But, where precisely in Yellowstone Park did Colter travel? This
question poses an extremely difficult problem in research. (The serious
student will find the many ramifications involved in the problem
explored more fully in the Appendix.) Unfortunately the dotted line
appearing on the Map of 1814, marked “Colter’s Route in 1807,” is of no
help whatever in answering the question. In fact, the map complicates
the problem because the geography depicted on the western loop, or
so-called Yellowstone Park section of the map, is wholly fictitious.
Unlike the valid section east of the Absarokas, the western section
bears no similarity to anything in Yellowstone Park, Wyoming, Idaho,
Montana, America, the world, or the moon! It is, in fact, a plat of
bogus geography comparable only to the kind found in Jonathan Swift’s
_Gulliver’s Travels_. In short, it is obvious that “Colter’s Route in
1807,” beyond the Yep-pe village, was not properly described because it
depicts him as visiting the drainage of all the river systems within a
radius of five hundred miles of that Indian encampment. The most obvious
errors in that part of the map which impinges upon the western section
of this so-called “Colter’s Route” are:
(1) Three Forks are shown to the northeast instead of northwest.
(2) Lake Biddle, usually identified as Jackson Lake, could only be
Brooks Lake and be on the Bighorn drainage. Jackson Lake lies due
south about fifty miles, on the other side of the Continental Divide.
(3) The Rio Del Norte (Green River of the Colorado) is far and away to
the south. It is grotesquely misplaced.
(4) The South Fork of Snake River is not depicted, neither is the
Jackson Lake area.
(5) Upper Yellowstone River is not shown, and Lake Eustis (presumed to
be Lake Yellowstone) is fantastic in all respects.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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