Chapter I: Part 1

COLTER’S HELL
AND
JACKSON’S HOLE

By Merrill J. Mattes

Published by
YELLOWSTONE LIBRARY AND MUSEUM ASSOCIATION
and the
GRAND TETON NATURAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION
in cooperation with
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

© 1962 Yellowstone Library and Museum Association
Reprint 1970

The Yellowstone Library and Museum Association and the Grand Teton Natural History Association are non-profit distributing organizations whose purpose is the stimulation of interest in the educational and inspirational aspects of Yellowstone and Grand Teton history and natural history. The Associations cooperate with and are recognized by the United States Department of the Interior and its Bureau, the National Park Service, as essential operating organizations.

As one means of accomplishing their aims the Associations publish reasonably priced booklets which are available for purchase by mail throughout the year or at the museum information desks in the parks during the summer.

Photographs used were provided through the courtesy of the National Park Service, except where otherwise credited.

COLTER’S HELL AND JACKSON’S HOLE:
The Fur Trappers’ Exploration of the Yellowstone and Grand Teton Park
Region

By
Merrill J. Mattes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
I. Strange Land of “Volcanoes” and “Shining Mountains” 1
II. The Mystery of “La Roche Jaune” or Yellow Rock River 9
III. John Colter, The Phantom Explorer—1807-1808 13
IV. “Colter’s Hell”: A Case of Mistaken Identity 19
V. “Les Trois Tetons”: The Golden Age of Discovery, 1810-1824 25
VI. “Jackson’s Hole”: Era of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company,
1825-1832 35
VII. “The Fire Hole”: Era of the American Fur Company, 1833-1840 53
VIII. Epilogue: 1841-1870 77
Selected Bibliography 86
Vicinity Map at rear

I. Strange Land of “Volcanoes” and “Shining Mountains”

The Yellowstone-Grand Teton region was not officially discovered and its scenic marvels were not publicly proclaimed until the 1870’s, beginning with the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition. For thirty years before, from 1841 to 1869, this region was a Paradise Lost, rarely visited by white men. But for thirty years before that, or from 1807 to 1840, this region had hundreds of appreciative visitors. These were the Rocky Mountain fur trappers. While searching for the golden-brown fur of the beaver, destined for the St. Louis market, these adventurers thoroughly explored this fabulous region. Although news of their discoveries received scant public notice back in the settlements, or was discounted as tall tales, to them belongs the honor of being the first actual explorers of these twin parks.

Neighboring Yellowstone and Grand Teton, established as National Parks in 1872 and 1929, respectively, are separately managed today as units of our National Park System. But geographically, now as well as in the early nineteenth century, they embrace one unique region, characterized by topographic and geologic features that are the crescendo of a great scenic symphony. Here, at the heart of the continent, the source of the three major river systems of the continent—the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Missouri-Mississippi—may be found the greatest geyser basins, the largest mountain lake, the most colorful of kaleidoscopic canyons, one of the richest arrays of wildlife, and one of the most spectacularly beautiful mountain ranges in the world. The Yellowstone-Grand Teton region has historical unity, also, particularly during the obscure but heroic age of the Rocky Mountain fur trade.

“Colter’s Hell”—bearing the name of the legendary discoverer, and conjuring up visions of a primitive “Dante’s Inferno”—is the term which visitors today associate with the early history of Yellowstone National Park and its universally famous hydrothermal wonders. Actually, the wandering, bearded, buck-skinned beaver trappers never referred to the geyser region of the upper Madison as Colter’s Hell. As we will see, the real Colter’s Hell in Jim Bridger’s day was another place altogether, having nothing to do with anything within Yellowstone Park itself. In trapper times the Yellowstone geyser area had no fixed name but was variously described by them as a region of “great volcanoes,” “boiling springs” or “spouting fountains.” On the recently discovered Hood and Ferris maps (see below) it is labeled “the Burnt Hole” (although this name seems to have been restricted by Russell and others to the Hebgen Lake Valley). Captain Bonneville tells us that his men knew of this region as “the Firehole” and this name, as applied to the river draining the geyser basins, survives today.

Yellowstone Park, carved out of territorial Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, is a rough-edged rectangle of 3,500 square miles that straddles the twisting course of the Continental Divide. It is a geological circus, a unique creation of ancient volcanoes and glaciers, flanked on the southeast and east by the Absaroka Range, on the north by the Snowy Range, on the northwest by the Gallatin and Madison ranges, on the west by the Centennial Range, and on the south by the Teton Mountains.

From the Park flow the headwaters of two continental rivers and their major tributaries. From here the Snake River arcs southward toward Jackson’s Hole and the cathedral-like Tetons, destined to join the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean. Here the Firehole and Gibbon rivers, draining the principal geyser basins, unite to become the Madison River, and here also arises the Gallatin, these being two of the Three Forks of the Missouri. Here arises a branch of the North Fork of the Shoshone River, a tributary of the Bighorn. And here, after its birth near Two Ocean Pass, begins the mighty Yellowstone River which, after passing through its vast mirror-like lake and its prismatic canyon, flows out onto the plains to receive the Bighorn and join the Missouri on its marathon journey to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

This region held a fortune in coveted beaver skins, but it was remote, snowbound, haunted by the vindictive Blackfeet, and plagued by weird visions, sulphurous fumes, and uncanny noises. Here indeed was fertile soil for a legend.

On a clear day Yellowstone Park visitors can see to the south the mountain spires which identify Grand Teton National Park of Wyoming, an indefinable shape of 500 square miles. (The actual boundaries of these neighboring parks are separated by a scant five miles.) The Tetons are perhaps the most distinctive of the granite giants which comprise the Rocky Mountains. A series of sharp pyramids of naked rock, the peaks stand like sharks’ teeth against the sky. The most precipitous sides and the most needle-like summit belong to the highest of these, the Grand Teton, which rises over 7,000 feet from its immediate base, nearly 14,000 feet above the level of the distant sea.

The Teton Mountains are the most conspicuous landmarks of a region which contains the scrambled sources of the three greatest river systems of continental United States. As we have seen, Yellowstone Park to the north gives birth to the eastward-flowing Missouri and the westward flowing Columbia waters. East of the Tetons, in the Wind River Mountains, is the head of Green River which rolls southward to merge into the mighty Colorado River, tumbling through the arid lands to the Gulf of California.

Jackson’s Hole is that part of the Upper Snake River Valley which lies at the eastern base of the Teton Range. One of the largest enclosed valleys in the Rocky Mountains, its glaciated floor extends about sixty miles north and south, and varies up to twelve miles in width. It is bounded on the west by the Tetons, on the east and south by the less pretentious Mount Leidy Highlands and the Gros Ventre and Hoback Mountains. The Gros Ventres merge imperceptibly into the Wind River Mountains farther east, the crest of which forms the Continental Divide. The southern extremity of the Tetons merges with the eastern end of the Snake River Range near the canyon where the Snake River escapes from the valley.

Historic Jackson’s Hole, also known as “Jackson’s Big Hole”—but now politely refined to just plain Jackson Hole—was named in 1829 for David Jackson, one of the partners of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. To the early trapper a “hole” was a sizeable valley abounding in game, and usually (with the exception of Yellowstone’s “Firehole”) associated with some distinctive personality—hence Brown’s Hole, Pierre’s Hole, Gardner’s Hole, etc. However, Jackson’s Hole was more than just a pleasant spot for trapping and camping. Research gives substance to the view that this was the historic crossroads of the Rocky Mountain fur trade.

Jackson’s Hole was destined by geography to become a traffic center of the Western fur trade. Between South Pass at the head of the Little Sandy and the northern passes above the Three Forks of the Missouri it offered the most feasible route across the Rocky Mountain barrier. In addition, it was the focal point of a region that was highly prized and vigorously contested because of its populous beaver streams. Here trappers’ trails converged like the spokes of a great wheel and, after Lewis and Clark, most of the important trapper-explorers crossed Jackson’s Hole on their journeys.

In historic times there were seven gateways to and from Jackson’s Hole: northward up Snake River; northeastward up Pacific Creek to Two Ocean Pass; eastward up Buffalo Fork to Twogwotee Pass; eastward up the Gros Ventre to Union Pass; southward up the Hoback to Green River; westward via Teton Pass or Conant Pass (at the south and north extremities of the Teton Range) to Pierre’s Hole.

The Tetons received their name from French-Canadian trappers who accompanied the earliest British expeditions into this territory. As they approached the range from the west, they beheld three towering mountains upon which they bestowed the name of “Trois Tetons” (“Three Breasts”). This romantic designation was readily adopted by the lonely trapping fraternity to whom the sharp snowy peaks (now known as the Grand, Middle and South Tetons) became a beacon to guide them through the hostile wilderness. To the Indians the Tetons were variously known as “The Three Brothers,” “The Hoaryheaded Fathers,” and “Tee Win-at,” meaning “The Pinnacles.” The earliest Americans in the region, being more practical than romantic, could find no better name for the silvery spires than “The Pilot Knobs,” while an official Hudson’s Bay Company map indicates with equal homeliness, “The Three Paps.” The name “Three Tetons” survived, however, and was officially recognized by cartographers. The name first appeared publicly in the Bonneville Map of 1837.

The Upper Snake River (i.e., above the mouth of Henry’s Fork) was called “Mad River” by the Astorians. Others simply referred to it as the “Columbia River” or “the headwaters of the Columbia,” but to most of the fur trappers it was “Lewis River” or “Lewis Fork,” so originally named in the Clark Map of 1810 for Capt. Meriwether Lewis, as Clark’s Fork of the Columbia was named after his fellow explorer, Capt. William Clark. This name was much more appropriate than its present one, which is derived from the Snake or Shoshone Indians, and first appears on the Greenhow Map of 1840.

In spite of past efforts by water power advocates to “improve” it by a dam, Yellowstone Lake remains just as it was when first discovered by John Colter, the original “Lake Eustis” of the Clark Map of 1810. Jackson Lake, however, was enlarged by a dam built in 1916 by the Bureau of Reclamation. This lake is identifiable with the “Lake Biddle” of the Clark Map of 1810, the “Teton Lake” of Warren A. Ferris, and the “Lewis Lake” referred to frequently by another trapper, Joseph L. Meek. There is today a tributary of the Upper Snake known as Lewis River, heading in a Lewis Lake within the confines of Yellowstone National Park, neither of which are to be confused with the historic “Lewis River” and “Lewis Lake.”

II. The Mystery of “La Roche Jaune” or Yellow Rock River

For some twenty years before the advent of Lewis and Clark, French-Canadian voyageurs of the North West Company were in league with the Mandans, and from these Indians learned of the distant “Pierre Jaune” or “Roche Jaune” River, a translation from the Indian equivalent of “Yellow Rock River.” Chittenden theorizes that the ultimate origin of the name descends from the brilliant and infinite varieties of yellow which dominate the color scheme of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and which probably awed the first aboriginal explorer just as it does today’s auto-borne tourist.

Although there is room for debate as to whether any of the Canadian traders beat Lewis and Clark to the mouth of the Yellowstone, it is certain that one of their number preceded the Americans in the approach to its headwaters. On September 10, 1805, Francois Antoine Larocque reached “Riviere aux Roches Jaunes” just below the mouth of Pryor’s Fork, near present Billings, Montana, in the course of “a voyage of discovery to the Rocky Mountains.” After wintering at the Mandan villages in 1804-1805 as a neighbor of the hibernating Lewis and Clark, and being thwarted in his desire to accompany them upstream, Larocque had returned to his post on the Assiniboine for supplies, then hurried back to the Mandans, going from there overland via Knife River, the Little Missouri, and the Tongue to the Bighorn Mountains, country of the Crows.

While wintering with the Mandans, Captain Clark sketched two maps of the unexplored country westward, based on “the information of traders, indians and my own observation and ideas.” One of these shows “Rochejhone River” with six tributaries from the south, five with Indian names, two translated as “Tongue River” and “Big Horn R.” The Bighorns and Rocky Mountains beyond are represented only by diagrammatic strokes. There is a trail from the mouth of Knife River to the Bighorns, roughly the same subsequently taken by Larocque. This was actually a refinement of a sketch made for Clark by the Mandan Chief Big White. The second map shows “River yellow rock” minus tributaries but with the Crows (“gens de Corbeau”) located just west of an imaginative “montagne de roche—conjecturall.” These maps, the first to our knowledge to depict the Yellowstone River, were sent to President Jefferson on April 7, 1805, by Meriwether Lewis, to accompany his eagerly awaited progress report.

Upon their return trip in 1806, after wintering at Fort Clatsop at the mouth of the Columbia, Lewis and Clark divided in order to explore the country more thoroughly, the latter undertaking to determine the source of the mysterious Yellowstone. On July 15, with eleven white men, the Indian woman Sacajawea and her baby, the cavalcade crossed Bozeman Pass, which marks the divide between the Yellowstone and Gallatin Fork, and reached the vicinity of present Livingston, Montana. Never suspecting what wonders lay concealed behind the snowy mountain wall to the south, Clark hurried on down the river to rejoin Lewis, with glory enough for one expedition.

There is only one hint of volcanic phenomena which Clark seems to have obtained from any source other than the presumed conversation with Colter, mentioned below. This was an Indian tale, received after Clark’s return, but before Colter’s return, to the effect that at the head of Tongue River, a branch of the Yellowstone, “there is frequently heard a loud noise like Thunder, which makes the earth Tremble, they state that they seldom go there because their children Cannot sleep—and Conceive it possessed of spirits, who were averse that men Should be near them.” Speculates Vinton, “it can hardly be doubted that the Indians referred to the geyser basin in the Park,” rather than to the Tongue River neighborhood.

It is commonly supposed that, prior to Colter, no white man had knowledge of strange phenomena on the Upper Yellowstone, this supposition being one of the pillars of the “first-discovery” theory. It is fairly evident that Clark knew nothing of geysers when he was within seventy-five miles of them in 1806 but, ironically enough, at this time some intimation of them had certainly reached others, including Clark’s sponsor, Thomas Jefferson. On October 22, 1805, James Wilkinson, governor of Louisiana Territory, with headquarters in St. Louis, sent to the President, in care of Captain Amos Stoddard,

a Savage delineation on a Buffalo Pelt, of the Missouri & its South
Western branches, including the Rivers plate & Lycorne or Pierre
jaune; This Rude Sketch without Scale or Compass ‘et remplie de
Fantaisies ridicules’ is not destitute of Interests, as it exposes the
location of several important Objects, & may point the way to useful
enquiry—among other things a little incredible, a volcano is
distinctly described on Yellow Stone River.

Wilkinson apparently obtained this primitive map from unidentified traders. It could not have been a copy of Clark’s map sent from Fort Mandan the April previous, for it obviously contained new data. In an advice to Henry Dearborn, Secretary of War, dated September 18, 1805, Wilkinson revealed that his interest in Yellowstone curiosities was sufficiently aroused to dispatch an expedition of his own upriver!

I have equipt a Perogue out of my Small private means, not with any
view to Self interest, to ascend the missouri and enter the River
Piere jaune, or yellow Stone, called by the natives, Unicorn River,
the same by which Capt. Lewis I find since expects to return and which
my informants tell me is filled with wonders. This Party will not get
back before the Summer 1807—they are natives of this town....

Who were Wilkinson’s explorers, and what became of them? Who were the “informants”? Was their information firsthand or derived from Indians who, unlike the Mandans, were acquainted with details of the Upper Yellowstone? These questions may be unanswerable, but they arise to shadow the giant figure of John Colter.

III. John Colter, the Phantom Explorer—1807-1808

The epic journey of discovery known as “The Lewis and Clark Expedition” was organized in the autumn of 1803 at Maysville, Kentucky. Here, on October 15, John Colter enlisted as a private with the stipulated pay of $5 a month, apparently answering the requirement for “good hunters, stout, healthy, unmarried men, accustomed to the woods and capable of bearing bodily fatigue in a pretty considerable degree.”

Colter shared all the hardships and triumphs of the expedition, as well as routine adventure in hunting, starving, Indian diplomacy, and getting chased by grizzly bears. In August 1806 the returning party reached the Mandan villages. Here Colter was granted permission by the explorers to take his leave and join two trappers from Illinois, Forrest Hancock and Joseph Dickson, bound for Yellowstone River.

The extent of the wanderings of this trio is not known. In the spring of 1807 Colter alone paddled a canoe down the Missouri to the mouth of the Platte where he found keelboats of the Missouri Fur Company of St. Louis, led by Manuel Lisa. He was promptly recruited and went with this expedition up the Missouri and the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Bighorn River, where Lisa built a log fort known as Fort Raymond or Manuel’s Fort.

It was from this point that Colter made his famous journey of discovery during the autumn and winter of 1807-1808. Colter left no written record of his own. The only thing resembling written evidence is the following by Henry Brackenridge, who heard it from Manuel Lisa:

He [Lisa] continued his voyage to the Yellowstone River, where he
built a trading fort. He shortly after dispatched Coulter, the hunter
before mentioned, to bring some of the Indian nations to trade. This
man, with a pack of thirty pounds weight, his gun and some ammunition,
went upwards of five hundred miles to the Crow nation; gave them
information, and proceeded from them to several other tribes. On his
return, a party of Indians in whose company he happened to be was
attacked, and he was lamed by a severe wound in the leg;
notwithstanding which, he returned to the establishment, entirely
alone and without assistance, several hundred miles.

Aside from this slim clue, his course can be determined solely on the basis of “Colter’s Route in 1807” and other data which appear on William Clark’s “Map of the West,” published in 1814, presumably based on a conversation of 1810 at St. Louis, whither the trapper-explorer returned after hair-raising adventures with the Blackfeet in the Three Forks country. Inevitably, in view of the topographical errors and distortions of the Clark map, Colter’s precise route is subject to wide differences of opinion.

A composite of theories offered by Hiram M. Chittenden, Stallo Vinton, Charles Lindsay, and Burton Harris, to mention only four qualified scholars who have undertaken to hypothecate Colter’s route, is that Colter ascended the Bighorn, followed up the Shoshone River to near present Cody, went south along the foot of the Absaroka Mountains, up Wind River to Union Pass, into Jackson’s Hole, thence probably across Teton Pass into Pierre’s Hole, thence north via Conant Pass to the west shore of Yellowstone Lake and northeast to the crossing of the Yellowstone near Tower Falls, thence up the Lamar River and Soda Butte Creek, back across the Absarokas, thence south to the Shoshone River, and back to Lisa’s Fort by way of Clark’s Fork and Pryor’s Fork.

The key to Colter’s route is the identification of Lakes Jackson and Yellowstone, respectively, as Clark’s Lake Biddle (named for the patron of his publication) and Lake Eustis (named for the Secretary of War), no longer questioned by historians. The “Hot Spring Brimstone” at the sulphur beds crossing of the Yellowstone River near Tower Falls and the “Boiling Spring” near the forks of the Stinkingwater or Shoshone (see Chapter IV) are other checkpoints which now seem quite firm. In addition, there are two interesting claims of physical evidence. While these are both necessarily debatable and subject to challenge as hoaxes, they deserve consideration. According to Philip A. Rollins, quoted by Vinton:

In September of 1889, Tazewell Woody (Theodore Roosevelt’s hunting
guide), John H. Dewing (also a hunting guide) and I, found on the left
side of Coulter Creek, some fifty feet from the water and about three
quarters of a mile above the creek’s mouth, a large pine tree on which
was a deeply indented blaze, which after being cleared of sap and
loose bark was found to consist of a cross thus ‘X’ (some five inches
in height), and, under it, the initials ‘J C’ (each some four inches
in height).

The blaze appeared to these trained hunting guides, so they stated to
me, to be approximately eighty years old.

They refused to fell the tree and so obtain the exact age of the blaze
because they said they guessed the blaze had been made by Colter
himself.

The find was reported to the Government authorities, and the tree was
cut down by them in 1889 or 1890, in order that the blazed section
might be installed in a museum, but as I was told in the autumn of
1890 by the then superintendent of the Yellowstone Park, the blazed
section had been lost in transit.

The second reputed Colter relic, which has survived, is the so-called “Colter Stone” which is now exhibited by the National Park Service in its new Fur Trade Museum at the Moose Visitor Center, Grand Teton National Park. This is a piece of rhyolite hand-carved roughly in the shape of a human head, with the inscribed lettering “John Colter 1808.” This specimen was dug up in 1931 by William Beard and son while clearing timber on their farm about five miles east of Tetonia, Idaho, just within the Wyoming state line. In 1933 Aubrey Lyon, a neighbor, obtained the “stone head” in trade for a pair of riding boots, and presented it to park officials.

Although the natural tendency to view such finds with skepticism may be respected here, several factors lend plausibility. Members of the Beard family had no knowledge of John Colter. In 1931 the Colter story had not been well researched, and the version then was largely confined to the year 1807; yet if Colter made winter camp in the Teton Basin, and left a record to help while away the time, this would logically occur early in 1808. The stone itself yields no conclusive evidence on the basis of wear or patination; but some geologists agree that 125 years of weathering and soil acidity could have elapsed between the initial carving and time of discovery. At least the Colter Stone is a great historical conversation piece!

According to Thomas James, an associate of Colter’s, the fight with the Blackfeet, mentioned by Brackenridge as occurring on Colter’s Yellowstone journey, did not actually occur until the summer of 1808, near the Three Forks of the Missouri. On this occasion Colter was wounded in the furious battle between the Blackfeet and Flatheads.

Still later in 1808 Colter and John Potts (another Lewis and Clark veteran) were captured by Blackfeet on Jefferson River. Potts was killed and dismembered. Colter was stripped naked and told to run for his life. The Indians, who were to have great sport with Colter in this way, were enraged when he managed to escape his tormentors and kill one of them. He finally made his way back to Manuel’s Fort, greatly emaciated.

After this fabulous feat of endurance, Colter remained in the wilderness until 1810, when he guided Colonel Menard to Three Forks, where a new fort was built, which was subject to constant Blackfeet harassment. Vowing never to return to the mountains, Colter returned downriver to St. Louis, arriving in May 1810 after six years of perils which well entitle him to claim as “The American Ulysses.”

Colter settled at the village of Charette, a few miles above the mouth of the Missouri River, and married a girl named Sally. According to Washington Irving, in 1811 Wilson Price Hunt of the Astorian expedition attempted to persuade Colter to join him but this Colter declined to do after “balancing the charms of his bride against those of the Rocky Mountains.” In 1813 he died, ingloriously, of “jaundice.” Thus passed the phantom discoverer of the Teton-Yellowstone region, to whom James pays this tribute:

[Colter was] five feet ten inches in height and wore an open,
ingenious, and pleasing countenance of the Daniel Boone stamp. Nature
had formed him, like Boone, for hardy indurance of fatigue, privation
and perils.... His veracity was never questioned among us and his
character was that of a true American backwoodsman.

IV. “Colter’s Hell”: A Case of Mistaken Identity

One of the most venerable old axioms of fur trade history is that of Colter’s Hell, which may be formulated thus: “After John Colter discovered what is now Yellowstone National Park, he told others of the scenic wonders there. No one believed him, and his listeners derisively dubbed the imaginary place Colter’s Hell.” No item of Yellowstone history is more widely believed, more universally beloved, and more transparently incorrect.

There was a Colter’s Hell in the fur trappers lexicon, which referred specifically to an ancient thermal area bordering the Shoshone River just west of present Cody, Wyoming. The term was never applied historically to the thermal zone within Yellowstone Park itself. It was Hiram M. Chittenden, the esteemed engineer and historian who first suggested this usage in 1895 with the original edition of his book, Yellowstone National Park.

The earliest published reference to “Colter’s Hell” is in Washington Irving’s version of Capt. Benjamin L. E. Bonneville’s journal narrating events from 1832 to 1835. However, note here that this “volcanic tract” with its “gloomy terrors, its hidden fires, smoking pits, noxious streams and the all-pervading ‘smell of brimstone’” was located, according to Irving, not on the headwaters of the Yellowstone but on the Shoshone or “the Stinking River” or “the Stinkingwater,” originally named on the Clark Map. It was Chittenden in 1895 and not Irving in 1837 who started the legend by asserting vaguely that “the region of ... [Colter’s] adventures was long derisively known as ‘Colter’s Hell,’” implying that by “region” he meant Yellowstone Park, the subject of his book. He does not accuse Bonneville or Irving of error, perforce conceding that “this name early came to be restricted to the locality where Colter discovered the tar spring on the Stinkingwater,” but he hopefully guesses that “Colter’s description, so well summed up by Irving ... undoubtedly referred in large part to what he saw in the Yellowstone and Snake River Valleys.” This is where the misconception got started.

It is significant that no historian prior to Chittenden entertained this misconception. For example, in 1890 Hubert H. Bancroft wrote: “Far east of ... [the volcanic basins on the Upper Madison], on the Stinkingwater Fork ... is Colter’s Hell, where similar phenomenon is exhibited on a lesser scale.” It is further significant that in his monumental American Fur Trade of the Far West, the first edition of which appeared in 1902, seven years after the first edition of Yellowstone, Chittenden wrote that Colter was “the first to pass through the singular region which has since become known throughout the world as the Yellowstone Wonderland. He also saw the immense tar spring at the forks of Stinkingwater River, a spot which came to bear the name of Colter’s Hell.” This is his only reference here to the term, which is a clear if tacit admission that he was in error in the first instance to create the impression that it ever applied contemporaneously to Yellowstone Park. But the impression once created would not down. Like Aladdin’s wonderful lamp, the jinni was out of the bottle, and the poetic version of “Colter’s Hell” has become a stock item in Western literature.

Defenders of the Colter’s Hell mythology are eager to challenge Washington Irving as an authority. True, Irving’s Captain Bonneville by his own admission never personally saw the Yellowstone Park area. Also, it is true that geysers are not to be seen today along the Shoshone River. Hence it might be reasoned that the only noteworthy thermal activity in 1807 was likewise confined to the Yellowstone (more particularly, to the upper Madison), and that Bonneville was merely reporting a twisted rumor. But a cold examination of the facts shows that Irving and Bonneville were correct.

First, there is no good reason to question Bonneville’s geographical knowledge. While he never saw it himself, Bonneville had quite a crew circulating through the future park as early as 1833 and, in fact, there is reason to believe that the great geyser basin of Firehole River, climaxed by Old Faithful, was discovered that year by one of his own lieutenants (see Chapter VII).

Secondly, although there are no phenomena readily apparent to passing motorists at the bona fide and unmarked Colter’s Hell site just west of Cody, the evidence of thermal activity, not entirely extinct now, is abundantly evident to anyone who cares to pause enroute to or from Yellowstone’s East Gate. On the Canyon rim downstream from the rocky defile enclosing the Buffalo Bill Dam, there are extinct geyser cones up to thirty feet in height and an extensive crust of fragile sinter. In the canyon floor itself there are bubbling fountains in the river bed, and the same pervasive smell of rotten eggs, (or more scientifically, sulphur dioxide) which assails one’s nostrils on the Upper Firehole. (Other related hot springs once existed at the forks of the Shoshone, now drowned beneath the reservoir).

How very strange that this spot, quite evidently the “Boiling Spring” of Colter’s famous route on the William Clark Map of 1810, has been largely ignored since 1895. Campfire writers and lecturers have been so enchanted by the Yellowstone “Wonderland,” they never gave thought to this historical-geological feature 50 miles outside of the Park boundary.

Thirdly, Bonneville wasn’t the only one who knew about the phenomena on the Stinkingwater. The true identity of Colter’s Hell was well understood by other mountain men. In 1829 Joe Meek knew all about steam vents “on the Yellowstone Plains,” but he also was familiar with a volcanic tract on “Stinking Fork,” previously “seen by one of Lewis and Clarke’s men, named Colter, while on a solitary hunt, and by him also denominated ‘hell.’” In 1852 the famed missionary-explorer, Father De Smet, cited “Captain Bridger” as the source of his information that, “Near the source of the River Puante, which empties into the Big Horn ... is a place called Colter’s Hell—from a beaver-hunter of that name. This locality is often agitated with subterranean fires....”

Stallo Vinton, early Colter biographer and editor of the 1935 edition of Chittenden’s American Fur Trade, paid no attention to Chittenden’s footnoted correction of 1902. Rather, he did more than anyone, perhaps, to exterminate the true Colter’s Hell and pin the name on the National Park. He accuses Irving of a substantial error in locating “Hell” on the Stinking River. Similarly, he ignores Joe Meek’s careful distinction between the Yellowstone and Shoshone volcanic tracts.

In 1863 Walter Washington DeLacy accompanied a party of Montana gold-seekers through the Yellowstone Park area. Although his companions were too absorbed in the search for the precious metal to pay any attention to the scenic wonders, DeLacy, a surveyor by trade, did pay attention and subsequently published a crude but illuminating map of the Park region. Here the principal geyser basin on Firehole River is called “Hot Springs Valley.” And far to the east, near the forks of the Shoshone is a “Hot Spring, Colter’s Hill.” [sic] In 1867 the official map of the Interior Department, by Keeler, apparently reproducing DeLacy’s data, also indicates a “Hot Spring, Coulter’s Hill.” [sic] So the Federal Government, at this early date, gave this official recognition to the clear distinction between the two thermal areas.

Vinton refers to the DeLacy and Keeler maps but he dismisses this further evidence as a mistake. Perhaps his stubborn version of Colter’s Hell would have collapsed if he had seen the recently discovered Bridger-De Smet Map of 1851, in the Office of Indian Affairs. Here Bridger also clearly distinguishes between “Sulphur Spring or Colter’s Hell Volcano” on Stinking Fork and an entirely different “Great Volcanic Region in state of eruption” drained by Firehole River. (See Chapter VIII.) Can we invoke any higher authority than Jim Bridger?

V. “Les Trois Tetons”: The Golden Age of Discovery, 1810-1824

In the spring of 1810, after Colter had departed, the Missouri Fur Company fort at Three Forks was so besieged by the Blackfeet that Andrew Henry was forced to flee with his trappers southwestward. They crossed the Continental Divide to the north fork of Snake River, since known as Henry’s Fork. A few log shelters built here near present St. Anthony, Idaho, called “Henry’s Fort,” became the first American establishment on the Pacific slope. During the rigorous winter of 1810-1811 it may be reasoned that these men explored the country within a wide radius of the Teton Mountains. Any belief that they touched Yellowstone Park must be conjectural, but that they were acquainted with Jackson’s Hole is quite evident from the testimony of the Astorians. In the spring of 1811 the starving company disbanded. Henry and others returned down the Missouri via Three Forks, while John Hoback, John Robinson and Jacob Reznor went eastward via Teton Pass, Jackson’s Hole, Twogwotee Pass, and overland to the Arikara villages on the Missouri, where they shaped a dugout and proceeded downstream.

In 1808 John Jacob Astor secured a charter from the state of New York creating the American Fur Company. The most ambitious of his schemes was the establishment of a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River, to exploit the wealth of the Northwestern wilderness. To promote this enterprise, Astor organized the subsidiary Pacific Fur Company and sent out two expeditions, one of which went by sea around Cape Horn, while the other was to proceed overland along the route of Lewis and Clark. The overland Astorians achieved fame as the first transcontinental expedition after Lewis and Clark, but fate decreed that they should blaze their own trail—through Jackson’s Hole.

Early in 1811 the overland party, under the command of Wilson Price Hunt of New Jersey, left St. Louis and sailed by keelboat up the Missouri River. On May 26, near the mouth of the Niobrara River, they met Hoback, Robinson, and Reznor. This trio was persuaded to join the outfit as guides and hunters, and it appears that it was their reports of hostile Indians on the Upper Missouri that prompted Hunt to abandon his boats on July 18 at the Arikara villages and proceed on dry land. From this point on the expedition consisted of 82 horses, 62 men, and the squaw and two children belonging to the interpreter Pierre Dorion.

The hopeful caravan retraced the route that Hoback and his companions had followed across the trackless plains and the Bighorn Mountains, then started up Wind River. Here, on September 14, according to Irving’s Astoria, the guides

assured Mr. Hunt that, by following up Wind River, and crossing a
single mountain ridge, he would come upon the head waters of the
Columbia. The scarcity of game, however, which already had been felt
to a pinching degree, and which threatened them with famine among the
sterile heights which lay before them, admonished them to change their
course. It was determined, therefore, to make for a stream [Green
River] which, they were informed, passed the neighboring mountains to
the south and west, on the grassy banks of which it was probable they
would meet with buffalo. Accordingly about three o’clock on the
following day, meeting with a beaten Indian road which led in the
proper direction, they struck into it, turning their backs upon Wind
River.

In the course of the day they came to a height that commanded an
almost boundless prospect. Here one of the guides paused, and, after
considering the vast landscape attentively, pointed to three mountain
peaks glistening with snow [the Tetons], which rose, he said, above a
fork of Columbia River. They were hailed by the travellers with that
joy with which a beacon on a sea-shore is hailed by mariners after a
long and dangerous voyage....

After a buffalo hunt on the “Spanish” or Green River, the Astorians crossed the dividing ridge to the head of the Hoback River (presumably then named in honor of their guide), which they followed into Jackson’s Hole.

The Hunt cavalcade paused at the confluence of the Hoback and the Snake rivers, and debated. “Should they abandon their horses, cast themselves loose in fragile barks upon this wild, doubtful, and unknown river; or should they continue their more toilsome and tedious, but perhaps more certain wayfaring by land?” After some tentative exploring of the Snake River Canyon, and upon the advice of the three hunters, they wisely decided in favor of the latter course. They forded the Snake, and on October 5 as they crossed “the mountain [Teton Pass] ... by an easy and well-beaten trail, snow whitened the summit....” On the 8th they arrived at Andrew Henry’s abandoned post. Here Hoback, Robinson, Reznor, and two others left the party on a separate exploring trip; and here it was that Hunt yielded to the demands of his followers, which he previously had resisted, and abandoned his horses in favor of passage by canoe flotilla down the Snake, a tragic mistake which brought great suffering to the Astorians before they reached their goal.

While the main body passed on, four men remained in Jackson’s Hole to “catch beaver.” This was the first known actual trapping of that area. Even more important, it was the first actual step in the great commercial project of Astoria. Irving recognized the significance of this move:

[The expedition] had now arrived at the head waters of the Columbia,
which were among the main points embraced by the enterprise of Mr.
Astor. These upper streams were reputed to abound in beaver, and had
as yet been unmolested by the white trapper. The numerous signs of
beaver met with during the recent search for timber gave evidence that
the neighborhood was a good ‘trapping ground.’ Here then it was proper
to begin to cast loose those leashes of hardy trappers, that are
detached from trading parties, in the very heart of the wilderness.
The men detached in the present instance were Alexander Carson, Louis
St. Michel, Pierre Detaye, and Pierre Delaunay.

These men were instructed to “trap upon the upper part of Mad (Snake) River, and upon the neighboring streams.” Whether they entered Yellowstone Park at this time is entirely conjectural. In the spring of 1812 they were attacked by Crow Indians near the Three Forks, and Detaye was killed.

On June 29, 1812, seven men led by Robert Stuart left Astoria carrying dispatches overland to Astor. The party arrived at St. Louis on April 30, 1813. They were the first organized transcontinental expedition eastbound after the return of Lewis and Clark, and the first to discover South Pass and the great Platte or Central route which was destined to become the main highway of the covered-wagon migrations. This journey again took them through Jackson’s Hole.

Stuart had gone out to Astoria by sea, but his fellow travelers had all been members of the Hunt expedition. These were John Day, Benjamin Jones, Francois Leclerc, Andre Valle, Ramsay Crooks, and Robert McClellan. Soon after setting out up the Columbia River John Day became violently deranged because of his sufferings from the previous winter and had to be sent back to Astoria. To the six remaining travelers, however, was eventually added Joseph Miller, who had been with Hoback, Robinson, and Reznor after they left Hunt in October 1811. The Stuart party reached Bear River intending to go due east; but there Crow Indians got on their trail. To elude them Stuart went north to the Snake and thus struck Hunt’s route of the preceding year. At Snake or “Mad River” near the present Idaho-Wyoming boundary, Crows stampeded their horses. They built a raft and descended the Snake for over a hundred miles, then crossed over the Snake River Range to Pierre’s Hole at the foot of the “Pilot Knobs,” where they reached familiar territory.

Here, in order to avoid a chance encounter with a Blackfoot war party, Stuart kept to the foothills, but the cantankerous McClellan, complaining of sore feet, refused to detour and went his own way. He was not to be seen again for thirteen days. Crooks, who had been ailing for some time, fell desperately ill, and despite recourse to castor oil and “an Indian sweat,” tied up the expedition in Pierre’s Hole for four days. On October 5 they set out again and on the 7th crossed “the summit of Pilot Knob Mountain [Teton Pass]” and reached the east bank of “Mad River.” Their stock of venison was by this time depleted. On the 9th they started up the precipitous Hoback Canyon and on the 12th reached Green River drainage, where they found McClellan. Warding off starvation by slaughtering an “old rundown buffalo bull,” the travelers journeyed from here to South Pass and down the Platte, wintering in the vicinity of Scotts Bluff.

For a few years after Stuart’s party disappeared up Hoback Canyon, the Tetons and Jackson’s Hole were left in solitude. Due to the hostility of the Blackfeet, the loss of Astoria in the War of 1812, and the indifference of the Federal Government, American interest in the Western Fur trade suffered a relapse. British interests now took the initiative. In 1816 the Northwest Company, licensed by the Crown to trade in Oregon, put Donald McKenzie in charge of the Snake River division. From Fort Nez Perce at the mouth of the Walla Walla, he set forth in September of 1818 at the head of an expedition “composed of fifty-five men, of all denominations, 195 horses and 300 beaver traps, besides a considerable stock of merchandise.” He reported his course to Alexander Ross:

From this place [the “Skamnaugh” or Boise] we advanced, suffering
occasionally from alarms for twenty-five days, and then found
ourselves in a rich field of beaver, in the country lying between the
great south branch and the Spanish waters [Bear River?].... I left my
people at the end of four months. Then taking a circuitous route along
the foot of the Rocky Mountains, a country extremely dreary during a
winter voyage, I reached the head water of the great south branch
regretting every step I made that we had been so long deprived of the
riches of such a country....

In a description of the Snake River country, presumably furnished him by McKenzie, Ross continues:

For twelve years after the returning Astorians disappeared up the
Hoback, no Americans entered Jackson Hole. The British North West
Company, and then the Hudson’s Bay Company, with which it merged,
trapped unchallenged west of the Rockies.

The Rocky Mountains skirting this country on the East, dwindle from
stupendous heights into sloping ridges, which divide the country into
a thousand luxurious vales, watered by streams which abound in fish.
The most remarkable heights in any part of the great backbone of
America are three elevated insular mountains, or peaks, which are seen
at the distance of one hundred and fifty miles: the hunters very aptly
designate them the Pilot Knobs they are now generally known as the
Three Paps or ‘Tetons’; and the source of the Great Snake River is in
their neighborhood....

Boiling fountains, having different degrees of temperatures, were very
numerous; one or two were so very hot as to boil meat. In other parts,
among the rocks, hot and cold springs might alternately be seen within
a hundred yards of each other, differing in their temperature.

McKenzie’s exact route can only be conjectural, but the context suggests passage through Jackson’s Hole into a corner, at least, of Yellowstone Park. It was apparently on this occasion that the “Trois Tetons” and “Pierre’s Hole” were given their names by Iroquois or French-Canadians who accompanied McKenzie.

Chittenden reports the discovery in 1880 by Colonel P. W. Norris of a tree near the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone with the inscription “JOR Aug 19 1819.” Although of course the initials prove nothing as to identity, Chittenden accepts this as proof of white men in the Park at that time.

Stimulated by McKenzie’s success in acquiring peltries, the Northwest Company followed up with other Snake River expeditions. The threat of British domination of Oregon was aggravated when, in 1821, the Northwest Company was absorbed by the powerful Hudson’s Bay Company.

Shortly after the consolidation of the British companies, the prospects for a revival of American interest in the mountain fur trade were awakened in the frontier town of St. Louis by the formation of a partnership that would evolve into the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In 1822 General William H. Ashley and the veteran Major Andrew Henry enlisted the aid of “one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source” on a trapping expedition. Among those who joined the enterprise, then or subsequently, were men destined to make history in the West—James Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Smith, William Sublette and David E. Jackson. They were green boys, hardly fit material for an epic invasion of the uncharted Rocky Mountains; yet they were destined to become continental explorers.

Henry took his young men in keelboats up the Missouri to the mouth of the Yellowstone, where they spent the winter. In the spring of 1823 he set out for the Blackfoot country to the west. Again, as in 1810, these Indians proved to be most inhospitable, scalping four of his recruits and driving him back to his fort. Meanwhile General Ashley organized another expedition and proceeded upriver without incident until he arrived at the villages of the Arikara. There his plans were upset by a treacherous attack in which thirteen of his men were killed and many others were wounded. Colonel Leavenworth hastened to the rescue, but his campaign against the Indians was something of a fiasco. Soon afterward Ashley returned to St. Louis, Henry returned to his post on the Yellowstone, and a third contingent started overland under the command of Jedediah Smith. In February 1824 this last group made the first crossing of South Pass from east to west, their discovery of rich beaver fields in Green River Basin opening a new era in fur trade history. In June they split into four parties. Fitzpatrick, heading east for Fort Atkinson to report the situation to Ashley, rediscovered the Platte route of the returning Astorians; Sublette, Bridger, and others went southwest to explore the Bear River country and lay claim to the discovery of Great Salt Lake; and Smith, with six unidentified companions, went north. The details of their course are given in Washington Hood’s Original draft of a report of a practicable route for wheeled vehicles across the mountains, written at Independence, August 12, 1839.

After striking the Colorado, or Green river, make up the stream toward
its headwaters, as far as Horse creek, one of its tributaries, follow
out this last mentioned stream to its source by a westerly course,
across the main ridge in order to attain Jackson’s Little Hole, at the
headwaters of Jackson’s fork [Hoback River]. Follow down Jackson’s
fork to its mouth and decline to the northward along Lewis’s fork
[Snake River], passing through Jackson’s Big Hole to about twelve
miles beyond the Yellowstone pass [sic], crossing on the route a
nameless beaver stream. Here the route passes due west over another
prong of the ridge [Conant Pass], a fraction worse than the former,
followed until it has attained the headwaters of Pierre’s Hole,
crossing the Big Teton, the battleground of the Blacksmith’s fork;
ford Pierre’s fork eastward of the butte at its mouth and Lewis fork
also, thence pass to the mouth of Lewis fork.

Subsequently the Smith party encountered a Hudson’s Bay Company brigade under Alexander Ross, giving first notice that Americans would actively contest British claims to Oregon. This expedition to the Jackson’s Hole country was also significant as the first in an amazing series which has established Jedediah Smith as perhaps the foremost explorer of Western America.

We have noted the visit of McKenzie’s brigade of British-Canadians to the Upper Snake and a region of boiling fountains, in 1818-1819, as reported by Ross. Now, in 1824, Ross himself conducted the second British invasion of Yellowstone Park, while crossing from Okanagon to the headwaters of the Missouri. In the foolscap folios which make up his official report, the entry for April 24 reads: “We crossed beyond the Boiling Fountains. The snow is knee-deep half the people are snow-blind from sun glare.” So British traders have supplied the first clear record of Yellowstone thermal wonders to follow the hazy notations along Colter’s route on The Clark Map of 1810.

VI. “Jackson’s Hole”: Era of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, 1825-1832

Late in 1824 General Ashley, journeying west to reap the winter’s harvest of furs, approached the mountains by way of the little-known South Platte route and the Colorado Rockies and explored the lower Green River. In the summer of 1825 on Henry’s Fork of the Green (near the Wyoming-Utah line) he inaugurated the annual rendezvous of the mountain trappers, which provided a more flexible system of fur trading than the “fixed fort system” which had hitherto prevailed in the Western fur trade. The beaver catch brought in this first year was of such magnitude that Ashley was assured of a substantial profit. With Smith and a strong guard he took his prize by pack train to the Bighorn, by bullboats to the mouth of the Yellowstone, and by keelboats down the Missouri River to St. Louis.

Jedediah Smith left Flathead House in 1825 with Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but left him in time to rejoin his comrades at the rendezvous. When the reunited Americans exchanged tales of their adventures, it is possible that Smith offered a glowing account of the Jackson’s Hole region. Whatever the inspiration, Bridger and Fitzpatrick are reported to have headed there to resume trapping operations, after seeing Smith and Ashley safely down the Bighorn. This may have been the first large-scale trapping venture in which Jackson’s Hole was a primary objective.

The rendezvous of 1826 took place near Great Salt Lake. The turnover of furs was immense and, having made his fortune, General Ashley sold his interests to three of his most able employees, Jedediah Smith, David E. Jackson, and William Sublette. Smith left the rendezvous to lead a band southwest across the desert to the Spanish settlements of California, being the first to make this perilous passage. Jackson and Sublette headed for the Snake River country to trade with the Flatheads, taking a large force of trappers.

Daniel T. Potts of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, one of Sublette’s men on this expedition, is now identified as the long-mysterious author of the letter which first appeared in the Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, September 27, 1827, reprinted in Niles’ Register of October 6, which contains the earliest known description of any portion of present Yellowstone National Park by an American. The original document came to light in 1947 when Mrs. Kate Nixon and Miss Anne G. Rittenhouse of Washington, D. C., collateral descendants of Potts, made themselves known to officials of the National Park Service. It has been fittingly acquired for posterity by the Yellowstone Library and Museum Association at Mammoth Hot Springs. The cover is addressed to “Mr. Robert T. Potts, High Street, Philadelphia” and stamped “St. Louis, Missouri.” Dated July 8, 1827, at the “Sweet Lake” or Bear Lake (Utah) rendezvous, it describes how the Potts party, no members of which are identified, went north after the Salt Lake rendezvous of 1826: