On Christmas Day 1780, Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson instructed the head of his state’s militia, George Rogers Clark, to fortify Virginia’s western frontier against a British-Indian invasion. At the end of his instructions, Jefferson added his hope that the American “Empire of Liberty” would someday convert such dangerous enemies into “valuable friends.”
Jefferson’s dream of a western “Empire of Liberty” was threatened by European politics as soon as he became president in 1801. Spain had signed a secret treaty retroceding Louisiana to the expansionist plans of Napoleon, and Britain reportedly had staked a claim to the Columbia River, giving another continental antagonist a Pacific port with commercial access to the “wealth of the Orient.” By the summer of 1802, Jefferson was in serious discussions with his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, about undertaking an expedition to discover a Pacific passage for the United States. Jefferson and Lewis both embraced the optimistic idea of “geographical symmetry,” believing that the trans-Mississippi West would be the mirror image of the East’s gentle Blue Ridge mountains and navigable rivers. While Jefferson never ventured west of the Shenandoah, Lewis would be stunned by the reality of western geography.
On July 4, 1803, the National Intelligencer reported that President Jefferson had purchased Louisiana from Napoleon. For about $15 million, the United States instantly doubled its size, gaining an area of 825,000 square miles that encompassed not only New Orleans but all the western lands drained by the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. That very same day, Jefferson gave Meriwether Lewis a letter of credit to fund a transcontinental exploration to discover an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean “for the purposes of commerce.” On July 5, Lewis set off to organize his expedition.
Lewis and his “Corps of Discovery” partner William Clark, younger brother of George Rogers Clark, forged a chapter in American history that has fascinated us ever since. Such colorful figures as Sacagawea are familiar in this storytelling, but the expedition’s success also depended on a cohort of “mountain men” who slogged a path through the wilderness, hunted and gathered food, and fought off grizzlies. David W. Marshall has now written a biography of one of these explorers, and Mountain Man is Marshall’s chronicle of the expedition that has long captured his imagination. He selected John Colter because “Colter was the first of the mountain men, acclaimed by the frontiersmen of his time as a living hero. .  .  . He was the prototype of the ideal westerner—ruggedly independent, self-sufficient, and quietly confident in his own abilities.”
Colter was exploring Kentucky along the Ohio River when he joined the expedition in October 1803. Known as a skilled woodsman and hardened frontiersman, Colter was assigned to the Corps of Discovery “as a lone scout and hunter providing game.” He was one of the earliest recruits, and Lewis and Clark spent the next nine months filling the corps’ ranks to 32 before the expedition was officially launched at St. Louis on May 14, 1804.
It was the first time Colter had crossed the Mississippi River, and he never returned East. He spent the next 28 months with the expedition, and was with Lewis and Clark when they reached the Pacific. But when the corps began its homeward trek, Colter remained in the West. On his own after mid-1806, he explored the northern plains, the Rockies, and regions that included the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone country.
Colter left no written records, so Marshall has reconstructed his narrative through such primary documents as the journals of Lewis and Clark. Maps were also useful, notably William Clark’s 1810 map that marked Colter’s post-expedition route in 1807-08. But Marshall has also retraced Colter’s steps himself, attempting to experience first-hand what life in the wilderness was like: how Colter had pitched a shelter, built a fire, and forded a stream.
Hunting was Colter’s essential task, and he was proficient at procuring buffalo, deer, elk, turkeys, and geese. Bison was the favorite frontier meat, and each animal provided a thousand pounds of “the wholesomest and most palatable meat.” Grizzly bears were a constant threat, and Colter was a risk-taker who notched some narrow escapes. Marshall explains that “his intrepid nature made him the consummate explorer—a fearless adventurer who reached his prime in the most daring venture of his time.”
Marshall also believes that Colter’s decision to remain in the wilderness was because the West offered “independence and freedom”—a place where the mountain man was “a sovereign among nature’s loneliest works.” He describes how Colter clothed himself in buckskin, leather moccasins, snowshoes, and relied on hooded wool and fur coverings for subzero temperatures. His vital supplies included a canteen, a tomahawk, a hunting knife, a rifle, flint and steel to start a fire, oilcloth, a comb, and tobacco.
John Colter was “the prototype of the western hero—of explorers, mountain men, cavalrymen, and cowboys,” in Marshall’s description. After he left Lewis and Clark, he traveled on foot instead of horseback. Colter explored the sites of today’s Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park, and was the first white explorer to experience Yellowstone where “steaming geysers and sulfurous formations left strange specters on the landscape.” He continued to lead western exploring parties and was an itinerant fur trapper, but the Blackfoot Indian tribe began to fight back against white exploration. Colter once barely escaped death only after he was “seized, disarmed, and stripped entirely naked.” The Blackfoot allowed him to run for his life, and he managed to escape.
By 1810, Marshall writes, “Colter finally got his fill.” He built a cabin near the village of La Charrette, which the Corps of Discovery had visited near the beginning of their expedition. The 75-year-old Daniel Boone, his wife Rebecca, and son Nathan lived nearby. The area was described as a hunter’s paradise. It was also the place that provided a peaceful finale to Colter’s intrepid life. He died on May 7, 1812—not, as Marshall writes, because of “a howling blizzard, a raging river, or a grizzly on the prowl.” Rather, Colter likely died from jaundice.
Amy Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.
