JOHN COLTER WAS TWENTY-NINE, four years older than he was now, when he signed on with Lewis and Clark for the expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase and open up the west. He’d been raised on the frontier in Kentucky, a wild place back then, more comfortable sleeping rough than in his own bed in the cabin he shared with his parents and his brothers and sisters and one uncle and his uncle’s wife, and if the other farmers’ sons were content to walk behind a plow, he wasn’t. He was a free agent from the earliest age, earning his keep by way of hunting, fishing and trapping, and in no need of a trail to carry him out or bring him home again either. As a child, he took to disappearing for days at a time, and then, as he got older and ran through his teens, for weeks, and no matter how far he roamed or in what territory, he was never lost, born with an uncanny ability to orient himself no matter where he was. He was like an animal in that regard, like a fox—or better yet, a wolf, an outlier with his nose to the wind.
Lewis and Clark took him on as scout and hunter, and while he left St. Louis with the expedition and stayed with it for more than two years, exploring the course of the Missouri River and going overland to the Columbia and ultimately the Pacific Ocean, he never made it back to civilization with the rest of them. It happened that on the return trip, while they were retracing their route through the Dakota country, a pair of trappers, heading west, stopped to camp with the expedition and tried to persuade Colter to come with them—he knew the country and they didn’t. He’d be their guide and their partner, three-way split. Plews were fetching ten dollars a head back in St. Louis, so it would be like stealing candy from a baby, easiest thing in the world, trap beaver and get rich—not that Colter cared about money much more than as a means to keep him in powder and balls, but the idea of staying in the country appealed to him. He went to Captain Clark for permission to muster out and he gave it to him, though there wasn’t a man in that company who didn’t think he was out of his mind, more than two years on the trail and civilization within reach—women, drink, clean sheets, news of the world and the celebrity that would come down to them all—and yet all that meant nothing to him. That was for other men, weaker men. He wanted to go out into the wilderness and take what was his and if anybody stood in his way, Cheyenne, Crow or Blackfoot, he’d take them too.
What became of the trappers, nobody knows, but at some point—a month in, two—Colter had got fed up with them, and who could blame him? Even with Lewis and Clark he was mostly on his own, out ahead of the expedition, breaking trail, hunting meat, camping solitary against the fastness of the night. The trappers—Joseph Dixon and Forrest Hancock—bickered, gave out with opinions, expected him to do things their way, two votes to one, as if setting traps and roasting beaver tail over a cottonwood fire was a democratic process. By spring of the following year—this would have been 1807—he was heading back down the Missouri in a canoe, his plews gone and stolen after a party of Blackfeet had surprised him. He had nothing to his name but his knife and rifle and a leather pouch with his powder, balls, flint and steel inside, and he had no destination either, though he had a vague notion of going back down to St. Louis just to see what would turn up.
He never made it. He ran into another expedition at the mouth of the Platte River—a conglomerate of fur traders under Manuel Lisa who were ambitious to set up a trading post–slash-fort—and he agreed to go on ahead, to go back, that is, and scout for them. His job this time was to contact the Crows in their scattered villages and spread the news about the trading post and how they could exchange furs for steel knives, mirrors, blankets, beads and baubles, which he did. In the process he became the first white man to discover what would become Yellowstone Park and managed to get himself shot in the right leg while fighting with the Crows against a party of Blackfeet. The Crows weren’t especially sympathetic or grateful either. They moved on and left him to his fate. But what kind of fate was that? Dying out there with a suppurating wound while the buzzards settled in for the feast? No, no way. Totally unacceptable. He wasn’t ready to leave this planet because he was too tough for that, too determined and resilient—and yes, independent—so he favored his good leg and walked three hundred miles back to the fort on the Platte.