The information actually known about Colter and his activities would barely fill a magazine article. The author of this book pads his account with all sorts of tangents — the accuracy of a map William Clark drew of the Yellowstone area which purports to show the route of Colter's solo trip, the ins and outs of beaver trapping, the business dealings of several fur traders. Many pages are filled with accounts of what Colter might have done, probably did, or surely did — all speculation. Occasionally the writing gets so bad that it is laughable. My favorite sentence is this one, about an possible time when William Clark and Thomas Jefferson looked at Clark's map.

Crawling about on hands and knees with their red hair often touching, is the only way the two men could have studied the maps, following the Missouri around the great bend to the Rocky Mountains, and then down the Columbia to the Pacific, extending through the archway and under Jefferson's suspended bed.

Huh?