A Yellowstone Tale

All week I'd been tagging along on Austin-Lehman's "Yellowstone National Park Family Adventure," shooting catalogue pics of the kids and parents as they'd hiked and rafted and ridden horses. And laughed.

There was lots of laughter, which surprised me. Never having had kids myself, nor even nieces or nephews, I'd worried that a week with a bunch of brats, even in the natural amusement park of Yellowstone, might drive me crazy.

I couldn't have been more wrong. They were interested in looking through my camera, fascinated by the hulking buffalo, delighted in getting to know one another and the young tour-company guides, and filled with questions for the rangers about the geysers and bubbling mud pots and lots of things I wouldn't otherwise have noticed. I found myself marveling at how alive they were, and they and their parents kindly made me feel like part of an extended family. I didn't want it to end.

The kids even paid attention, for a while anyway, when on a hike one day the old history teacher in me brought on a lengthy discourse about a man who'd been with one of the early expeditions into Yellowstone, became separated from his party, was lost for weeks and weeks as he wandered around, and had nearly starved to death before he was rescued. The munchkins peppered me with questions for his name, what he ate, the year this happened, if the Indians had helped him, why he didn't kill a buffalo and tan the hide to use as a coat and blanket....

I squirmed beneath the barrage. But I didn't take the easy course of making up answers. I told them only what I remembered distinctly, absolutely. It wasn't much. I knew his last name was Truman. That the event had occurred in the late 1850s. That he was lost for three months and weighed only ninety pounds when found alive.

Fast-forward to the final dinner of the tour, the last chance to see everyone together and reminisce happily about the week. I was mugging with the kids, trying to get some final portrait shots, when one of the mothers arrived with apologies for being a few minutes late. Then she smiled broadly, asked for quiet so that she could make a "presentation" (as she put it), and while still standing turned to me and said:

"Dennis, we have enjoyed your company this week. Most of the time, anyway. We even enjoyed being models, some of us more than others. But..." she hesitated, removing a book from the bag she'd brought in with her, "the next time you give us a history lesson you should get your facts straight!" The group erupted into laughter.

And with this she handed me the book I later learned she'd found that afternoon at the Visitor Center, the very one I'd read decades earlier and, to put it kindly, misremembered--"Thirty-Seven Days of Peril," by Truman Everts. She pointed out that I'd gotten half the name right. That I was off by only two decades when recalling when the expedition took place. That while the poor man was lost for just over a third of the time I had told them, he weighed only half as much when he was found.

Next time--and I sincerely hope there is a next time, preferably on another family tour--I'll just say some guy got lost a long, long time ago. And that if anyone wants more details (the correct details!), to call up the Trusted Adventures blog and read all about it.

So, with warm thoughts about that evening with families that had become friends in one short week--and with the book in front of me so that I get my facts straight this time around--I'll offer a few paragraphs about a tale that will entertain you during your own time on the trails in Yellowstone.

Truman Everts was fifty-four years old when, as a member of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition, he rode horseback into Yellowstone in the summer of 1870. This nineteen-man group had been organized to "prove or refute the existence of natural phenomena" in the region, for many people still believed that the tales of erupting geysers and boiling mud were myth.

It was the ninth of September, late in the day, and the party was negotiating a huge windfall at the south end of Yellowstone Lake. Each man was "working his separate path through the thicket" of brush and fallen trees when, as Everts himself writes, he simply "strayed out of sight and hearing of [his] comrades." This had happened before, to Everts and to others in the expedition, and so he was relatively undisturbed. "I selected a spot for comfortable repose, picketed [tethered] my horse, built a fire and went to sleep."

But deep concern began to take hold the next day, followed by fear when his horse--taking fright while Everts, dismounted, studied the ground for hoof prints--galloped off into the trees. "My blankets, gun, pistols, fishing tackle, matches--everything except the clothing on my person, a couple of knives and a small opera glass--were attached to the saddle." He spent half the day trying to locate his horse, and thereby putting even more distance between himself and his traveling companions. He passed a second night, this time without a comforting fire, longing for "food, friends, and protection." In the distance were "the screeching of night birds, the angry barking of coyotes and the prolonged, dismal howl of the gray wolf."

He had eaten nothing for three days when, overjoyed, he spied an Indian paddling across the lake in a canoe. Nearsighted and having broken his glasses, he rubbed his eyes and called out to his fellow human. But at that instant the "Indian" transformed itself into an enormous pelican, spread its wings and flapped into the sky--"as if in mockery of my sorrow. This little incident quite unmanned me."

Four days out, he ate his first meal. It was the same food that was to keep him alive for all of his thirty-seven days of peril--thistle roots. (Now called the "Everts Thistle," you will find it in the meadows of the northern half of the park.) He found these roots "palatable and nutritious...not unlike a radish." I'll take his word for it.

But the occasional protein dish also came his way. While hiding from a storm for two solid days beneath a spruce bough a "little benumbed bird" hopped within his reach. He ate it raw. One week later, he spent an entire morning catching a grasshopper. Fashioning a hook from a bent pin he pursued the wary trout--to no avail. But he caught and ate two minnows, and one evening found a seagull's wing and judged it "delicious."

Nevertheless, in lucid, honest moments Everts realized he was slowly starving to death. He also recognized that he was wearing himself down through a series of mishaps. Frostbite had taken the heels and sides of his feet. While he slept next to a life-sustaining thermal pool (the heat protecting him from the gathering fall chill) the crust broke, pouring steam onto his hip and scalding it badly. And while he had at last deduced a way to make fire with the lens of his opera glass he inadvertently fell asleep, falling into the flames and burning one hand severely.

And then there were the encounters with Yellowstone's animals. A mountain lion yowled and scratched and thumped its tail when it ran Everts up a tree, keeping him there for hours while the intended victim hurled branches and epithets in return. He came upon several bears in the daylight and heard hungry wolf packs in his dreams, but managed to escape meal-hood as he first made his way toward the Madison Range (to the west of Old Faithful), then thought better of an attempted crossing of the mountains and retraced the party's route north along the east side of Yellowstone Lake.

By now it was touch and go. Everts, alone for more than a month and growing ever weaker, began having visions. His weight had fallen to only fifty pounds. The end was near.

But then John "Yellowstone Jack" Baronett and prospector George Pritchett, employed by Everts' comrades to search for him, appeared on the scene. Riding in the bitter cold and spitting snow near today's Roosevelt Lodge, Baronett's dog began to growl at "a black object...making a low groaning noise, crawling along upon its knees and elbows and trying to drag itself up a mountain." Baronett almost shot it, thinking it a small bear.

He later described Everts as looking more forlorn than any human he'd ever seen, "A few tattered rags upon an emaciated skeleton, frozen, scalded, singed and festered into the semblance of a two-legged animal, hideous beyond description...." He took him gently down the mountain into camp, made him warm, gave him sips of antelope tea, and began round-the-clock nursing .

Truman's rescuers moved him to a cabin close to present-day Gardiner. Days of rest, more tea, meals of meat broth, and a pint of bear oil to restore his digestion (kindly rendered from the fat of a bear killed by a passing mountain hunter), in time put Everts in the pink. Or nearly so. It would be months before he regained his weight, and more than a year before he recovered from his wounds.

But recover he did, magnificently--and lived until 1901. When he died in February of that year, at age 85, he was survived by his daughter, and a young widow, and a son who was only nine.

by Dennis Coello