After
our visit to the museum, we stopped in a gift store where I complained
to one of the clerks that the place next door should be shut down for
improper advertising. She agreed. The owner of the adjacent restaurant
had a smoker right out on the sidewalk so that passersby would have to
smell the slow cooking ribs. We ended up eating lunch there.
During our drive to Yellowstone, I thought of the old adage that if an adventurer wants to be remembered, he had better leave a written record. [At least, it is my old adage] Whether the written record is in the form of a journal or a Dime Novel is not important; the record doesn’t even have to be true. What is important is that there is some type of written record. A case in point is John Colter. Arguably, no American lived through as many adventures as Colter. A member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, he was not ready to return to civilization when the expedition was heading home. He received permission from Lewis and Clark to leave the expedition when it reached today’s Bismarck, North Dakota. Joining up with two men from Illinois who were interested in trapping, he spent four more years in the mountains. He teamed up with various men at different times during his travels, but often traveled alone. He spent one winter in Yellowstone in 1807-1808, and is the earliest known white man to visit Yellowstone.
After his last adventure, Colter finally decided that it was time to go home. Colter and a man named Potts were traveling together when a couple of hundred Crow Indians captured Colter and killed Potts. Being fair-minded people, the Indians gave Colter a chance to escape. He was stripped naked and given a “head start.” After a time, Colter outdistanced all but one of the Indians. Turning quickly, he surprised and killed the fleetest of the Indians. After killing the Indian, he hid in a nearby river and used the old “breathing though a hollow weed” ploy which would become a cliché in the movies of the 20th century. Wearing only the robe he had taken from the Indian he had killed, he then walked a hundred miles to the safety of a fort.
When Colter reached St. Louis and told people about the thermal activity he had observed in Yellowstone, his stories were dismissed as “Colters’ Hell.” Ironically, he moved up the Missouri River from St. Louis and settled not far from where Daniel Boone had settled a number of years earlier. Boone, of course, had several biographers; Colter did not. Boone became famous; Colter did not. He married and died in 1812, a few years after his return from the mountains: “Johnny we hardly knew ye.”
It was only a 50 mile drive to Yellowstone; but once we reached the park, we had another 20 mile drive to our lodge, The Canyon Lodge. We saw a large number of buffalo on our way to the lodge, but saw no need to take more photos. After we arrived at the good-looking but amenity-lacking lodge, we ate dinner and went to a Ranger run “sky show.” Because the place chosen for the show offered a limited view of the sky, most of the “show” was a Power Point presentation concerning constellations. The ranger pointed out that over the centuries, various people in various countries, probably aided by their local form of intoxicant, have been “able to see” a variety of people, animals and objects in the night sky. I had heard most of this before, but even with intoxicants I could never make out what others could supposedly see. Carole liked the show; I enjoyed looking at the sky on the way back to our car far more than I did the show.
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