Snowshoe Thompson Needed to be the Most Badass Backcountry Snowboarding Mailman Ever

Right now the excessive Sierra is famend for its huge snowpack, typically greater than 20 toes in a winter season that stretches six or seven months. This skier’s bounty wasn’t at all times welcome, although. Within the mid-1800s, snows routinely closed the passes for months, leaving settlers and miners in what’s now japanese Nevada utterly remoted from the skin world.

The mail merely couldn’t get by way of, till Norwegian-born John Thompson agreed to hold it 90 miles every manner by way of the Sierra Nevada, from Pacerville, Calif., to Mormon Station within the japanese Utah Territory (now Genoa, Nevada). He confirmed up for the job carrying a pair of 10-foot oak planks, what we might name skis immediately. Thompson referred to as them snowshoes.

For the subsequent 20 years, he would make the 180-mile round-trip twice every month, three days out and two again, carrying an 80-pound mailbag and little else. No blankets or tent, no map or compass, solely matches and a little bit of jerky and crackers. He wore a Mackinac jacket and broad-brimmed hat, and rubbed charcoal on his face to protect towards snow blindness. He adopted a route generally known as Johnson’s Cutoff, crossing 7,283-foot Echo Go alongside a course roughly paralleling immediately’s U.S. Freeway 50 from Placerville to South Lake Tahoe. The circuit included greater than 10,000 vertical toes of climbing and 10,000 toes of typically harrowing descents, a lot of it on steep wooded terrain. Thompson did this for 20 years in all method of climate and snow situations and, if we’re to imagine his appreciable legend, by no means as soon as misplaced his manner.

The round-trip took him solely 5 days.

Thompson carried the U.S. mail for 20 years and by no means bought a dime from the federal authorities for his hassle. Historical past has been extra beneficiant to him than the Postal Service, and immediately he’s remembered as the daddy of California snowboarding, even when his nickname, Snowshoe Thompson, is a little bit of a misnomer.

In Thompson’s time, “snowshoe” was a catch-all time period, encompassing each the webbed “Canadian snowshoes” and the less-common Scandinavian-style skis variously referred to as “Norwegian snowshoes” or “Norwegian skates.” Thompson was a grasp of the latter self-discipline, stated to have often sped down lengthy grades at greater than 50 miles per hour. “It has been attested,” one chronicler hedged, “that on one event he sailed off a cliff 180 toes in top, and got here down standing up.” Tales instructed in gold rush saloons are finest taken with a grain of salt, even when they later discovered their manner into newspapers and books. From the space of 150 years it’s troublesome to parse reality from fancy, however simply the exploits we all know to be true place John “Snowshoe” Thompson firmly among the many biggest skiers of all time.

Due to Kenneth Bjork’s exhaustive dive into modern information reviews on behalf of the Norwegian-American Historic Society, we all know Thompson often made the 180-mile roundtrip by way of the Sierra Nevada, in winter, with out a lot as a blanket for cover. We all know that he carried masses as heavy as 100 kilos, bringing the whole lot from mail to medication to communities that regularly had no different contact for months. And we all know that he saved the lives of at the very least 4 males, together with one rescue operation through which he traveled 400 miles on skis and 100 on horseback in simply 10 days.

Snowshoe Thompson’s mail route was 180 miles spherical journey, with 10,000 toes of vert. College of Utah Library

We all know that he was born Jon Torsteinson Rue on a farm in Norway’s Telemark area on April 30, 1827. His father died when he was a boy, and that Thompson emigrated to america together with his mom and brother when he was ten years outdated. The household homesteaded first in Illinois, then Missouri and Iowa. After his mom died, Thompson moved on to Wisconsin after which California, arriving in 1852 on the top of the Gold Rush.

He tried his hand at mining with out a lot success, and shortly turned to farming close to Placerville within the Sierra foothills. In 1855, when he was 28 years outdated, an commercial within the Sacramento Union caught his eye. “Uncle Sam Wants a Mail Provider,” blared the headline. Nobody, it appeared, had been capable of carry the mail over the Sierras in winter with any type of regularity.

After studying the advert, Thompson went dwelling and made a pair of skis. Lower from inexperienced oak and patterned on his childhood reminiscences, his first “snowshoes” had been a careless rendition of the normal skis utilized in his native Norway. Used with a single lengthy pole for pushing, braking and steadiness, every 10-foot plank sported a lone leather-based strap for a binding. Thompson practiced a bit to regain his proficiency—he hadn’t been on skis since leaving Norway almost 20 years earlier than—then offered himself to the postmaster.

The final man to cross the go in winter had wanted eight days to achieve Genoa on webbed snowshoes. Thompson made the outbound journey in three days, and the return leg in two, carrying greater than 50 kilos of mail and sundries on his again, with a pair of skis that weighed 25 kilos. He would preserve that schedule for the subsequent 20 years, although he did ultimately vogue lighter skis. Of their last iteration Thompson’s sticks had been about 9 toes lengthy, 4 inches huge on the suggestions and narrowing to about three inches on the strap. He seemingly carved them from well-dried spruce or fir, which had change into the popular supplies as Norwegian skates gained recognition within the mining camps by way of the 1860s.

Thompson most well-liked to journey within the early morning and late afternoon, when the snow was crusted in ice and quick. Although he caught to a agency supply timetable, on the path he let situations dictate when he traveled and rested. He typically moved at evening, when within the phrases of frontier newsman Dan DeQuille, he “appeared to the celebrities, as does a mariner to his compass.” He adopted no set course, for “in a trackless waste of snow there was no path to comply with.” We are able to solely think about the powder days he skilled, and the Sierra cement by way of which he slogged. Throughout the day the snow would typically develop heavy and clump on his skis. He knew nothing of the waxes, or “dope” that different skiers of the period had been experimenting with, so when the snow slowed down, he’d relaxation. When situations had been good he made time.

He slept wherever he stopped, typically in a cave or beneath overhanging rocks, typically in deserted cabins. Regularly he would make a sofa of inexperienced pine boughs on the snow round a lifeless stump, which he would set alight for heat.

He appeared to thrive in nation that broke different males. Of 1 1856 encounter, Eliot Lord wrote that Thompson overtook 4 males from Placerville who “had superior solely 10 miles in three days and had not as but pretty entered the snow belt. Because the light-footed courier slid previous they requested him despondingly whether or not they had been virtually by way of the snow. ‘There are 45 miles extra of it,’ he cried again, with out slackening tempo.”

Thompson’s legend has grown in all kinds of venues, from ski mags and frontier histories to this 1956 buying and selling card. The declare on the reverse that he “provided Nevadans with needles, laxatives, perfumes” couldn’t be independently verified. Photograph: eBay

One midnight in December of that yr, Thompson arrived at a seemingly abandoned cabin the place he discovered a person mendacity alone on the ground, “with out different protecting than the garments he wore, and the boots frozen to his toes,” in accordance with the Sacramento Union’s account. The person was James Sisson, and he’d been mendacity there for 12 days with nothing to maintain him however uncooked flour.

It’s price noting that Sisson had come to grief on the identical route Thompson crossed routinely. He’d been on the path two weeks when a storm caught him, and had been lucky to achieve the deserted cabin the place Thompson discovered him.

Sisson’s toes had been badly frostbitten and gangrene had set in. At a look, Thompson knew they must be amputated or the person would die. The subsequent morning was Christmas Eve. Thompson left earlier than daybreak and reached Genoa on Christmas Day, the place he rallied 5 males to ski again to the cabin and haul Sisson out on a sled. It was arduous going, with a blizzard for good measure, however on the 28th, “they packed Mr. Sisson on the sled, and thus, with nice labor, succeeded in conveying him safely to Carson Valley.”

There was no anesthetic within the valley, so Thompson left immediately on the 90-mile run to Placerville, the place he discovered no chloroform and continued one other 45 miles on horseback to Sacramento. There he secured the wanted medication and returned instantly to Genoa. All instructed, within the house of 10 days Thompson traveled some 500 miles, 400 of them by ski or on foot. Sisson survived, and actually would outlive Thompson by a few years.

In 1859, Thompson rescued three males who had left Strawberry Station in a blizzard. He discovered them eight miles up the go. One after the other he introduced them down on the backs of his skis. A fast little bit of math places the rescue in perspective: Thompson skied eight miles to seek out them, then three 16-mile spherical journeys to carry the lads to security. That’s 56 miles, virtually half of it with an exhausted man on the again of his skis.

One of many social gathering later described the rescue to a newspaperman, who associated the story with maybe a gloss of embellishment. “Howard was a wreck,” Fortunate Baldwin recounted. “He put his toes on the again of Thompson’s snowshoes and his arms round Thompson’s neck, and away they slid, down the eight miles to Strawberry.

“It was sluggish work for Thompson to return again, and our hopes had been nearly to zero when his ‘Howdy’ introduced us again to life. Thompson made these three spherical journeys and not using a kick. I’ve traveled all of the methods there are to journey, from elephant-back in India, jinrikishas in Japan and the quickest coach-and-eight in California, however that experience on the again of Thompson’s snowshoes was the quickest and most enjoyable in my life.”

Not all of Thompson’s exploits had been so laudable. In 1860 he joined a posse of self-styled rangers in a punitive raid towards the Paiute, after males from that tribe killed a lot of white settlers, seemingly with good trigger. The 105 volunteers had been a motley crowd, poorly armed, ill-disciplined and regularly drunk. The Paiute baited them into an ambush and killed 76 of the vigilantes in a matter of minutes. Thompson’s horse was shot out from beneath him and he fled on foot. As he ran a horse overtook him, however as a substitute of a hostile Paiute warrior it carried solely an empty saddle. Thompson swung aboard and made his escape–one among simply 19 white survivors of the Battle of Pyramid Lake.

The episode is never talked about in most accounts of Thompson’s life, primarily based as they’re on an 1876 story written by DeQuille of Virginia Metropolis, Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise. A personality in his personal proper, DeQuille was Mark Twain’s first editor, wrote the definitive historical past of the Comstock strike, and outlined Thompson’s legacy in a single paragraph.

“Mounted upon his sneakers—which weren’t in contrast to skinny sled runners in look—and together with his lengthy balance-pole in his arms, he dashed down the edges of mountains at such a fearful charge of pace as to trigger many to characterize the efficiency as foolhardy. Not just a few of his outdated buddies among the many miners begged him to desist, swearing roundly that he would sprint his brains out towards a tree, or plunge over some precipice and break his neck. However Thompson solely laughed at their fears. Along with his toes firmly braced, and his balance-pole in his arms, he flew down the mountain slopes, as a lot at dwelling as an eagle hovering and circling above the neighboring peaks.”

That picture kinds the mannequin for no fewer than 4 statues of Thompson in ski resorts and outdated mining camps throughout the Sierra. Three of the sculptures depict him in that hovering pose—knees bent, weight ahead, nine-foot planks pointed straight down the autumn line. DeQuille constructed him up like a matinee idol. “A person of splendid physique,” he wrote, who together with his honest hair and blue eyes “appeared a real descendant of the sea-roving Northmen of outdated.”

A mural of Snowshoe Thompson in downtown Placerville.

The journalist interviewed Thompson in 1876, at a time when the intrepid mailman was campaigning to get the federal authorities to compensate him for his years of devoted service. DeQuille and others reported that the Postal Service had by no means paid him, and it grew to become a part of Thompson’s legend that he’d carried the mail all these years without spending a dime, out of his beneficiant spirit, or maybe naïveté.

The reality appears a bit extra complicated. Thompson got here to California looking for his fortune in gold, however seems at all times to have had a backup plan as nicely. When he first got here west, he and his half-brother drove a small herd of dairy cows throughout the plains and bought the milk at exorbitant income to the Forty-Niners, till the primary winter when the cows starved.

When he wasn’t carrying mail throughout the snowy Sierra, Thompson farmed and reduce firewood. As a employed laborer he helped construct sawmills and a gristmill, and dug a few of the first irrigation ditches within the area. For a lot of years he hauled freight throughout the mountains on a mule-drawn sleigh.

Although he carried the mail and not using a federal contract, he earned at the very least a modest payment for his labor. He tried to gather a greenback a letter for his companies, and although few paid that tariff his companies as a personal “expressman” had been regularly in demand. Thompson famously carried the ore pattern that kicked off the Comstock silver rush. The rock was assayed at $1,000 a ton in gold and $1,200 a ton in silver; Thompson earned $2 for carrying it throughout the mountains—his common charge for a side-gig that will need to have added appreciable weight to his pack. The Comstock Lode made an important many males very rich, however Snowshoe Thompson was not one among them.

After he married in 1863 and had a son, Thompson started to hunt compensation extra energetically. Lastly, in 1874, he boarded a prepare to Washington D.C., armed with a petition signed by “all of the state and different officers at Carson Metropolis” and decided to see that Congress paid him his due. The Central Pacific Railroad had crossed the Sierra 5 years earlier, and Thompson’s usefulness as a courier was starting to wane. Rail journey nonetheless had its limitations although, as grew to become obvious within the Rocky Mountains, the place heavy drifts stopped the locomotive in its tracks.

Thompson disembarked and, carrying his suitcase, walked 100 miles in three days by way of the snow to Cheyenne, Wyoming, the place he bought one other prepare to Washington. He needed $6,000 in again pay, however Congress by no means heard his plea. Thompson waited within the capitol for six weeks till his cash ran out, then went again to California. He by no means bought a dime from the federal authorities.

Right now he’s celebrated with introducing snowboarding to California. In keeping with many accounts, nobody within the Golden State had ever seen a pair of skis when Thompson began carrying the mail on them on 1856. That appears unlikely. The mining camps had been filled with Norwegians and Swedes, and inside just a few years of Thompson’s first mail run, organized downhill races had change into widespread.

The epicenter of this exercise was Plumas County, about 100 miles north of Placerville. As early as 1863, simply seven years after Thompson’s first run over Echo Go, the La Porte Mountain Messenger reported on a trio of match races between rival mining firms, with the racers competing for “ten gallons of lager.” By 1867 the stakes had been significantly larger, in accordance with American Heritage journal. “The Alturas Snow Shoe Membership held a ‘world’s championship’ meet in February, 1867, and repeatedly for a number of years thereafter, with a silver studded belt (‘valued at $75’) as the primary prize within the males’s finals.” (This custom is alive and nicely in longboard snowboarding revivals that also happen at California resorts immediately, and in accordance with Powder journal, such setups may very well be extraordinarily quick. “In 1964, on the event of Nevada’s Centennial, Plumas-native Jerry Burelle (on well-doped longboards) crushed U.S. Ski Workforce Olympic medalist Billy Kidd (on trendy skis), writes Powder’s David Web page.)

In keeping with American Heritage, in 1869 Thompson “heard of the frivolous doings up Plumas County manner, and it’s seemingly that he thought of the Alturas Membership racers a bunch of upstarts . . . and determined to point out them a factor or two. Alas, he had not counted on the refinements produced by aggressive free enterprise.”

Specifically, Thompson was unaware of the fast-advancing and secret science of dope, through which racers anointed their skis with secret concoctions of beeswax, tallow, bear grease, pine tar, whale oil, bacon fats, and the like with a view to make them run sooner over the snow. Thompson additionally was disturbed to seek out the Alturas racecourse was a straight downhill run on packed snow. Unburdened by the necessity to flip, his opponents used for much longer skis—some so long as 16 toes—with grooves reduce within the backside to assist maintain their line. Thompson’s un-doped nine-footers had been no match on such a course. The good Snowshoe Thompson completed lifeless final.

He later challenged all-comers to a contest extra suited to his abilities, providing $1,000 to any man who may beat him in such worthy contests as leaping for distance off a 15-foot cliff, or racing “from the highest of Silver Mountain Peak to the city of Silver Mountain. The altitude of the Peak is 11,000 toes, four,000 toes above the city and distant 4 miles.”

Nobody took up the problem.

Thompson went again to his mail route, his farm, and his fruitless lobbying marketing campaign. Within the spring of 1876 he was struck by belly ache so extreme he couldn’t stand. That day he planted his barley from horseback. Two days later he was lifeless, seemingly of a burst appendix. He was 49 years outdated.

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