Kevin Costner's the West (2025) s01e02 Episode Script

At the beginning of the 19th century,
the western border of the United States
is the Mississippi river.
Beyond it lies French Louisiana,
a land that, for most
Americans, is too vast to imagine,
too mysterious to comprehend.
But when president Thomas
Jefferson buys it from Napoleon,
American explorers quickly seek out
its most valuable resource, animal furs.
As trappers and traders
pursue their fortunes out west,
native Americans will be forced to fight
to preserve the riches of their homeland.
One daring mountain
man named John colter
will get caught up in a clash of cultures,
forging a legend with a run for his life.
People live on myths.
And the myths that really
stick in the American experience
are the myths of the west.
The mountains were taller,
the deserts were harsher.
The snows were deeper.
American west conjures
wonder, possibility, opportunity.
The figure of the mountain man.
Notorious outlaws.
The cowboy.
The discovery of gold in California.
This train of wagons
trailing across the prairie.
Everybody has a reason
for wanting this land.
But most of that land
was already occupied.
We have been residents
for more than 10,000 years.
But this is a clash of two different ways
of seeing life itself.
Fighting for the future of
your homeland on the one side,
and fighting for the destiny
of the new republic on the other side.
The history of the
west is a creation story.
It's the creation of what we
think of as modern america.
The west is a place
where anything is possible.
It is the essence of the American dream.
The core of this, is what
are we to be as a nation?
The reckoning is coming.
The west is this canvas
on which American dreams
become larger than life.
March 1803.
The United States is young.
It's been independent for just 20 years,
and its economy and infrastructure
are still in their infancy.
But the nation is growing fast.
Ohio has just entered
the union as the 17th state.
The us population is 5.3
million, and rising 35% a year.
The majority of Americans are farmers.
And for president Thomas Jefferson,
the future of the republic
rests on their shoulders.
To Jefferson's mind,
the ideal American citizen was a farmer
cultivating a small tract of land.
Jefferson saw the yeoman farmer
as almost a natural aristocrat.
And he was opposed to
that inherited aristocracy
of Europe culture.
Jefferson also needs American farmers
to build the nation's economy,
but as more settlers move west,
the Mississippi river
becomes increasingly vital
for trade and transport,
and it's vulnerable to foreign influence.
France has just taken over the lands
west of the Mississippi river.
Spain is down in Mexico, another threat.
The British are up north in Canada,
so you still have empires that are circling
around the United States
or pressing in from all sides.
With so many potential
European threats,
Jefferson needs to make
sure American farmers
have free access to the Mississippi river
to ship their crops.
So he looks to acquire
the port of New Orleans.
That's all Jefferson wants,
control of the port city,
so we can control all of
that produce going down river
and it'll be under American jurisdiction.
But Jefferson will have to bargain
with the leader of the French republic,
Napoleon Bonaparte.
Napoleon has designs
on a global empire,
which includes the western hemisphere,
but when slaves revolt in Haiti,
Napoleon finds himself
in the midst of a quagmire.
His imperial goals
are starting to fall apart.
He needs to finance this army
and he's looking for
any way out that he can.
Jefferson sent his diplomats
over to make an offer
for New Orleans, and
that's when Napoleon said,
"well, I don't know about New Orleans.
Why don't you buy the whole thing?"
Napoleon offers to sell the United States
the entire territory of Louisiana,
a vast swath of land that stretches
from the Mississippi to the rockies.
828,000 square miles,
575 million acres for $15.6 million.
The greatest land sale in
human history, 3 cents per acre,
doubling the size of our republic
with a single stroke of Jefferson's pen.
It's impossible for us to get
our brains around this moment.
With France now gone
from the north American continent,
the United States is down one rival.
Now, its primary threat
is its former colonial ruler,
Great Britain.
The treaty of Paris in
1783 settles the revolution
and the us thinks, "okay, we're free now.
We're free of British influence,
we're our own people."
The British aren't thinking the same way.
They're looking to push
over the us at any opportunity.
With their extensive network
of north American outposts, the British
run the most profitable
fur trade in the world.
The fur trade, the trade in animal pelts
in the 17th and the
18th and 19th century,
was one of the greatest
economic machines
in the entire western world.
In exchange for
weapons and other goods,
native people trade valuable fur
such as fox, marten, mink, and sea otter,
which Europeans take
overseas and sell at a markup.
The British had a
tremendously developed
infrastructure in the fur trade.
It was easy to come
down from Canada into
what was technically us territory
and take furs, or trade for furs.
Jefferson suspects the newly acquired
territory of Louisiana is filled with furs
and other valuable resources.
He asked congress to fund an
expedition to explore the area.
He wants to know what's out there.
Various flora and fauna
and species of bird and fish,
and he wants to know it all.
Jefferson tasks two army officers,
meriwether Lewis and William Clark,
with a mission to lead
a corps of discovery
into Louisiana territory.
In may of 1804, they head west
from St. Louis on the Missouri river.
And the kind of young
men who were capable
of doing this are like Navy seals.
The rest of us wouldn't last two days
on the Lewis and Clark expedition.
The party totals 45,
including scientists, photographers,
and several healthy young men
with exceptional survival skills.
Among them is 32-year-old John colter.
John colter is born in
Virginia in the early 1770s
and he grows up on a farm
and has access to the great outdoors.
And spends a lot of time there
really learning his way around a forest.
John colter is the type of person
meriwether Lewis and William
Clark were trying to recruit
for the corps of discovery.
Extraordinary endurance,
incredible outdoor skills,
and ability to confront things
in a spontaneous fashion,
and able to rendezvous
at a very distant location.
And he had all of those things in spades.
When we think of, like,
a natural in baseball
or a natural athlete, he
was a natural mountain man.
He could read the land.
He had skills that
most people don't have.
He had drive.
He is a person who is resistant
to the strictures of modern society,
of rules, of churches, of laws,
and he's gonna be
much more comfortable
away from all that, out
there in the wilderness.
To be part of a historic mission
that's authorized by the
congress of the United States,
that had to be so intoxicating.
This is the moon mission.
This is a mission to Mars.
As the corps of discovery
heads deeper into
this uncharted territory,
they experienced the harsh conditions
of the northern plains.
They also discover the
fabled beauty of the land
and encounter the native
nations who call it home.
The biggest misconception is that
the west was a virgin land.
They knew better,
and we certainly know better
that it wasn't a virgin land,
it was a peopled land.
East of the Mississippi,
native nations are being
pushed off their lands
by an onslaught of American settlers.
It's different in the west,
as the corps discovers.
They are trying to collect
not only scientific information,
but also diplomatic
and military information
in order to be able to ascertain,
how hard is it going to be
to get control of this place,
or the many places that
different peoples inhabit.
They require a tremendous amount
of help from native peoples.
They had, among their
party, the frenchman,
who knew some of the native peoples,
and his wife that everyone
knows as sacagawea.
Serving as a guide and translator,
sacagawea will prove
invaluable to the mission.
So much so that Lewis and
Clark name a river in her honor.
Oftentimes, it's connections
with Indians that are crucial
because if Indians don't want you there,
you're not gonna last long there.
Throughout the expedition's first year,
Lewis and Clark
encounter numerous tribes
across the northern plains.
John colter proves his word.
John colter turns out to be really good
interacting with native Americans,
and bartering with them, and
getting information from them.
He's also really good
at navigating his way
through wilderness.
And so whenever
there's a job to be done
to send somebody a hundred miles
on a journey to do something,
they pick John colter
because he can do it
and he can find his way back.
Lewis and Clark task colter
with finding a lost member of the corps.
They send him on scouting missions
and he quickly gains a reputation
as one of the most
skilled hunters in the party.
I mean, just imagine what it was like
to be alone, danger every day,
have no idea what
you're going to encounter.
He became a professional
man of the west.
As the corps makes its
way up the Missouri river,
colter can't help but
notice the abundance
of a particular animal.
All the way up,
they're seeing more and
more and more beaver
and he, like others, on the
corps of discovery are thinking
that there's wealth to be had here.
Beaver are such unique species
because their hair is
so dense on their hide
and it makes it extremely
soft, very durable,
and so it became
extremely popular for top hats
during the 19th century.
Beaver fur becomes one
of the hot commodities,
essentially the gold of
the early 19th century.
So, the person that
can acquire beaver pelts
is sitting on a fortune.
By the summer of 1806,
the corps of discovery
is finally headed back
towards St. Louis.
Over the course of two years,
they've made an incredible
8,000 mile round trip voyage
mapping not only the Louisiana territory
but vast areas of the pacific northwest.
Their discoveries of rivers, mountains,
native nations, plants, and animals
create a catalog of the west
drawn in detail in the
journals of Lewis and Clark.
So they get beyond
the yellow stone river.
They're this close to St. Louis
and they encounter the first
white men they have seen
for a very, very long time.
Their names are for rest
Hancock and Joseph dicks on.
They've had a rough time of it
and now they're in hopes
of repairing their fortunes
by trapping beaver.
One of the most beaver-rich
areas in the entire nation
was around the headwaters
of the Missouri river,
and that's where colter
had just come from
with the Lewis and Clark expedition.
And so he's one of
the very few white men
to have actually been to that place.
Hancock and dicks on,
they asked the captains,
"is there anyone among
you who might be willing
to come back with us
to serve as a kind of
guide or companion?"
And Lewis and Clark
think, are you nuts?
You know, we're just weeks from home.
Of course no one's gonna turn back.
And colter steps forward
and says, "I'll do it.
I wanna do it.
I wanna go back."
So in the fall of 1806,
John colter turns back to the west
while the rest of the corps
of discovery heads home.
They have been out of contact
with American society
for nearly two years.
Because they were gone so long,
people just assumed
that they too had perished.
And so, when they
finally show up in St. Louis,
it's like they came back from the dead.
"Here we are!"
As news of their return spreads,
Lewis and Clark become
national celebrities.
Americans savor their detailed accounts
of the wild frontier and its riches.
Meriwether Lewis
writes this very reassuring
letter to president Jefferson.
"The west abounds with essentially
infinite numbers of beaver.
"This resource is unlimited."
For president Jefferson,
this discovery presents
an incredible opportunity,
a chance to compete with
the British in the fur trade.
A handful of American trappers
are already making their way
up the Missouri river,
including John colter.
And colter turns back
with Hancock and dicks on
and goes up to the
mouth of the yellow stone.
He knows its unlimited wealth
if you can really harvest this.
By the early 1800s, the idea in america
that one can come from
very humble circumstances
and through hard work
and a little bit of luck,
one can elevate themselves
up to a higher class.
That has been firmly entrenched
after 200 years of colonization.
And so people like John
colter are imbued with that idea
that even though I'm born
to humble circumstances,
I can get into the fur trade.
And if I work hard and I apply myself,
I can become fabulously wealthy.
As John colter leads
dicks on and Hancock
up the Missouri river,
the winter of 1806 is about to set in.
He knows if he wants to survive,
he'll have to find native allies.
So he sets up camp near the crow.
Crow people in the
19th century were located
all along both sides
of the yellow stone river.
We occupied an area that was
about 40 million acres in size.
Crow people are not
hung up on race politics.
They are welcoming of anyone
who wants to come and
share their community.
They're opening their doors to them
and John colter is one of those people.
He knows how to speak
plain sign language.
Once a person could learn
how to use this language,
then they were able to communicate
with any tribe on the
northern or southern plains.
Colter comes in and he's gaining
hundreds, thousands of years
of local knowledge from these tribes.
Every plant that he's
looking at on the ground
is something that the crows
can identify as something
that's either edible or
useful in some utilitarian way.
But some native nations
don't want Americans
trapping on their lands.
The black feet are strongly opposed
to American fur traders
coming up the Missouri river
into black feet territory, and
many of those fur traders
ended up paying with their lives.
The black feet were feared by
their native American
neighbors like the crow,
and they transmitted this fear to
the white folks that came on.
Watch out for the black feet.
By the early 1800s, the
black feet had been trading
with the British-owned Hudson's
bay company for decades,
making them one of the
most heavily armed tribes
on the northern plains.
But while the British respect
the blackfeet's sovereignty,
Americans are using their
lands without permission.
The black feet made a
lot of mountain men retire.
They have been on the
northern plains thousands of years
and they control, militaristically,
the entire northern portion of Montana,
probably for several hundred miles.
This is their sovereign homeland
and suddenly, these
people from outside are in,
no license, no negotiation,
just coming in, killing
stuff and and taking it out.
The black feet rightly
understand that this is a threat.
John colter has found allies
in the blackfeet's
fiercest rivals, the crow,
who show colter where it's safe to trap
and which places to avoid.
But even with some
help, the work is relentless.
The beaver fur is thickest
and most valuable
in the middle of winter.
And in order to set the traps
and to retrieve the beaver,
if they do get trapped,
you have to go in the water
in absolutely freezing temperatures.
And if you get wet and it's really cold,
you can freeze to death very quickly.
Colter makes it through the long winter,
but the harsh conditions
prove too much for his partners.
I think Hancock and dicks on
really don't have the right stuff.
They knew it, that's
why they asked for help.
And so he finally gives up on them.
Colter leaves Hancock and dicks on
with all the provisions.
By the spring of 1807,
he's on his way back
down the Missouri river,
defeated and alone.
But in the west,
opportunity is never far away.
This time, he gets all the way
to the mouth of the platte river.
So he's just days from St. Louis now,
and he meets Manuel Lisa.
Now, Lisa a spaniard.
He is a very ambitious and driven man
and he is leading a large group
up to the yellow stone country
to do industrial extraction of beaver.
Colter discovers that
there are several members
of his friends in Manuel Lisa's expedition
and he agrees to work for Manuel Lisa.
And colter turns back again.
So, this means he can't
get it out of his system.
There's something so
compelling in the west
that he overcomes his caution
again and again and again,
very nearly to the point of death.
By the early 1800s,
British Canadian fur trade
has been going strong
for nearly two centuries
and the United States is
just beginning to catch up.
In the us, I mean, they're
kind of hobbling along
on horses and hauling
boats up rivers with ropes,
compared to this very
efficient British fur trade.
Our image of the fur
trade during this period
is dominated by these
romantic fascinating characters,
the mountain men,
and they were obviously,
they were sort of the working force of it,
but all of this was run
by larger businesses.
The British have already established
major fur trading outposts in Canada,
such as the Hudson's bay company,
employing hundreds of trappers
and generating a
hefty stream of revenue.
By contrast, the American great plains
has nothing of the sort
until Manuel Lisa ventures
up the Missouri river.
Manuel Lisa will be the first to establish
a trading post there.
This is a place that
traders can trade their furs
and their wares all year,
where native Americans can come
and engage in commerce as well.
So it becomes an
important economic driver
in this long move toward
the settlement of the west.
Manuel Lisa creates his trade fort
at the mouth of the big horn.
So in the heart of absaroka crow country.
It's in their interest to be
on good terms with the crow.
Colter's experience with the crow
makes him the perfect man
to head up trade relations
with the local tribes.
Manuel Lisa wants colter to go around
and inform the different tribes
that there's going be a new trading post,
that they're welcome to come there
and trade with their hides.
And so this is gonna be a new costco
or Walmart on the northern plains.
If you'd said to him, "what
do you have to have?"
He would've said, "powder,
ball, rifle, hatchet, knife.
Beyond that, I can make do,
I can make moccasins,
I can make clothes,
I can butcher animals."
Colter's exploration
of the upper yellow stone is legendary.
He makes his way west
of the wind river range
into what we know of as
the yellow stone caldera.
He experiences the geysers,
he sees the hot pools.
He's encountering these things
that only indigenous
people would've known.
And so in that way, it's like
discovering a new continent.
As colter lays the groundwork
for Lisa's trading post
known as fort Raymond,
he helps to create the first
commercial infrastructure
for this region of the American west.
This is what Thomas
Jefferson has been hoping for,
but his vision doesn't stop there.
To him, the fur trade
in the northern plains
is a gateway to the pacific coast.
So in these years, the very early 1800s,
the west coast is really
unclaimed territory.
Technically, Spain's up
as far as San Francisco,
you have Russian fur
traders way up in Alaska.
And then between
those Russian fur posts
in Alaska and San Francisco, you have
2,000 miles of unclaimed
coast in the northwest.
This is an incredible resource
in both land and in furs,
and britain knows it, and the us knows it.
The British and the
Americans eventually end up
in a fur trading arms race, so to speak,
to extract as quickly as they can
the remaining furs across
most of western North America.
But as American trade networks
advance towards the rockies,
it causes turmoil
among the native nations.
A lot of these tribes have agreements.
They're peaceful with one another.
As pioneers and other
Americans move westward,
tribes steadily lose land and resources,
and that causes conflict amongst them.
The rivalry between the
crow and the black feet
has been building for decades.
Fights over territory
and horses are common.
But the latest sticking point
is Manuel Lisa's trading fort.
The crow are benefiting
because now they're getting
rifle and shot,
they're getting kettles, and
handkerchiefs, and beads,
and all the things that
they want and can use.
And so they like this arrangement.
But the black feet know
that the fort means one thing,
more Americans
trespassing on their lands.
And it's not long before John colter
finds himself caught in the fray.
As John colter returns
from his thousand-mile trek
in the spring of 1808,
he passes through the
middle of a generational conflict
between two native nations,
the crow and their rivals, the black feet.
When colter leaves
fort Manuel Lisa in 1808
and makes his way to the west,
he comes into a group
of crow hunter gatherers
and he joins their group.
And they encounter a very
large contingent of black feet,
and there's a battle.
Colter's part of the crow world.
He's naturally gonna fight with the crow.
In the ensuing clash, John colter,
he's a really good shot,
so he ends up killing a
number of black feet warriors
before getting wounded
himself in the leg.
Wounded and bleeding,
colter hikes the long trail,
through the snow, back to fort Raymond.
But his bravery has left
its Mark on the black feet.
When you talk about
plains Indian warfare
at the time that John
colter was engaged in it,
it was pretty close up.
It was pretty personal style of fighting
so people could see you.
They would remember
what you looked like.
And so, if he fought
against black feet in 1808,
it's likely that they
remembered who he was
and that they could identify him.
But as he recovers at fort Raymond,
the allure of the wilderness
is too great for him to resist,
and he's already planning his next move.
While colter is convalescing,
he sees all kind of trappers
coming into the fort with fur
and making really good money.
And it starts to gnaw at him
because he's an exceptional trapper,
he knows how to do this.
So colter heals up from his injury
and like any good cowboy,
he wants to get back up on that horse.
Meanwhile, a wealthy
entrepreneur in New York
also has his eyes on the fur trade
with grand ambitions
to corner the market.
Well, John Jacob astor
was born in Germany
in modest circumstances.
He comes to america as a teenager,
he hears talk about
this lucrative fur trade.
So what does he do?
He gets to New York
and he goes into a furrier,
and he learns everything
he can about the trade,
and then somehow goes out on his own
and eventually becomes the first
multimillionaire in america.
Jefferson gets a letter
from John Jacob astor
and the letter says to Jefferson,
"I have a plan for capturing
the entire fur wealth of North America."
And Jefferson says, "who is this guy?
Come on down to the
white house, let's talk."
In the summer of 1808,
astor goes to Washington
to meet the president
and lays out his plans.
He'll set up a network of trading posts
all the way from the Missouri
river to the pacific coast,
where he'll establish an outpost
to link the American fur trade with Asia,
Alaska, and beyond.
It's this grand vision
and they've come out all
pumped out of this meeting
and Jefferson says, "I will
help you in any way I can."
Well, of course, this'll help them
crush britain in the fur trade.
But astor's not the only one
looking to make his
fortune in the fur trade.
In the fall of 1808, colter decides
to embark on another
trapping expedition.
Competition for furs
has never been greater,
but colter has an advantage.
He knows the terrain,
he knows the tribes,
and he alone knows where to find
the densest population of beaver,
right in the middle
of black feet territory.
When fur trappers first
came to black feet country,
the black feet told them,
"don't hunt these beavers here
or we're gonna chase you out of here."
A lot of fur trappers decided
that they were gonna go ahead
and trap anyway,
and a lot of them didn't
have very good results.
Colter is aware that
they are in the territory
that is patrolled by the black feet tribe,
which makes it a very perilous venture.
But he knows his prospects are great
and if he gets out there,
he can do well and
maybe make his fortune.
Colter decides to go in with a partner,
someone he already trusts,
and he chooses John potts,
his former canoe mate
from the corps of discovery.
Colter suggests to potts that
they do most of their trapping
and most of their setting
and cleaning of traps at night,
under the cover of darkness.
And so it works for a while.
They managed to stay out
of the black purview there
and trap quite a few
beavers for several months.
And so one morning
while the sun is coming up,
they are setting and repairing traps
and they hear in the
distance this thunderous roar,
which they first think might be
just a herd of buffalo passing by.
That's when they encounter
a very large contingent
of very angry black feet.
Colter and potts are
on the river in their boat
fixing beaver traps,
when a large group of black feet warriors
appears on the banks of the river
and motions them to come ashore.
John colter realizes there's no escape.
It's totally pointless.
Hey, wait, wait, wait.
And colter is ready to go ashore
because that's what
they're asking him to do.
Potts, on the other hand,
immediately hesitant.
And actually, potts picks up his rifle
and aims at the black feet group.
The black feet unleashed a
barrage of arrows on potts
and he was killed in pretty short order.
They bring potts to the shore
and they dismember him.
They butcher him in front of colter.
Colter listens to the
black feet as they adjudicate
and decide what they're
gonna do with him,
and he's familiar with them
and they seem to be familiar with him.
He's pretty sure he is a dead man,
but willing to see if he can
maybe find a way out of this.
They strip him,
including his moccasins.
And he listens in
as the black feet elders make a decision.
Then they report to him,
we're giving you a chance to survive.
They're speaking to him in
sign language, telling him,
we'll let you know when
you can start running.
He starts running as fast
as he can across this plain.
It's a flat plain but it's
covered in prickly pear
and all sorts of other things
that are slicing up his feet.
Colter may be running for his life,
but the black feet are
defending their homeland
from the ever encroaching Americans.
This is not just an opportunity
to get revenge against John colter.
This is actually part of a wider
effort by native Americans,
by the black feet here to
resist what they see now
as white seizure of resources
that native Americans
have depended on.
Colter knows that his
only hope of survival
is to make it to a fort.
He's got six miles of
open territory to traverse
and then, he's still 200 miles
away from the nearest fort.
Blood was gushing out
of his nose and mouth,
his lungs were bursting.
His feet were so badly damaged
that the pain was just
absolutely excruciating.
At a certain point, he's winded.
He turns around to see his progress
and realizes that most of the
warriors are far behind him.
But there's one that's right on his tail.
John colter wheels around.
And his appearance apparently
shocks this black foot Indian
because he's covered in blood.
And colter somehow manages
to wrest the spear from him,
and stab him with it and kill him.
There's no time to savor the victory
because he's got hundreds
of other warriors hot on his tail.
And heads as fast as
he can to a river nearby.
Jumps in the river,
begins to swim down river,
trying to get away from the
warriors who are in hot pursuit.
He eventually comes to
a cluster of fallen timbers,
logs that have been probably
chopped down by beavers upstream.
If he can get underneath this pile of logs
and find an air pocket,
he might be undetectable.
Colter gets under it in such a way
that he can get his nose and mouth
just above the water line.
And he waits in ice cold water.
Eventually, the black feet arrive.
You're cold, you're alone, you're bruised.
I don't know what he's thinking,
but I'm pretty sure he was thinking,
"this is the last day of my life."
John colter's there in
the freezing cold water
under this pile of logs.
He's badly damaged.
He's totally exhausted.
The black feet, they're
still searching for him.
All day, they were moving back and forth,
gotta be here somewhere.
The black feet become incensed
at not being able to find
him and leave him alone.
And he waits.
Finally, he's alone
and he carefully
crawls out from the river,
and begins to walk 200
miles to the nearest fort.
He has nothing to eat, so
he survives by eating bark
and by eating roots.
Colter learned how to harvest wild plants
from the crow Indians.
All colter really needed to
survive was a digging stick.
He eventually gets to fort Raymond.
Sometimes in his telling, 7
days, sometimes 11 days,
but an incredible journey.
When colter reaches the fort,
he's so emaciated and dirty
that his peers don't even recognize him.
He recovers and continues his
adventures for two more years,
but after a few more close
calls with the black feet,
he finally decides to call it quits.
In 1810, he returns to
St. Louis where he marries
and builds a small cabin
by the Missouri river,
next to Daniel Boone and his family.
He soon gets a chance to
share his unparalleled knowledge
with the entire nation.
In 1811, colter encounters
a group of explorers
on their way up the Missouri river.
John Jacob astor's overland expedition,
which is headed to the pacific coast
to set up a trading fort.
John colter tells his
story to the astor people,
among whom is a
trained British scientist,
botanist by the name of John bradbury,
who writes down colter's story
about being chased by
the black feet word for word.
And that's the definitive
source of the John colter story.
Colter's tale quickly spreads,
becoming a popular
frontier legend by the 1830s,
but with each retelling,
there are variations.
And while he surely
escaped the black feet,
his story serves a purpose.
I've always believed that the black feet
wanted colter to survive that run.
They want to be feared,
they want to be respected,
and here's an opportunity for them
to send that message loud
and clear through a legend.
No matter which way you look at it,
John colter is an amazing human being.
Anyone who goes
through Montana naked
for 200 miles deserves a medal.
John colter is instrumental in creating
this mythical image of the
westerner, the mountain man
that becomes a fixture
in American culture
so that in decades later,
kit Carson will fill dime novels
with stories of his exploits.
Teddy Roosevelt, even
though he was born in Manhattan
and goes to Harvard, goes out west
and does a little dabbling in cattle.
And next thing you know,
Teddy Roosevelt is this icon
of the American west.
But after colter's story,
most Americans will
avoid black feet territory,
reshaping the path to the west.
It seems surprising
that individuals off on their own
can be agents of historical change,
but that's essentially
what the mountain men
become over time.
John colter and mountain men like him
are really the spearhead
of the westward movement
because they learned from the
tribes where the passes were,
where the trails were,
where the rivers were,
how to navigate the landscape.
And then in turn, the mountain
men passed that knowledge on
to the white settlers.
John Jacob astor's expedition
sets up a fur trading post
at the mouth of the Columbia
river in the spring of 1811,
naming it fort astoria.
For the us, it's a claim
to the pacific northwest,
and despite the war with
britain that erupts in 1812,
the two nations agree to
share control of the region.
In the decades that follow,
American fur trappers and traders
will seek out the riches in
what will become Oregon,
with native nations as
their trading partners.
But a new kind of migrant
will follow on their heels.
Christian missionaries will
come to convert native peoples
and transform their way of life.