The Yellowstone National Park: Historical and Descriptive. Hiram Martin Chittenden
escape, in which the details are throughout so clearly within the range of possibility. It is a consistent narrative from beginning to end. In briefest outline it is as follows:
When Colter returned from his expedition of 1807, he found Manuel Lisa, of the Missouri Fur Company, already in the country, where he had just arrived from St. Louis. With him was one Potts, believed to be the same person who had been a private in the party of Lewis and Clark. In the spring of 1808, Colter and his old companion in arms set out to the headwaters of the Missouri on a trapping expedition. It was on a branch of Jefferson Fork that they went to work, and here they met with their disastrous experience.
One morning while they were in a canoe examining their traps they were surprised by a large party of Blackfeet Indians. Potts attempted resistance and was slain on the spot. Colter, with more presence of mind, gave himself up as the only possible chance of avoiding immediate death. The Indians then consulted as to how they should kill him in order to yield themselves the greatest amount of amusement. Colter, upon being questioned as to his fleetness of foot, sagaciously replied that he was a poor runner (though in fact very swift), and the Indians, believing that it would be a safe experiment, decided that he should run for his life. Accordingly he was stripped naked and was led by the chief to a point three or four hundred yards in advance of the main body of the Indians. Here he was told “to save himself if he could,” and the race began—one man against five hundred.
The Indians quickly saw how they had been outwitted, for Colter flew away from them as if upon the wings of the wind. But his speed cost him dear. The exertion caused the blood to stream from his mouth and nostrils, and run down over his naked form. The prickly pear and the rough ground lacerated his feet. Six miles away across a level plain was a fringe of cottonwood on the banks of the Jefferson River. Short of that lay not a shadow of chance of concealment. It was a long race, but life hung upon the issue. The Indians had not counted on such prodigious running. Gradually they fell off, and when Colter ventured for the first time to glance back, only a small number were in his wake. Encouragement was now added to hope, and he ran even faster than before.
But there was one Indian who was too much for him. He was steadily shortening the distance between them, and at last had arrived within a spear’s throw. Was Colter to be slain by a single Indian after having distanced five hundred? He would see. Suddenly whirling about, he confronted the Indian, who was astounded at the sudden move and at Colter’s bloody appearance. He tried to hurl his spear but stumbled and broke it as he fell. Colter seized the pointed portion and pinned the Indian to the earth.
Again he resumed his flight. He reached the Jefferson, and discovered, some distance below, a raft of driftwood against the head of an island. He dived under this raft and found a place where he could get his head above water. There, in painful suspense, he awaited developments. The Indians explored the island and examined the raft, but Colter’s audacious spirit was beyond their comprehension. It did not occur to them that he was all the time surveying their movements from his hiding place under the timber, and they finally abandoned the search and withdrew. Colter had saved himself. When evening came he swam several miles down the river and then went ashore. For seven days he wandered naked and unarmed, over stones, cacti, and the prickly pear, scorched by the heat of noon and chilled by the frost of night, finding his sole subsistence in such roots as he might dig, until at last he reached Lisa’s trading post on the Bighorn River.
Even this terrible adventure could not dismay the dauntless Colter, and he remained still another year in the mountains. Finally, in the spring of 1810, he got into a canoe and dropped down the river, “three thousand miles in thirty days,” reaching St. Louis, May 1st, after an absence of six years.
Colter remained in St. Louis for a time giving Clark what information he could concerning the places he had seen, and evidently talking a great deal about his adventures. Finally he retired to the country some distance up the Missouri, and married. Here we again catch a glimpse of him when the Astorians were on their way up the river. As Colter saw the well appointed expedition setting out for the mountains, the old fever seized him again and he was upon the point of joining the party. But what the hardships of the wilderness and the pleasures of civilization could not dissuade him from doing, the charms of a newly-married wife easily accomplished. Colter remained behind; and here the curtain of oblivion falls upon the discoverer of the Yellowstone. It is not without genuine satisfaction that, having followed him through the incredible mazes of “Colter’s Hell,” we bid him adieu amid surroundings of so different a character.
CHAPTER IV.
THE TRADER AND TRAPPER.
For sixty years after Lewis and Clark returned from their expedition, the headwaters of the Yellowstone remained unexplored except by the trader and trapper. The traffic in peltries it was that first induced extensive exploration of the west. Concerning the precious metals, the people seem to have had little faith in their abundant existence in the west, and no organized search for them was made in the earlier years of the century. But that country, even in its unsettled state, had other and important sources of wealth. Myriads of beaver inhabited the streams and innumerable buffalo roamed the valleys. The buffalo furnished the trapper with means of subsistence, and beaver furs were better than mines of gold. Far in advance of the tide of settlement the lonely trapper, and after him the trader, penetrated the unknown west. Gradually the enterprise of individuals crystallized around a few important nuclei and there grew up those great fur-trading companies which for many years exercised a kind of paternal sway over the Indians and the scarcely more civilized trappers. A brief resumé of the history of these companies will show how important a place they occupy in the early history of the Upper Yellowstone.
The climax of the western fur business may be placed at about the year 1830. At that time three great companies operated in territories whose converging lines of separation centered in the region about Yellowstone Lake. The oldest and most important of them, and the one destined to outlive the others, was the world-renowned Hudson’s Bay Company. It was at that time more than a century and a half old. Its earlier history was in marked contrast with that of later years. Secure in the monopoly which its extensive charter rights guaranteed, it had been content with substantial profits and had never pushed its business far into new territory nor managed it with aggressive vigor. It was not until forced to action by the encroachments of a dangerous rival, that it became the prodigious power of later times.
This rival was the great North-west Fur Company of Montreal: It had grown up since the French and Indian War, partly as a result of that conflict, and finally took corporate form in 1787. It had none of the important territorial rights of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but its lack of monopoly was more than made up by the enterprise of its promoters. With its bands of Canadian frontiersmen, it boldly penetrated the north-west and paid little respect to those territorial rights which its venerable rival was powerless to enforce. It rapidly extended its operations far into the unexplored interior. Lewis and Clark found its traders among the Mandans in 1804. In 1811 the Astorians saw its first party descend the Columbia to the sea. Two years later the American traders on the Pacific Coast were forced to succumb to their British rivals.
A long and bitter strife now ensued between the two British companies. It even assumed the magnitude of civil war, and finally resulted in a frightful massacre of unoffending colonists. The British government interfered and forced the rivals into court, where they were brought to the verge of ruin by protracted litigation. A compromise was at last effected in 1821 by an amalgamation of the two companies under the name of the older rival.
But in the meantime a large part of their best fur country had been lost. In 1815 the government of the United States excluded British traders from its territory east of the Rocky Mountains. To the west of this limit, however, the amalgamated company easily forced all its rivals from the field. No American fur company ever attained the splendid organization, nor the influence over the Indians, possessed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. At the time of which we write it was master of the trade in the Columbia River valley, and the eastern limit of its operations within the territory of the United States was nearly coincident with the present western boundary of the Yellowstone Park.
The second of the great companies to which reference has been made was the American Fur