Truman Everts — 1870, Lost 37 Days in Yellowstone

Summary

In September 1870, a small party of Montana citizens and soldiers — the Washburn–Langford–Doane Expedition — pushed into the strange, unmapped country of geysers and hot springs at the head of the Yellowstone River, the wilderness that would become the world's first national park. Among them was Truman C. Everts, a fifty-four-year-old former federal tax assessor, badly nearsighted and the least woodsman-like member of the group. On about September 9, riding through dense lodgepole timber near the southern arm of Yellowstone Lake, Everts fell behind, became separated from the others, and lost track of the trail. Within a day he had also lost his horse — and with it his blankets, his gun, his matches, and nearly everything he needed to live.

What followed was thirty-seven days alone in the high wilderness as autumn turned to early winter. Everts was left with little more than the clothes he wore, a small knife, and a pocket opera glass — and the wits to use them. He survived mainly on the boiled roots of a thistle that would later be named for him — Everts' thistle — and he kept from freezing by sleeping beside the hot springs and thermal vents that riddle the country, scalding himself badly when the thin crust gave way and burning his hip while he slept. He lost his glasses, half-blinding himself; he was stalked by a mountain lion; he was caught in snow; and as starvation and exposure wore him down he began to hallucinate, conversing with an imaginary companion.

The expedition searched for days, firing guns and building signal fires, then reluctantly gave him up for dead and rode out for the settlements. A reward was offered, and two frontiersmen — Jack Baronett, known as 'Yellowstone Jack,' and George Pritchett — kept looking. On October 16, more than thirty-seven days after he had gone missing, they found Everts over fifty miles from where he had been lost, crawling on his hands and knees, delirious, frostbitten and burned, and so wasted by hunger that accounts put his weight at around fifty pounds — a living skeleton whom they at first took for a wounded animal.

Everts recovered, and in 1871 he published his own account of the ordeal, 'Thirty-Seven Days of Peril,' in Scribner's Monthly. It became one of the most widely read survival narratives of its day and helped fix the wonders of the Yellowstone country in the public imagination at exactly the moment Congress was being persuaded to protect it. In 1872 Yellowstone became the first national park; a mountain near Mammoth Hot Springs carries Everts' name to this day.

Timeline

The Setup

By 1870 the upper Yellowstone was the last great rumor on the map of the American West — a place where, travelers claimed, the ground steamed and roared and threw water at the sky. To settle the rumors, a party of prominent Montana men organized an expedition that summer: Surveyor General Henry Washburn led it, Nathaniel P. Langford was among its members, and a small cavalry escort under Lieutenant Gustavus Doane came along for protection. They set out in late August to explore the geyser basins, the great lake, and the canyon of the Yellowstone, and to bring back a reliable account of what was actually there.

Truman Everts fit the expedition only loosely. He was fifty-four, a former Internal Revenue assessor for Montana Territory who had recently lost the post, and he was not a frontiersman. Worst of all for a man riding through trackless timber, he was severely nearsighted — without his spectacles he could barely make out a tree at a few paces. In the thick lodgepole forests around Yellowstone Lake, where the going was slow and the party often strung out single file through the deadfall, a man who could not see well and could not read the country was always one wrong turn from being alone.

That turn came on or about September 9, on the southeast side of the lake. The column was working through dense timber when Everts dropped behind to look for the trail. The others rode on, each assuming he was somewhere in the line. By the time anyone realized he was missing, he had no idea where the party had gone — and he was about to make it far worse. Dismounting to scout on foot, he let go of his horse, and the animal bolted, carrying off his blankets, his food, his gun, and his matches. Everts was left in the wilderness with a small knife, a pocket opera glass, the clothes he stood in, and not much else.

The Disaster

The first days were a slow education in how little he had. Everts had no way to make fire, no gun to hunt, and almost nothing to eat. He tried to find the party and could not; he tried to find his horse and could not. Then he lost his knife as well, and shortly after that he lost his eyeglasses, leaving the nearsighted man nearly blind in a country that demanded sharp eyes. He drifted, cold and starving, toward the thermal areas — and there found the two things that kept him alive. The hot ground gave him warmth in nights that were already dipping below freezing, and a thistle growing in the area gave him food.

He learned to dig the thistle's root and boil or roast it in the hot springs, and for much of the thirty-seven days that root — later named Everts' thistle in his honor — was nearly all he ate. The same hot springs that warmed him also nearly killed him more than once. The crust around the thermal vents is treacherous, a thin shell over scalding water and mud, and Everts broke through it and was badly scalded; another night he fell asleep too close to the heat and burned his hip severely. He was caught by a mountain lion that screamed and stalked him through the dark, and he drove it off by shouting and climbing; he was caught by an early snowstorm that pinned him for days; and through it all he was wasting away.

The turning point of his physical survival was fire. Having lost matches and knife alike, Everts at last realized that the small opera glass he still carried could focus the sun. With its lens he kindled a flame — and from then on he could carry fire and keep himself warm and cook, though one night the fire he lit raged out of control and burned the timber around him. But the body was failing faster than the will. He grew so weak he could barely walk, his feet froze, and starvation began to work on his mind. In his own account he describes sinking into delirium, even conversing with a phantom companion who counseled and chided him — a hallucination born of hunger and solitude that, strangely, seemed to keep him moving when reason alone might have let him lie down.

The Ordeal

Everts spent the better part of five weeks in this condition — half-blind, frostbitten, scalded, starving, and increasingly out of his mind — slowly working in the wrong direction and back again across the rough country at the head of the Yellowstone. He could not see far, could not move fast, and had no map but the one in his failing head. By the later days he was reduced to crawling, his clothing in rags, his body a frame of bone. He kept a fire when he could and dug thistle roots when he could find them, and he simply refused, day after day, to stop.

The expedition, meanwhile, had spent days searching for him. They fired their guns and built signal fires in the hope he would see or hear, but Everts — deaf to distant shots in the wind, too nearsighted to spot a fire on a ridge — never found them. With their own supplies running low and winter closing in, the party finally, painfully concluded he must be dead, and rode out for the settlements, carrying the assumption that they had lost a man. A reward of several hundred dollars was posted for the recovery of his body, dead or alive.

Two experienced mountain men took up the search where the expedition left off: Jack Baronett, a Scottish-born frontiersman known as 'Yellowstone Jack,' and George Pritchett. On October 16, 1870, more than fifty miles from where Everts had first gone missing — near Blacktail Deer Creek, north of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone — Baronett spotted a dark shape moving on the ground and at first took it for a bear or wounded animal. It was Everts — crawling, raving, blackened by burns and frost, the balls of his frostbitten feet worn to the bone, and so emaciated that the standard accounts give his weight as only about fifty pounds. He was barely recognizable as a man, and barely alive, but he was alive: thirty-seven days after he had ridden off the trail, he had been found.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

Baronett and Pritchett got the dying man off the mountain and began the slow work of bringing him back. One stayed to tend him while the other went for help, and Everts was eventually carried to shelter and then toward Bozeman, Montana, to recover. He was in dreadful condition — frostbitten, deeply burned, starved nearly to death, his feet ruined — and his recovery was long. But he lived, and in time he regained his health, an outcome that astonished everyone who had seen him brought in.

In the November 1871 issue of Scribner's Monthly, Everts published his first-person narrative under the title 'Thirty-Seven Days of Peril.' Written with unsparing detail about the thistle roots, the scalding springs, the lost knife and glasses, the burning-glass fire, the mountain lion, and the hallucinated companion, it became one of the most famous wilderness-survival accounts of the nineteenth century. Coming when it did, it gave the public a vivid, human window into the Yellowstone country precisely as Langford, Washburn's surveys, and the 1871 Hayden expedition were building the political case to protect it. In March 1872, Congress set the region aside as Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the world.

There is a wry coda. Everts' fame from the ordeal was such that he was reportedly offered the superintendency of the new park — and declined it, in part because the post carried no salary. He lived on for years afterward, married again late in life, and died in 1901 in his eighties. His name endures on the Yellowstone landscape: Mount Everts, the long ridge near Mammoth Hot Springs, was named for the half-blind tax assessor who got lost for thirty-seven days and, against every expectation, walked — and crawled — back out.

Lessons

References

• Truman C. Everts Wikipedia
• Truman Everts National Park Service (Yellowstone)
• What's in a Name? The Misadventures of Truman Everts U.S. Geological Survey