Interesting Times

Interesting Times

If anyone has ever lived in interesting times, it was surely the fur trappers of the early nineteenth century. When I began studying the lives of the mountain men a few years ago, I would often come across facts, small tidbits really, that would make me pause in wonder at the lives these men led.

John Colter for instance, was a private in the army who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition. For two years Colter lived and worked in the wild on this historic journey, enduring hardships and labor that we can scarcely imagine today. In 1806 the 'Corps of Discovery' as it was called, was nearing St. Louis at the tag end of their extraordinary journey, when they happened across the camp of two men who were headed upstream to trap beaver. The two trappers, named Hancock and Dixon, mentioned that they sorely needed a man who knew the Yellowstone country. John Colter volunteered to accompany the men back into the mountains as their guide.

If one is not paying attention, one might gloss over this small factoid as a minor occurrence at the end of a legendary journey, but think about it for a minute. Two years spent in wilderness the likes of which no longer exists and we won't see again. The expedition endured all the weather the northern plains and Rocky Mountains has to offer with nothing but the shelter that they could carry with them or construct from those things at hand. Everything they ate, they either gathered, hunted, or carried thousands of miles. The men were often surrounded by large, and sometimes dangerous, animals. They were out-manned, out-gunned, and out-supplied by native peoples whose land they had to cross, with or without their consent, in order to achieve their goal. For two long years, the men endured daily hardship, privation, danger and brutal toil.

After all that, John Colter went back.

When the odyssey was nearly over, with the goal nearly in sight, Colter elected to turn away from civilization and head back into the mountains. Waiting for him in St. Louis would have been nearly two years back pay, the fame of having been a member of the Corps of Discovery, and numerous opportunities for financial gain and a life of relative ease, yet he turned away from all of those things, and returned to the wilds.

To our modern values, this decision seems to be madness. Our society as a whole and most of us as individuals make our daily decisions based on what will make our lives easier. I could list a number of examples, but it seems redundant to do so (and it's easier not to). Just think of a time when you asked someone, or they asked you why a thing was done a certain way and the answer was 'it seemed easier'. The phrase 'it was easier' is axiomatic in our culture and passes as wisdom without question.

I point this out not to pass judgment on our culture or society, but to show that John Colter must have been operating with an entirely different set of values than many of us know, when he decided to head back into the Rockies with civilization so near at hand. The realization that these men maintained an entirely different mindset than my own has made me want to understand them better.

While writing my novel 'Plews', I tried to discover, and thus illustrate, what might have made a man make such a decision. The answers I arrived at, can be stated one of two ways: The first takes the form of my novel, and the second takes the form of the West itself.

Anyone who lives, or has traveled west of the Mississippi, must at least have an inkling of what Colter must have been thinking when he turned away from the settlements, and headed back to the Great American West. If we see those places and still do not understand, then we should be pitied.

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