John Colter

The plaque's first claim had a rival two years earlier. In the summer of 1805 François-Antoine Larocque, a North West Company trader out of Canada, rode home with a band of Crow from the Hidatsa villages on the Missouri, followed the Powder River into the country near present-day Sheridan and skirted the Bighorns on the way to the Yellowstone. The Vérendrye brothers may have sighted those mountains in 1742. Larocque and Colter alike were newcomers in country the Crow and their neighbors had long known.

What the plaque says

John Colter First white man in Wyoming, passed this way in 1807 and discovered Yellowstone Park Dedicated by the Historical Landmark Commission of Wyoming July 4, 1939

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Elk Refuge — 0.4 mi
  Stephen Leek's photographs of starving elk built this winter refuge in 1912; a century of hay feeding is now its hardest question.
• Teton Pass — 9.7 mi
  The trail the Astorians crossed in 1811, the six wagons of 1889, the highway of 1969, and the hairpin that slid off the mountain in 2024.
• Murie Ranch — 12 mi
  The porch where the Wilderness Act was argued into being; Olaus Murie died a year before it passed, and Mardy kept going for forty more.
• Mormon Row Historic District — 13 mi
  A Latter-day Saint farm village on Antelope Flats, its ditches still running and the Moulton barns still standing against the Tetons.

More markers nearby

• Reverend Samuel Parker — 22 mi
• Pierre's Hole — 22 mi
• The Astorians — 26 mi
• Teton Range — 28 mi