1.  The True Pioneers

2.  If you ask people, “Who were the pioneers?” You will get answers like… the people who travelled the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Pioneers who came to Salt Lake or the settlers moving to California.  Those Pioneers came west in the late 1840s and 1850s.  The true pioneers were the mountain men who were out here in the years 1805-1840.  By the time those other pioneers came west the trails were already made, and a blind man could have followed them.

3.  Some people just enjoy living alone, or they love the outdoors and independence.  The real reason the mountain men came west was one little animal.  The Beaver  For whatever reason EVERYONE in Europe and along the east coast absolutely had to have a beaver skin hat. A beaver’s fur was worth major money.  You might call it Beaver Fever

4.  Think for a minute about all the dangers of living out in the wilderness. Things like…  Animal attack, disease, exposure to weather, getting lost, hunger, hostile Indians, foreign invaders this list goes on and on.  Mountain men went out into the woods armed to the teeth, and they practiced with their weapons because they were life savers.

5.  The United States now owned Louisiana, but there was no one out there to keep other people out.  The British had been trading with the Indian tribes for decades, and they weren’t going to stop.  No one officially had claim to the Oregon Territory at first.  Neither the Americans or the British cared about trespassing into Spanish Mexico either.

6.  About 10 miles from where you now sit is a little city called Mountain Green  In 1825 three groups of Mountain men showed up there.  One guy, Peter Skene Ogden was there working for England.  Another man, Johnson Gardner was leading some American trappers.  Finally Etienne Provost was there.  Gardner and Ogden argued with each other for days about whose land they were on.  Finally Gardner ordered Ogden to leave. Ogden refused and the so Gardner agreed to pay Ogden’s men more money if they would join with the Americans, a bunch of them did.  So who was right, The British leader, Ogden; or the American leader, Gardner?

7.  Actually they were in the corner of Spainsh Mexico, and Etienne Provost’s group owned the land, but luckily he had stayed out of the argument.  You can actually go see the historic plaque up in Mountain Green that talks about this little “meeting.”

8.  American and British companies all hired Indians to serve as guides and trappers.  These Indians had good knowledge of the areas and knew how to live off of the land.  They also made the best trappers until they taught the white men how to trap.

9.  A mountain man had a couple of options.  He could work for a company like the Hudson’s Bay Company from England.  If you were a company man, you were guaranteed a certain price for each pelt.  Or you could be independent and sell your pelts for whatever they were worth.  No matter what, in order to sell your pelts you had to get them to the east.  Luckily for the mountain man there were others who would come out to get pelts

10.  The fur companies would sponsor Mountain Men Rendezvous  People from back east would load up on all kinds of goodies to sell and they would come out to trade things for pelts.  There would usually be friendly competitions at these meetings as well.

11.  Instead of a rendezvous sometimes you could simply take pelts to a fort if there was one nearby.  A fort usually had a small military garrison and a trapper could trade pelts for supplies.  This is where the story of John Colter comes in, he was hired by a man named Manuel Lisa to travel up the Missouri to build forts and trap beaver.

16.  John Colter (from the Lewis and Clark trip). Made good friends with the Crow Indians.  The Crow Indians led John Colter to a mystical place that was full of hot springs and “fountins of hot watter”  John Colter was the first white man we know of to have set foot in Yellowstone.  Colter then turned south and found the Teton mountain range.  He found the place after having survived a battle with some indians. He was wounded and wandering through the mountains.  When he told other mountain men about it they did not believe him. They thought that he was crazy.  Yellowstone first came to be called “Colter’s Hell,” and people who talked about it were usually not believed (people dismissed it as a myth). It was not confirmed to exist until 1860 when Jim Bridger led an expedition of scientists and explorers to the place.

17.  John Colter met up with an old friend in eastern Montana.  The old friend’s name was John Potts. The two had both served on the Lewis and Clark trip.  Colter had not gone home, and now Potts was out west to try his hand at making money catching beaver.  The two decided to go trapping in the area around Three Forks, Montana.

18.  Colter and Potts were out one morning setting up and checking their traps when a large group of Blackfeet Indians surrounded them.  Colter and Potts took their canoes out to the middle of the river, but that was not out of range of the Indian’s bows.  The Indians demanded that both of them land their boats and come “talk.”  Colter had already had a number of encounters with Blackfeet Indians and they had never gone well.

19.  John Colter, realizing that he could not win this fight, paddled his canoe over to the shore.  The Indians set upon him, dragged him out of his boat, started beating him, and tore all of his clothes off of him.  John Potts watched all of this in horror, and when he was told again to come over to the shore he refused.

20.  Rather than go over to the shore John Potts refuses to move. Instead he pulled his rifle, shot into the group of Indians, killed one, and was immediately showered with dozens of arrows. John Potts is dead.  The Indians then decide to hold a short council to decide what to do with John Colter.

21.  After a few minutes of talking an older Indian came over and through some kind of sign language told Colter to run.  John Colter turned to see some of the other Indians taking off their long pants and warming up for a run.  He realized in that instant that they are letting him go, but they were going to chase him, and when they caught him, they would probably kill him.

22.  So what does he do?  He takes off running. He knows the area and scans ahead to see a open grassland with nowhere to hide for the next few miles and then thick trees along the bank of another fork of the river. If he can simply outrun the Indians for the next 5 miles he might have a chance to make it to the next river and hide.

23.  At some point Colter looks to see that all of the Indians have fallen away except one. This one Indian is keeping pace, and he has a spear.  After a few miles of running for his life the exertion causes a blood vessel in his nose to burst and his nose begins bleeding profusely.  Trying to breathe through a bloody nose is tough, and Colter realizes that he can not make it to the river, so Colter decides to turn and face the Indian. He wheels around and shouts, “do not kill.”  Now try to imagine being in the Indian’s place when suddenly this naked blood- soaked white man turns around and screams a bunch of words that you don’t understand at you.

24.  The Indian, understandably so, was a little bit shocked by the sight of Colter and he hesitated.  The Indian half throws / half drops his spear.  Colter and the Indian pick up the spear and start a little tug-of-war. The spear breaks and the sharp end is in Colter’s hand. This, he throws at the Indian.  The spear hits the Indian, goes right through him and nails him to the ground.  At just that time the other chasers that had fallen behind caught up and saw their friend mortally wounded.  For John Colter it meant, back to running.

25.  Colter once again outdistances his pursuers and reaches the river.  Plunging into the water he spots a beaver den and climbs up into it.  Soon the Indians arrive, and he can hear them looking for him.  Colter waits all day for the sun to go down, and then carefully escapes under the cover of darkness.

26.  After dragging himself out of the river Colter made sure that the Indians were gone.  Then he had to walk nearly 200 miles over the mountains to get to return to fort Lisa.  The whole time he was worried that the Blackfeet Indians might be in the area looking for him.  When he arrived at Fort Lisa he was naked, bruised, bloody and the men thought at first he was a walking dead man, but when they cleaned him up he told his story and they could hardly believe it.

28.  The beaver traps that John Colter had left behind cost $20 each. He had left 16 of them.  That would be worth about $20,000 today, so of course he wanted to look for them. So after he was well he went back to site of the attack.  On his first trip he went alone.  He got to the three forks area and was camping one night when he heard the distinctive clicking noise of a rifle being cocked. He leaped away from the sound, over his fire, and ran into the darkness. He once again travelled an entire week to reach Fort Lisa.  At least this time he had clothes on!

29.  The next summer, Colter’s old boss asked for his help to build a fort at Three Forks.  Colter agreed to go along hoping to get his traps.  The men build the fort, and one day after trapping near the fort Colter arrives back at dusk to find that the fort had been attacked and most of the people inside had been killed.  He knew the Blackfeet Indians were still in the area.

30.  Colter writes in his journal…  "If God will only forgive me this time and let me off… I will leave the country tomorrow, and be >@^*#> if I ever come into it again.“  6 weeks later Colter arrived in St. Louis. He picked up his pay check for the Lewis and Clark trip. He cashed in his pelts, and retired from being a mountain man with enough money to buy a farm and start a family.  Two years later he died of disease.

31.  The Hudson’s Bay Company (from England) had been trapping for years before Lewis and Clark.  When the Americans got into the game the HBC would usually try to run them out of business.  The Hudson’s Bay Company could afford to sell their furs for cheaper and pay the mountain men more.  The only way for the Americans to compete was to wipe out the beaver population.

32.  The Hudson’s Bay Company in retaliation also began wiping out the beaver simply as a mean- spirited business move. This made being a trapper nearly impossible.  The beaver skin hat also began to fall out of style, and people weren’t paying much for them anymore.  These two facts meant the end of the mountain man era by the 1840s.