running. Coulter turned around, faced his pursuer, and raised his arms. Surprised by the suddenness of the reversal, and may be startled by the bloody appearance of the man in front of him, the Blackfoot warrior stumbled as he attempted to throw his spear. The point struck the ground and the shaft broke. In one motion, Coulter snatched up the broken spearhead and drove it through the fallen warrior's body, pinning him to the ground. Colter had realized, even through the frenetic action, that the contest had gone from one against many to one against one. One-on-one, he had used surprise to kill his enemy.

But the race was far from over. Colter grabbed the dying man's blanket and started running again. He ran with renewed vigor, while behind him, the other warriors reached the body of their fallen comrade. A ghastly wail of grief and fury rose up from the prairie. The hunt had gone from a game, a blood-gloor. sport to something desperate and personal. Colter clutched the blanket and the spearhead and he ran like mad. The river was close. He ran through the cover of a cottonwood grove and a copse of willows. Then he plunged into the cold water of the Madison River. Like Jack London 90 years in the future,

when the young man and many others hauled hundreds of pounds of supplies on their backs across hundreds of miles of territory in Alaska and the Yukon, including up the side of a small mountain, and completed a feat that wouldn't even be considered by modern reality game show producers, John Coulter had survived the first part of a race that put all outdoor survival TV shows to shame. Colter's contest, like London's, was actually real. The stakes were genuinely life or death, and the contest wasn't nearly done. Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs? What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search Select Historical Occupational Records for free

for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors. Search free until August 31st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. Half swimming and half running through the cold water of the Madison River, Coulter searched for any refuge he could find. Close beside him, rising about 10 feet above the surface of the water, stood a massive pile of driftwood and logs, tangled timber that had accumulated against the riverbank. It looked, one account said, like a coal pit.

And embedded within that tangle of wood, Coulter spotted something that most men would not have noticed, a beaver lodge. Colter knew beaver lodges. He had trapped them for years. He knew that the entrance was underwater, and that inside, above the waterline, there would be a chamber where the animals rested. There would be a dry platform of sticks and mud, insulated by the mass of the structure around it. He might be able to fit inside, just barely, if he could find the entrance and hold his breath long enough to reach the interior. Colter dove. He went under the surface of the river, found the submerged entrance, and pulled himself through.

He came up inside the Beaver Lodge in darkness, gasping for air, and found the platform. The space was just large enough to lie on his back, with his head above water, and his nose near a tiny gap between the logs where air could reach him. The water was cold, the space was cramped, but he was hidden. Blackfoot warriors arrived at the river within minutes. Colter could hear footsteps, voices, and the sounds of furious men urgently searching for their prey. They walked on the pile of driftwood above him. They drove their spears down into the logs to try to stab him or flush him out of whatever

hole he had found. All the while, Coulter lay motionless on the ledge in the beaver den, in the freezing water in the near total darkness, hardly daring to breathe. The warriors searched his side of the river and then splashed into the water and crossed the other side. They searched the far side of the river and then came back. Hours passed. The Blackfoot warriors were certain Colter was nearby. A naked, bleeding man could not simply vanish. They searched the area throughout the afternoon and returned to the driftwood pile again and again. But for whatever reason, they never tried to swim into the beaver den. Maybe they didn't

recognize it. Maybe they considered it, but believed it was impossible. Regardless, John Colter waited. There was nothing else he could do. He lay in the cold and the wet and the dark, with his body cramped, his feet mangled, and the water starting to wash away some of the blood that had caked on his body. Afternoon wore into evening, and the noises of his pursuers gradually faded. The gaps between searches grew longer, and then sometime after darkness fell, the sounds stopped. The Blackfoot warriors were gone, no doubt baffled by the turn of events and likely facing

mockery and scorn when they returned empty-handed. Even then, Colter didn't trust the silence. He continued to wait. Future generations of travelers and soldiers would learn painful lessons about the patients of Native American warriors, who could lie prone for hours and wait for the right moment to strike. There in the Beaver Lodge, with the river water growing colder and the night pressing down, Colter waited until he was as certain as he could be. Then he held his breath, pushed himself under the water and swam out of his hiding place. He emerged from the blackness of the beaver den into the darkness of night. The prairie around the Madison River was quiet.

The warriors had given up, or at least they had moved their search somewhere else. John Coulter was alive. He had a blanket and a broken spearhead and nothing else. He had survived the race from the Jefferson River to the Madison River, and then he had survived hours in a beaver den while warriors prowled all around. around him. Now, he had to survive the walk to Fort Raymond, more than 200 miles away. John Colter traveled all night. If the distances are taken at face value, Colter would have been caught on the Jefferson River just south of the modern town of

Three Forks, Montana. He would have been somewhere near a hill, now called Sakajia Bluff. That's where the distance between the Jefferson River and the Madison River is roughly six miles. From the Madison, he walked all night to the Gallatin River, the easternmost of the three forks of the Missouri. The Gallatin River branches into numerous smaller rivers and creeks, all of which wind their way southward toward the modern city of Bozeman, Montana. From the Madison to the nearest branch of the Gallatin, John Coulter would have walked about nine miles that first night. At the Gallatin River, he turned south, but he did not follow it into Bozeman Pass, a natural gals. in the high hills of southern Montana, through which the modern Interstate 90 now connects the city of Bozeman to the city of Livingston. If Coulter had used Bozeman Pass, he would have

followed the Yellowstone River all the way back to Fort Raymond, where the Big Horn River joined the Yellowstone. That would have been the most direct route to the fort, and it was the route William Clark had used in 1806. But Bozeman Pass was also the obvious route, where Coulter knew the Blackfoot warriors would expect him to go. So he swung wide. As he walked south along one of the branches of the Gallatin River, he ignored Bozeman Pass and continued down to the Gallatin range of the northern Rocky Mountains. Coulter was known for his incredible sense of direction, even in the dark.

And of the few white men in southern Montana, he knew the area better than anyone. He had crossed it during his 500-mile winter trek, and he had been back there with a group of Crow and Flathead a few months before his current plight. Now he was crossing the area again, though in the worst condition of his life. By dawn of the morning after he started his foot race across the prairie, Coulter had reached the Gallatin Range. He was making for a mountain pass, the only outlet from the valley. But just like the Bozeman Pass that he had already skipped,

he knew that his current trail was another likely place for a Blackfoot ambush. Fearing warriors might be guarding it, Coulter made a hard decision. Rather than approach the pass directly, he went four miles below it and then climbed the mountain itself. He hauled himself up the crag by grabbing rocks, shrubs, and tree branches. His tortured feet must have left bloodstains on the rocks, but by the time the sun was fully up, he had reached the top. He stayed concealed the entire day, watching the land below and waiting. He didn't see any warriors, but he also didn't dare move. He climbed down out of the Gallantin Range only after nightfall.

By the third day, Coulter was 40 or 50 miles southeast of the Jefferson River. His feet were a rash of blisters and embedded cactus thorns. He may have stripped bark from a sapling to wrap them and try to soothe the pain, but it would have provided only minimal help. And the real problem was not his feet, as painful as they were. The real problem was food. John Coulter was one of the finest hunters on the frontier, but it was impossible to hunt without a weapon. He couldn't kill anything with the broken spearhead from the dead Blackfoot warrior, so he used it as a small shovel.

Everything the Lewis and Clark expedition had taught him about surviving without a rifle came back now. Shoshone women had gathered roots, which could be eaten green or dried. Salish women had given the Corps of Discovery chemist roots, and Sakajuea had gathered bread root, which Meriwether Lewis had once dismissed as tasteless insipid food. Colter probably felt differently about it now. Best of all, breadroot could be eaten raw, and Colter likely ate a lot of it on the prairie. But that created another problem.

Suddenly, the type of food was almost worse than the lack of food. Coulter was a man accustomed to eating meat every day. The sudden switch to roots and berries gave him stomach cramps, diarrhea, fatigue, weakness, and sores. But he pushed on, growing more gaunt and exhausted, and covering fewer miles each day. Coulter continued in a southeasterly direction. If he had taken the most direct route, from the Jefferson River, he would have followed the Yellowstone River in more or less a straight line east to Fort Raymond. But in his effort to avoid Blackfoot warriors, he made a giant loop to the south, all the way into northern Wyoming.

There, he found Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River and finally turned north. He followed Clark's Fork up to the Yellowstone, near the present-day town of Laurel, Montana, a few miles outside of Billings. He walked northeast along the Yellowstone River, on battered feet with a tattered blackfoot blanket wrapped around him, clutching the broken spearhead. After nine or ten days, Coulter saw something he recognized, Pompey's Tower, a sandstone Butte along the Yellowstone River where William Clark had carved his name into the cliff face two years earlier. Coulter knew he was on the home stretch, though that home stretch was still 25 miles.

He continued to hobble downstream, traveling day and night, stopping only when he needed to rest. He subsisted on roots and the bark of trees. And on the 11th day after his run from the Jefferson River, John Coulter reached Fort Raymond. John Coulter may have looked at like a demon or a ghost or the dead risen from the grave as he approached Fort Raymond. He was a skeletal figure wrapped in a blanket, limping toward the outpost. His beard was long. His face and body were thin and emaciated by hunger. His limbs and feet were swollen and sore. The men at the fort stared at him, and no one recognized him until he said his name. He explained his ordeal, likely in brief, as the men

started to care for his nearly uncountable injuries. John Coulter had traveled more than 200 miles, barefoot, naked, naked, except for a ragged blanket, with only roots and tree bark to eat. The journey became known as Coulter's Run, and it remains one of the all-time feats of survival, endurance, and determination. It undoubtedly took Coulter weeks or maybe months to recover. And when he was finally back to full strength, he did what he always did. He volunteered to go back to the place where he had nearly been killed.

In March of 1810, either six months or 18 months after his ordeal, again, depending on which accounts you believe, Coulter signed on to guide Pierre Menard's expedition to the Three Forks of the Missouri. Coulter led 32 men west on the Yellowstone River from Fort Raymond, through Bozeman Pass to the Gallatin River, then to the confluence of the Three Forks. In April, the group set up a camp-sowne, site on ground between the Jefferson and Madison Rivers, only a couple miles north of the land

over which John Colter ran to escape Blackfoot Warriors. They built a crude outpost called Henry's Fort, named after Andrew Henry, who would later team up with William Ashley to form the fur trapping company which employed legendary mountain men Jedediah Smith, Hugh Glass, and Jim Bridger. In April of 1810, Andrew Henry and the others of Pierre Menard's group were right to build a fort for protection. The Blackfoot Nation had not forgotten about the white man who got away, and its warriors would not have tolerated more encroachment anyway. Within nine days of arriving, the expedition suffered its first losses. A detachment, including John Colter, had been out

trapping when Blackfoot warriors attacked. Two trappers were killed, and three more were never seen again. The rest scattered. A few survivors rushed back to the fort and reported the attack, but most of the detachment was still missing, including Coulter. The men at the fort waited all night and the next day for an assault, but it never happened. Then the survivors, including John Coulter, straggled back to the fort. That, at long last, was the end for John Coulter. He had survived another attack in nearly the same place where his friend John Pots had been killed and where his run had started.

After three years of work with Manuel Lise's company, Colter was convinced that the company would fail. At that time, the trappers were still badly outnumbered by Native American warriors, and Coulter thought it was only a matter of time before all the trappers were killed. The next morning, Coulter left Henry's Fort and Pierre Menard's group, and Manuel Liza's expedition, and the Western Frontier. And he did it not a moment too soon. Shortly after Coulter left, Blackfoot warriors killed two Shawnee hunters who were with

Menard's group, and they killed George Drouillard, the man who was known as the best hunter of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Members of Menard's group found Drayard's butchered body near the spot where John Potts had been killed. A few weeks later, Pierre Menard, the leader of the group, packed up and traveled back to St. Louis. That left only Andrew Henry and a few others at the fort, and they soon abandoned the outpost after yet another Blackfoot attack. By that time, John Coulter was well on his way to St. Louis. He took the Yellowstone River back to Fort Raymond, and then he continued on the Yellowstone to its junction with the Missouri River

on the modern border between Montana and North Dakota. And then, for the third time, he started following the Missouri River across North Dakota until it turned south and moved down through South Dakota and past the future states of Nebraska and Iowa, and then across Missouri to St. Louis. Seven years after he had set off into the great unknown of the West, he was back. With the profits from his time as a trapper,

John Colter purchased a farm near New Haven, Missouri in the settlement of St. John's, a community composed mainly of families who had immigrated from Kentucky and Tennessee. Daniel Boone, who was in his mid-70s, lived right across the Missouri River. Coulter, who was in his mid-30s, quickly married a woman named Sally and settled into a low-key existence for a couple years. They had a son named Hiram. John Colter told his story to naturalist John Bradbury, who produced the most detailed account of Colter's adventures during that era,

though it came out five years after Colter died. Washington Irving would later borrow freely from Bradbury's account for his 1836 book Astoria, the book that effectively launched the John Colter legend and introduced the name Colter's Hell to the world. On April 18, 1811, one year after Coulter returned from the West, the Missouri Gazette identified Coulter as a celebrated Hunter and Woodsman. It was as close to fame as Coulter achieved in his lifetime.

That same year, William Price Hunt attempted to recruit Coulter for another journey West. For the first time, Coulter said no, though he didn't enjoy his retirement for long. In 1812, the U.S. and Great Britain were back at war, and Coulter enlisted in the militia to guard the western frontier. He served under Nathan Boone, Daniel Boone's son, though only for a short time. John Coulter died on May 7, 1812. He was in his late 30s, 37, 38, 39 years old. With no official birth date, it was impossible to know for sure. And like the mystery of his place of birth, there's mystery about the place of his death.

death and burial. No one knows for sure where he died or where he was buried. The cause of death is known. It was jaundice. In the end, an ailment of the liver did what Blackfoot warriors and years of travel in the mountains and rivers of the West could not. His widow reportedly buried him on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, but the exact spot has been lost to history. Nathan Boone honored Coulter's memory by naming his son, born in 1816, John Coulter Boone. The first known historical record of John Coulter is a journal entry by William Clark, recorded on a snowy December morning in 1803. Coulter, Kill a Deer, and a Turkey.

Shortly after Coulter returned to St. Louis, he reunited with his former captain and provided detailed information about his own adventures and the landscape of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which Clark incorporated into a manuscript about the core of discovery and the first American exploration of the West. of the West. From total obscurity on the Kentucky frontier to extraordinary adventures across thousands of miles of the western frontier, John Coulter left nothing behind, no letters, no journals, no diaries. He served on the most important expedition in American history, crossed the continental divide alone in winter, became the first white man to see the Grand Teton's and the geothermal wonders of the Yellowstone region, survived multiple Blackfoot attacks, outran a war party on foot, and opened the Rocky Mountain West to American exploration. He recorded none of it in his own

hand, but what he left behind was an American legend. Next time on Legends of the Old West, 10 years after John Colter dies, 18-year-old Jim Bridger joins the fur company of William Ashley and Andrew Henry. The Ashley Henry expedition follows Colter's footstead. steps up the Missouri River, but young Jim Bridger's first season in the West turns into a nightmare after the Ericorah attacked the company and a grizzly bear mall's bridgers friend Hugh Glass. 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 very

researched and written by Matthew Kearns. Additional writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Villeer. Thanks for listening.