His membership in the Royal Adventurers into Africa placed him among the organized commercial infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade at one of its most formative periods. Colleton's career spanned colonial governance, parliamentary service, and fellowship in the Royal Society — institutional prestige that ran alongside, and in some cases directly enabled, his involvement in human trafficking.

Few figures from the frontier period have been mythologized as thoroughly as this one, which makes it easy to lose sight of the actual record — a sequence of thefts, escapes, and killings that began in adolescence and escalated steadily. He was linked to nine murders by the time of his death at twenty-one, operating within the lawless ranching disputes and territorial conflicts of the New Mexico frontier. The legend has long outpaced the biography, but the biography is grim enough on its own terms.