"We heard a most awful rumbling, the ground shook under our feet, and there burst into the air a column of water and steam that looked as if it reached the skies."
John Colter
A Tale: Another Version of Colter’s Run
""He saw the younger Indians throwing off their blankets, leggings, and other encumbrances, as if for a race. Now he knew their object. He was to run a race, of which the prize was to be his own life and scalp."
A Tale: Colter’s Run — 1807
John Colter really did cross the plains naked after outrunning hundreds of Blackfeet warriors who were screaming for his scalp. He was the first white man to visit what is now Yellowstone Park. And his reports of a stinking place where springs spout steam and boiling water were greeted as fantasy and labeled “Colter’s Hell.”
