When night came and Colter could no longer hear the Indians, he swam downstream, gained the prairie, and headed for Fort Manuel, some two hundred miles away. Naked, with bleeding feet, he walked over prickly pears on the prairie and through snow in the mountains, which he crossed above the timber-line. The sun blistered him. Part of the time, he traveled by night and lay hid by day. He appears to have lived chiefly on the Indian-turnip (_Psoralea esculenta_).
Colter arrived at Fort Manuel in terrible shape. At first the men did not recognize him. He had been eleven days in making the distance between Three Forks and the fort.
That winter Colter had the courage to go back alone to the scene of his capture to recover his beaver-traps. Before he reached them he was ambushed by Blackfeet, but escaped. He returned to the fort, and the following spring he was with Pierre Menard at Three Forks when the place was successfully attacked by Blackfeet. Colter was among the few who escaped.
Pierre Menard wrote a four-page letter to his brother-in-law, Pierre Chouteau, and Colter started with it for St. Louis. With a companion, "Mr. William Bryant," he made the three-thousand-mile journey by canoe in thirty days. Upon his arrival at St. Louis, he reported to his old commander, William Clark; told him the story of his journeys, discoveries, and adventures, and gave him much material for his forthcoming map of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Clark traced on the map the route of Colter's Yellowstone Park journey and gave it the legend "Colter's Route of 1807."
There is nothing incredible about any of Colter's stories. His accounts of the Yellowstone region appear to have been remarkably true to fact. His escape from the Indians, and his various journeys, are experiences within the range of human achievement. His hiding in a beaver house is easily possible. His race and his naked journey across the mountains show the courage and hardihood of the frontiersman of the day. I have been over the place where he ran for his life from the Blackfeet and have followed his trail across the mountains.
Henry M. Brackenridge, the author of "Views of Louisiana, together with Journal," secured Colter's story at first hand, and he does it justice. John Bradbury, author of "Travels into the Interior of North America," did much important work in the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys in the years 1809-11. He also got Colter's story from Colter himself, and gives a careful account of the race for life with the Blackfeet. The account given by General Thomas James, in "Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans," is a third first-hand story of Colter's activities. Washington Irving was too good a literary craftsman to overlook Colter's story. In "Astoria" he retells the escape from the Blackfeet. General Hiram M. Chittenden gives full appreciation to Colter in his "History of the Early Western Fur Trade" and "The Yellowstone National Park," both standard works.