A Walk With John Colter

For most of my life, John Colter was a misty figure to me. “Some character out of cowboy fact or myth,” I would have told you, until about 10 years ago.

Then I took a greater interest in local history and found John Colter was indeed a fact. That he traveled with Lewis and Clark. That he became the first white frontiersman to see Yellowstone. That he wasn’t a gunfighter from cowboy days, but an explorer, hunter and fur-trapper half a century before the cowboys.

And not just a legend posing against a mountain backdrop, but a wiry 5’10” athlete in buckskins, a powerhouse of endurance who crossed the western wilderness largely on foot and once ran naked across a prairie to escape a band of armed pursuers.

And that he lived the final years of his life right here, in our back yard, a few miles west of modern-day New Haven.

I recently got to stand on a high hill and gaze at a view John Colter would surely have gazed at — plausibly from that same hill. It made him more real to me.

And I got to see a secret cemetery in the woods that some, with good arguments, believe to be the great traveler’s final resting place. 

The gravestones there were little more than rocks, and the inscriptions almost imaginary. But compared to something else I’ll tell you about — a view from that very high hilltop — those inscriptions are as fresh as yesterday.

It made Colter more recent to me.

“It has to be said, we don’t know for sure that this is where he was buried,” said David Menke, our guide on the John Colter Memorial Site Hike, part of the annual Miller’s Landing Day event in New Haven, held in early May.

He was standing next to a short granite monument placed there in 1988.

“We don’t even know he was buried in this area,” said Menke. “But if he were buried around here, where else would he be? There aren’t that many cemeteries.”

The cemetery, known as the Miller Family Cemetery, contains perhaps a couple dozen very small, very weathered grave markers. None has been identified as Colter’s, but one of them bears the name “Hiram” — the same name as Colter’s son.

In Colter’s time, the population here was very small. “How many Hirams could there have been?” asked Menke.

The reasoning being: a son and his father, in a small community, would likely have been buried in the same place.

So the burial site is conjecture, he said. Menke has written several books on New Haven history. He speaks with confidence, but also restraint.

But he didn’t question that Colter lived in the New Haven area.

As one piece of evidence, he said a “sale bill” exists listing the belongings that went when Colter’s house was sold.

And it’s generally believed by historians that Colter, after his western adventures, settled on a farm near present-day New Haven.

Menke places that farm along nearby Boeuf Creek.

And Boeuf Creek joins the Missouri less than a quarter mile from the cemetery.

It was John Colter’s back yard we were in. 

David Menke, local historian, at the monument to John Colter, located in a forest cemetery near New Haven.

A Special Place

That cemetery! Mentioned in local histories, but hidden. On private land, so that visiting is only by permission.

Along with 10 others, I got there by hiking across a farmer’s property.

“If I turned you loose and gave you all day to find it,” Menke told us as we started our hike, “I doubt you would.”

It’s small and looks little different from the woods it’s in, but I immediately knew it was special.

It’s a level spot in the woods at the foot of a long hill — a little point of ground perched above the river. Even without the man-fashioned stones and the surrounding rusty strands of old fence, you would probably slow down and wonder, “Has anyone been here before?”

The word “peaceful” would probably come to mind.

But you do see the stones. And you notice the trees inside the fence are fewer and younger than the ones outside it. Some of the plants look decorative, not wild.

This place in the woods has been maintained! For at least a century, you would guess — maybe two. 

And almost certainly for much of that time it’s been visited. People hiking there and wondering — or knowing — who those stones were for.

If you weren’t there with a tour group, listening and asking questions, it’s a place where you might just stand and think, adding your silence to the silence.  I saw that others in the group, walking around the cemetery and bowing low to make out inscriptions, stepped lightly and spoke a little like people do in museums and churches.

“If you’re interested in history and John Colter,” said Menke, “this can be an emotional experience. I’ve had people cry.”

He told us of one visitor who “pulled out a flask and some glasses and said, ‘We’re gonna have a toast!’”

A Special View

Now, about that view I mentioned.

On our hike in, walking single file and stepping in one another’s footsteps, Menke led us to the high point of a plowed field — the top of the landscape — and asked us to look around.

We were in a plowed field that sloped down all around us. To the south we saw the farmlands and forests of Franklin County rolling away for miles. To the north we saw the far-off highlands of Warren County, and before them the flood plain of the Missouri. And before that, just below us, the river.

It was almost an aerial view.

No, it was an aerial view. We were seeing what eagles see.

Menke let us just stand there awhile, turning one way and then the other, taking it in.

“This is highly coveted farmland,” he told us — fertile, deep, good for roots, unrocky. The hills closest to the river are “first bluff,” some of the best farmland around.

And the soil there, he explained, is a gift from the Ice Age. Bedrock ground fine as flour by glaciers, carried into the river systems as the ice melted, then blown and spread slowly over the riverside hills across thousands of years.

He told us the glaciers had stopped just north of us. They’d made that fantastic soil, brought it to us, then departed.

That’s something that doesn’t happen every day.

Or everywhere.

Looking Back

I imagined John Colter standing on that same hill 215-odd years ago.

He’d seen some of the grandest landscapes on the North American continent. He’d seen and reported geology so fantastic people thought he was lying.

Then he came to our stretch of river, of all the places he could go, and settled here.

Giving himself the same view, more or less, that we have today.

An overhead view of the Missouri River: not just a local river, but a giant of the continent.

A view from Franklin County, where the glaciers never reached, to Warren County, where they did.

Loess hills, a geological jackpot created by accident an age ago and still paying off today.

John Colter saw and walked some wondrous places. And one of those places was here.

Looking Far, Looking Close

As a kid growing up in this area, it amazed me to think about the pioneers, about Lewis and Clark passing through, about the glaciers stopping just a few miles north of us, about the ancient seas that left fossils on our property.

The old days and the ancient days came right up to our property.

But as I’ve grown older, my idea of “long ago” has changed. The ancient times? They still look very far away.

But the early 1800s, the days when these counties were home to Native Americans and frontiersmen? They seem recent.

15,000 years since the ice — who can really imagine it? But a snap of the fingers since Colter. 

That thought in my head, slogging up a long slope of foot-snagging Kentucky bluegrass and breathing hard, near the back of the group, I had a strange moment of confusion.

For a few seconds I imagined it was John Colter’s nation-crossing feet that had passed just a minute before.