John L. Hatcher

Quick Facts

Significance:

a prominent Bent, St. Vrain & Co. trader, appears to have been the firm’s point man with the Kiowa Indians.

Place of Birth:

Virginia

Date of Birth:

Circa 1813

Place of Death:

Linn County, Oregon

Date of Death:

1897

John L. Hatcher, a prominent Bent, St. Vrain & Co. trader, appears to have been the firm’s point man with the Kiowa Indians.

A Virginian by birth, John Hatcher began his employment with Bent, St. Vrain & Company about 1835, when he was approximately 22 years of age. He has been immortalized in fur trade annals by Lewis Garrard, who considered Hatcher the “beau ideal of a Rocky Mountain man.” Hatcher’s tall tale of his encounter with the Devil, reproduced in its entirety by Garrard in the coarse vernacular of the colorful trapper and trader, is a classic passage that is often cited as the best surviving example of mountain man story-telling and dialect. Hatcher’s response to a Missouri volunteer, who inquired of his name, is a good short sample of both Hatcher’s temperament and his speech: “Well, hos!...my name mout be Bill Williams, or it mout be Rube Herring, or it mout be John Smith, or it mout be Jim Beckwith, but this buffler’s called John L. Hatcher, to rendevoo – Wagh!”

Known to the Cheyennes and other Indians as Freckle Hands and Wrinkle Neck, Hatcher is believed to have established Bent, St. Vrain & Co.’s first trading post on the Canadian River, a log structure, in 1842. Here he appears to have formed close ties with the Kiowas. 

At a Kiowa village near the Canadian River in September of 1845, Lieut. Abert wrote that his party, to which Hatcher was a hunter and guide, “were struck with the affection which an old [woman] manifested for Hatcher. She wept over him for joy when they met and insisted on his receiving a bale of [buffalo] tongues and some pinole which she had manufactured from the musquit. She always calls him son, having adopted him ever since his first trading with her nation.”           

It is clear that Hatcher was both a trusted employee as well as a welcome companion to the Bents and St. Vrain. When William Bent acquiesced to Kearny’s entreaties that he captain a “spy company” in advance of the Army of the West, Hatcher was among the members of that special unit. During the winter of 1846-47, Hatcher was “with George Bent and company, in the interior of Mexico, on a mule-trading expedition with the Utah and Pimo tribes, who levy heavy contributions on the Mexican caballadas.”

Then, in the spring of 1847, Hatcher helped establish and briefly oversaw a farm for the Bents and St. Vrain on the Purgatoire River approximately 20 miles below Trinidad, Colorado. He was driven off the farm that July by Indians – Arapahos according to one account. Hatcher was still working as a trader for William Bent as late as 1848.

Content adapted from Mark L. Gardner's 2004 NPS Historic Resource Study:  "Bent's Old Fort on the Arkansas."