John Colter, Mountain Man

The Indians tortured and killed Potts. For some reason, the Blackfeet gave Colter a chance to save himself, interesting, considering the vendetta they had against him. They asked him if he was a good runner. He said he was slow.

So they gave him a head start of several hundred yards. In fact, he was a very good runner and had never lost a race as a kid. They took all his clothes and shoes before letting him go. He managed to outdistance them all after a mile, but one. The one started gaining on him because by then Colter's feet were cut and bloody and full of thorns. He stopped and let out a war cry. The Indian lunged at him, but he was able to kill him first. Then he ran to a nearby river and hid under the water at a log jam. The other Indians looked everywhere but couldn't find him. Half frozen he escaped into a forest. A week later after over 100 miles, living off nothing but berries and roots he gathered, Colter finally reached Lisa's fort (Fort Manuel).

A year later he returned to the Blackfeet country on a trapping expedition. But within a few days the Blackfeet had killed and scalped five men, so the rest of the party returned to the fort. He stayed in the wilderness until 1810, when he led an expedition to the Three Forks territory, where another fur trading post was established. But that year would be his last in the wilderness.

In 1810 he gave up the mountain man's life and settled on a farm in Missouri, a neighbor of Daniel Boone. In 1811, Wilson Price Hunt, of the Astor fur company, tried to get Colter to lead his party, but he declined. He married a girl named Nancy Hooker, but their marriage was a short one. He died of jaundice in 1813. There was no money for a coffin or a decent burial, so his wife laid his parfleche over his body, left him in their shack, and moved away. It wasn't until 1926, when the land was being excavated that his remains were found. Some documents found with the bones identified the remains as belonging to John Colter. The artifacts were placed in a museum and his body was finally given a permanent resting place on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River near New Haven, Missouri.

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